J and I have, completely unplanned, caught some documentary shows about food and food processing recently, and bread was among the topics. Perhaps due to that, or perhaps due to our gradually changing up such things every so often anyway, we also recently changed what bread we eat. The recent type gets moldy faster, which was disappointing for a moment before I realized it was actually indicative of a good thing.
Hear me out.
Bread used to be a pretty healthy food. Au natural, as it were, it’s made of only four ingredients: Flour, yeast, water, and salt. That’s it. But then over time, fewer people were making it for themselves as bakeries made more of it in growing towns and then cities. And ultimately we wound up with a lot of bread made by massive, centralized bakeries serving ever-sprawling populations.
But how to get it to the distant consumers before the bread started going bad?
Why, preservatives, of course!
This gave way, along with particularly the North American penchant for sugar, to the ultra-processed, mass marketed kinds of bread we see dominating grocery store shelves today. Leave such bread on the counter for a week or two and you’ll see no mold on it and probably taste very little difference from when it was first purchased.
That’s a breakthrough for the massive bread companies, but isn’t doing your health any favours.
What you want, dear reader, is exactly the opposite of that: The most simple kinds of bread with the really short ingredient lists. Eat it quickly before it goes moldy, which will happen way sooner than you probably have come to expect. But when that does happen, take heart that it’s only because you’ve done yourself a good thing by buying something way closer to the way bread is supposed to be.