Breaking Bread by David Wright: In-store bakeries are just ‘loaf tanning salons’
Breaking Bread by David Wright (Aurum £18.99, 272pp)
When David Wright was born, his birth was announced in the window display of his family bakery in Suffolk with a riot of blue balloons and teddy bears.
He was later to take over the business, and presided over its closure after 75 years, a trauma he is still evidently struggling to come to terms with.
In his book, he sets out to describe ‘how baking shaped our world’, and does so perfectly well.
But at the book’s core is a howl of sorrow at the way traditional bakeries in Britain like his family’s have been squeezed out, replaced by supermarkets selling bread-like pap in plastic packets for rock- bottom prices.
At the end of the Second World War, Britain had 35,000 small bakeries; by the turn of the millennium, that number was down to just 1,500.
For centuries, Wright notes, the bread that powered civilisations was made from relatively basic flour milled by stones. But in the 1820s, there was a breakthrough: for the first time, rollers were used to split the wheat kernel into three parts, and the white flour of the kind we know today was born.
Without that leap forward, none of us would probably ever have eaten a croissant or any other kind of viennoiserie (breakfast pastry).
David Wright took over his family’s bakery and presided over production until its closure
Two hundred years on, we are hooked on refined white wheat flour – it gets into 60 per cent of all supermarket products – but it leaves our digestive systems nutritionally short-changed.
It’s telling that there’s been a flip, over the past two centuries, in the kinds of people who eat products made from ultra-processed wheat: in the early days, they were enjoyed by the rich; but now, health-conscious elites tuck into austere sourdoughs, while the cash and time-poor are still on the white stuff.
Wright is particularly damning about the techniques that supermarkets use to reassure consumers they’re not eating junk.
Wright thinks supermarket bakeries are little more than ‘loaf tanning salons’ serving fake ‘rustic’ loaves that weren’t even made in this country
In-store bakeries, with their rustic baskets and enticing smells, are little more than ‘loaf tanning salons’, given their bread can be legally prepared off-site (even in another country), then displayed unpackaged, after a quick oven blast, without an exhaustive ingredients list.
Cheap mass produced bread is taking over from local bakery made loaves.
I’ve certainly kidded myself that the treats I get from these counters are somehow wholesome and virtuous; I won’t again.
At the core of the collapse of the traditional bakery, he writes, are British shoppers’ unrealistic expectations.
In the 1990s, supermarkets engaged in a price war that culminated with Tesco launching a 7p, 900g loaf. Though it wasn’t profitable, it drew shoppers in, who spent money on other products.
Usefully, Wright breaks down the cost of baking a loaf of organic sourdough bread today, demonstrating why it’s so hard for bakeries to produce one for less than about £4.20.
Sourdough, he reminds us, isn’t an ingredient or a flavour or a look, but a process; and the term – unlike organic – isn’t protected, so fake loaves can easily be passed off as the real deal.
The book is a depressing read at times. But Wright interviews can-do bakers and millers who are working hard to improve Britain’s bread culture, and peppers his lament against Big Bread with useful tips: if you have a stale loaf, for instance, he recommends running it under a tap then whacking it in the oven for ten minutes.
And though he is clear-eyed about how hard it is for many to get their hands on the kind of bread he thinks is worth eating – not everyone, he notes, has an artisan bakery nearby – he builds a persuasive case that good bread is worth spending money on.
I don’t think I’ll be buying my preferred loaf of ultra-processed ready-sliced for some time.