What an age we live in! We've made butter out of soya, palm oil, water, and emulsifiers. We've made bread out of flour, calcium propionate, and humectants. We've made freeze dried just-add-water coffee that tastes just delicious! Right!?
Ahh, the things we can do in the modern world are fantastic! But are they all necessary?
Strikes me that bread was great. Then in 1960 somebody thought it would be great to cheapen it up. And make TONS of it and make it out of something else - artificial bits and bobs that I don't know what they are, so I won't go there. If you want to go there go here: The Real Bread Campaign, they know.
I don't know what any of those things are, or whether they have long lasting nasty effects on us as human beings but what I do know is that "modern" bread is terrible. And when I say "modern" bread I mean the type of bread that was invented in 1960 that we are still eating and that's normal. In 1960 somebody thought it was a great idea!
What I do know is this. IT'S WIERD. If somebody gave me a banana that was cheaper than an actual banana FIFTY-EIGHT years ago, that was made of potato starch and dextrose I would think that was weird. And if it didn't really look like a banana, or have the same texture or flavour as one, I would think that was even weirder!
I would tell that person to get lost and never darken my doorstep ever again. I certainly wouldn't switch to their cheaper banana and eat it twice a day until today.
And that is how I feel about bread. And coffee. And butter.
It dawned on me the other day as I sat with my afternoon snack as you see in the photo above. I was thinking about how delicious it was, and if you replaced it will a slice of white Hovis (sorry chaps, just an example), margarine or "spread" (whatever that is!?) and a cup of Nescafe red label (whoopsy) how unappetising it would be.
This "modern" food ain't modern anymore. It's old skool, old fashioned, old hat. It'll be in the history books one day and people will say "Gross! People ate that? Why?!" And we will say "Dunno. Seemed like the thing to do I guess".
It continues to blow my mind daily.
More and more people are getting strange allergies and intolerances, right? It certainly seems that way anyway.
I'm not an expert, I don't know if these ingredients and products are bad for us because I don't know what they are, and as I write this I think that is part of the point. I don't know what they are. I know what flour is, and water, and salt and even yeast. I know if you milk a cow and shake the cream you get butter. I know if you roast a coffee bean you get coffee.
Let's move to the future, which is actually the past before we started messing around with stuff. It's weird and always will be.
There's something to be said about the olden days. The modern age is old hat now, let's leave it where it was.
Rant over.
It's real bread week from February 24th to March 4th 2018, a week (and a bit) to celebrate real bread. Bake a loaf ;-)