Why did our ancestors prefer white bread to wholegrains?
A couple of days ago, a reader contacted me to ask me to clarify my post on why our ancestors preferred white bread.
I checked the post. It’s been consistently one of my most popular. And it was written in 2011. So time for an update. This is a complete re-write of the original post.
Before white bread became ubiquitous
Bear with me while I lay out the background.
Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did large numbers of “our ancestors”–and obviously this depends on which part of the world they lived in–begin eating white bread.
For most of history, after the shift to agriculture, a large proportion of the world’s population depended on grains such as wheat, rice, corn (maize), barley, oats, rye, or millet for as much as 70-90% of their calories. This would have been true of farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of our ancestors would have been).
Even when the outer protective husks of grains had been removed they were hard to digest without further treatment: pounding, grinding, sprouting, fermenting and so on.
If grains are ground into flour, mixed with water to make a paste, and then that paste is cooked usually by dry heat, the result is bread.
Wheat bread was for the few. Wheat did not yield well (only seven or eight grains for one planted compared to corn that yielded dozens) and is fairly tricky to grow.
White puffy wheat bread was for even fewer. Whiteness was achieved by sieving out the skin of the grain (bran) and the germ (the bit that feeds the new plant). In a world of scarcity, this made wheat bread pricey. And puffy, well, that takes fairly skilled baking plus either yeast from beer or the kind of climate that sourdough does well in.
One pound of white bread
Most bread was dark, fibrous, dense, and usually flat. People chewed and swallowed their way through between one and two pounds of this dense, fibrous bread a day.
Today Americans eat six ounces of wheat flour a day, much of it as pasta, pizza, cookies, muffins, or some other alternative to bread. Thus we eat only a third to a sixth of the wheat flour that “our ancestors” did and we eat it in a much more enticing forms.
White bread ascendant
Between 1850 and 1950, the price of wheat bread, even white wheat bread, plummeted in price as a result of the opening up of new farms in the US and Canada, Argentina, Australia and other places, the mechanization of plowing and harvesting, the introduction of huge new flour mills, and the development of continuous flow bakeries.
In 1800 only half the British population could afford wheat bread. In 1900 everybody could.
In 1850, most Americans ate corn bread or mush. By 1880, except in the South, they had abandoned corn in favor of well over half a pound of wheat flour a day, most of it probably bread or crackers.
Why the shift to puffy white wheat bread? Well, how many reasons do you want? Here’s a list for the nineteenth-century shift (and that’s before convenient, sliced, long-lasting industrial bread became available).
Imagine it’s around 1880 and you are the wife of a laboring man. For one or more of the following reasons, you buy white wheat bread because it’s:
- easier to chew and swallow than whole meal. Sound silly? The family was eating a lot of bread and dentistry wasn’t what it is now.
- more palatable. White bread, rolls, and crackers are pleasing with just a bit of jam or cheese.
- purer. You know that processors and vendors adulterate food. You suspect that it’s more difficult to add dubious fillers and extenders to white bread than it to add them to brown. Pure as the driven snow, snowy white linens, and by extension snowy white bread.
- easier to digest. You know that whole grains or wholemeal bread tends to have a laxative effect, which you don’t need during a mine or factory shift. (Most of our food is so highly processed that it’s easy to forget that digesting is a difficult, energy-consuming business. We spend about 10% of the energy we get from food just digesting. For us sedentary modern urbanites, a small serving of whole grains is a good thing, less so for manual workers in the past. Christian Peterson, ed. Andrew Jenkins, Bread and the British Economy, ca. 1770-1870 (1995), ch. 2 for this and the following two points).
- better value for money. Like most women who spend most of their budget on food you have a keen sense of what fills and satisfies the family. (Peterson has done the complicated calculations, concluding that compared to, say, barley, wheat’s weight per volume, ease and yield in grinding, and relatively low cost of baking made it only slightly more expensive than coarser breads).
- possibly more nutritious, not that you would have put it this way, because being easier to digest, eaters got more calories and nutrients for a given weight of bread.
- a finer product. You knew that harvested grains had to go through a laborious sequence of cleaning, freeing of the dirt and grit of the field, threshing to get rid of the inedible outer husk, and grinding into flour. Didn’t it make sense to sieve out the coarse, dark bits to leave pure white flour.
- what the rich ate. Lords and ladies who could afford it had always opted for white wheaten bread, leaving the rough stuff to those they regarded as inferior. If you could feed your family like the rich, well then you most certainly would.
White bread as trash
The French, the Australians, the Canadians and others made the same shift.White bread became more and more affordable and convenient. World War II, Japanese, Mexicans, West Africans and others became white bread eaters too. Now white bread rules the world.
When everyone can eat white bread, it’s all too easy for it to be devalued (my italics below).
“A few years ago, I attended an international conference in which the bread workshop opened with the moderator throwing a loaf that had been purchased in a supermarket into a bin. It was an industrially produced bread; soft, white pre-sliced and pre-packaged. To hundreds of millions of families worldwide this was good bread. But this loaf of bread was outside its community. To the group of people in that room it was not just bad bread: it was not food. It was trash.” William Rubel, Bread: A Global History (2011), p.59.
[Industrial white bread became] a ubiquitous menu item and a visual stand-in for a whole range of assumptions about low-class consumption. [It] called up a lack of pretension–unfussy and authentically American–but also irresponsibility and shame. Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (2012), ch. 6. How White Bread Became White Trash.
Instead for the counter-culture in the 1960s and 70s
“Whiteness meant Wonder Bread, White Tower, Cool Whip, Minute Rice, instant mashed potatoes, peeled apples, White Tornadoes, white coats, white collar, whitewash, White House, white racism. Brown meant whole wheat bread, unhulled rice, turbinado sugar, wild-flower honey, unsulfured molasses, soy sauce, peasant yams, “black is beautiful.”” Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (1989), p.48.
In short, now, as in the past, the bread you eat (or don’t) says volumes about what you think about health (‘wheat belly,’ ‘no grain, no pain), your religion (‘white bread protestant), your social status (‘white trash‘).
But what about taste? what about health?
It all depends. It all depends on income, alternative foods, quality of bread, quantity consumed, other foods consumed. There is no one, single, knock down answer.
But wouldn’t you have opted for white bread if you had been alive in 1900?
Finally, terminology
I did not want to bog this post down in the complex government definitions of different kinds of bread labelling. This Wikipedia article is as good a place as any to begin understanding the differences between brown bread, whole meal bread, whole wheat bread, whole grain bread, etc.
- Heavy Lifting: The Potato, the Poor, and Pleasure in Ireland
- Foodways and Ways of Talking about Food
Additionally, I’ve been told that brown rice, whole oats and corn meal all go rancid relatively quickly due to their oil content – and that at least in the case of rice, people processed it specifically so it could be stored indefinitely.
Hi Mat, Thanks for commenting. I’m pleased to have you here as I am a big fan of your blog. If you mean processed it to white rice, I don’t think this could have happened before the late nineteenth century when rice mills made that a fairly easy task. Before that it was a matter of pounding in a pestle and mortar and I think it would have been impossible to cope with the entire harvest.
I’d love someone who knows more about grain storage to jump in on this, though.
Nice piece.
You skate around the idea that “The laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain for manual workers.” A prevalent story is that mill owners in Britain offered their workers white bread only, to reduce the number of toilet breaks the workers had to take. I can find that on the internet, but without any links to source. Is it documented in the Petersen book you mention?
Thanks Jeremy. I don’t think Petersen tells that story, nor had I heard it. How did I miss it. Any social historians out there?
I’ve also run across the point reading reports of army doctors in nineteenth century India. Accustomed to the pretty refined diet of the British army, they were taken aback at the stool size of Indians eating wholemeal or millet. I could probably rustle up that reference.
“Whole grains” is a bit confusing? There is very little consumption of Whole grain, even pot barley and wheat are processed to a degree. “Whole Meal” on the otherhand is flour made from ground grain that still contains the bran and germ.
I think that the main source of calories in grain is the starch, which is very effeciently digested. I’m not sure that there is that much of a difference between white bread or wholemeal from the point of extracting calories from starch.
Wheatgerm especially goes rancid, so I wonder if this made a difference to the finished product?
The way bread was eaten historically was a bit different to now. Bread was used to mop up liquids or even thicken them. You don’t need soft bread for this. But bread to eat for its own sake (manchet, pandemain), was made fresh in small loaves from refined flour.
Maybe it is less about food preference and more about way we eat that people ate bread that changed? I think that this might be correct as it isn’t about wholemeal or white bread, historically there was a huge spectrum of bread types.
Bolting flour is not easy to do, I wonder how much white bread was really eaten before the industrial revolution?
Hi Adam, I agreed about the vagueness and arbitrariness of the term “whole grain.”
On extracting calories, I am following Petersen’s argument which I found intriguing.
On wheat germ, it is clear that you had to use flour quickly. Or are you suggesting it went rancid while the grain was still unmilled? (See Matt’s comment below). I don’t think it did.
I agree that manchet and other fine breads were soft. The crust was even often rasped off to make them softer. They were however out of reach for most people.
I agree bread even for the poor would often have been used to mop up a thin vegetable soup perhaps flavored with a scrap of lard or bacon. It was also often take to the fields or pastures or on journeys, and then the liquid would not have been available.
I agree about the spectrum of bread types. They mapped fairly neatly on to social class, though, so I think what I say about manual laborers probably holds.
Clearly bolting was the technological catch. And the amount of the grain that had to be discarded or fed to the animals or poor (30%?) was the economic one. Not much white bread was eaten before the steel roller mill which changed the whole calculation.
“(And of course we still don’t eat the husks for”
Yes? You were going to say?
Saludos,
Don Cuevas
Hi Rachel,
Fabulous! Thank you for sharing your thoughts and research about this question which has been on my mind for years. There are so many layers to it. Love the story about the surprised army doctors in India, and never heard of the laxative troubles of mill workers in Britain. Great read!
What are your thoughts on the psychology of color? Could it be that we humans might also have a preference for eating something lighter, something white—versus something brown or darkish gray, associating it with cleanliness perhaps (e.g. esthetic, or hygiene)? I believe I read in The Oxford Companion to Food that the Roman aristocrats already preferred white over dark bread. Or were they too just concerned about frequent trips to the bathroom ?
Regarding unmilled grain: I don’t know if whole grains with their outer husk still intact —before milling—are better protected from going bad than the whole grains in our kitchen where the inedible outer husk has typically been removed.
In terms of caloric intake, Peterson’s argument does seem intriguing, but I too believe there is no difference between starches from whole grains versus refined starches, as Adam writes.
Last but not least, thank you so much for your kind words about my book. Knowing that you are enjoying the read means a lot to me.
Hi Maria, Your book deserves all the kind words that are being said about it.
On color. I think the color of food is a very important topic. I am a bit wary about assuming universals though white does often or usually signify purity worldwide. If we are talking about the western tradition, then clearly it signifies purity. It was also harder to adulterate white bread. It wasn’t impossible. You could use chalk or other white minerals. Your choices, though, were more restricted.
On nutrition. This is a complex issue. The more slowly the bread (and any accompanying foods) passed through the bowel, the greater the nourishment. In the 1940s, in the US, in the interest of wartime feeding, the relative energy value of the various grains was estimated. If you take wheat as the standard (100), then the same quantity of rye came in at 85, of barley at 83, and oats at 77. That is of course with modern processing.
There are other issues involved such as milling methods (roller milled flours are easier to digest than stone ground flours) and costs of baking. It’s all a hugely complex and to me hugely fascinating topic.
How about white bread tastes better? Even aside from social connotations, desire always associated with refinement and class. I think it actually has a nicer flavor. I’m letting a serious rye, spelt and flax grain bread rise now, which I love. But a white flour? Much better tasting. K
Hi Ken. I don’t think that’s the answer that Maria wants! She’s on a campaign for the deliciousness of whole grains.
Kidding aside, I think we have a basic disagreement about whether tastiness can be used to explain culinary change. You think it can. I’m not convinced.
Interesting piece, I love reading about food history and bread in particular. From a tooth point of view of course white breads are kinder as well !
Thank you Joanna. And yes, large quantities of coarse bread need lots of chewing and lots of saliva.
Love your blog by the way. I’d forgotten about Hasselback potatoes and your version looks just delicious. It’s bookmarked to try.
A culinary preference for white, as being more prestigious, is not only in bread. White veal and white asparagus pop to mind first.
I do not pretend to be schooled in grain storage but when I was buying grain berries to grind my own flour for various purposes I found that they kept longer in the refrigerator and longer still in the freezer before they went rancid. But, the whole berries DID go rancid. That is not just a property of the flour.
Also, as a kid we would pop a bit of wheat from animal feed into our mouthes to get gum. Gradually as we chewed and swallowed the juice, which I now guess contained the starch, we were left with a firm lump which would/could not be swallowed. That gluten was the protein part of the wheat. Later reflection on this process (object lesson) taught me that some processing of grain is a necessity if one is to derive the full nutritional benefit.
Hi Kay. Thanks for the information about whole grains going rancid.
Yes, I used to chew on grains of wheat too. Loved the first few bites, then my jaw ached. Hard work. Funny we both did that.
Ken, on the matter of taste: I invite you into my grains kitchen. You will leave a changed man.
Rachel, I agree with you on the issue color — it might just be one of the many pieces of an answer to this topic. Thanks for the information on the nourishment of refined versus unrefined grains from 1940. I wonder what today’s nutrition experts such as Walter Willet say about this? I have not seen any information about this. It gets more and more fascinating!
Yes, Maria, it’s incredibly complicated and interesting. There is also the question of how much heat it took to cook the different grains. And so on.
Kay and Rachel:
The whole grains we buy in the store will eventually go rancid. But this typically takes months or even years when they are stored in a cool dark place. I never use the fridge for grain storage (no space!) and don’t have a problem with it. What I wonder, however, is if the whole grain after harvest, with the outer inedible husk still intact, also goes rancid in the same way, or if the husk somehow protects it for much longer.
Yes, I chew on grains too. The softest and most delicious are whole oats—so sweet.
We’ve lost so much knowledge about grains. Since the combine harvester came in the threshing is done in the machine.
Hey Rachel,
Interesting! On the topic, from a rice-centric part of the world:
On the grassroots level (among farmers that I work with), there is a demand now for red or black rice that they used to have, but the millers in remote areas do not make their machinery open to the option. Also, the millers sell the bran to piggeries. We’ve had some farmers try to process their black rice just to get the outer cover out and it comes back as a sort of white rice, in light purple.
Not sure if the current demand is due to public education about “healthier” rice, or some observations about anecdotal increase of chronic illness between generations (I hear lot sof those), but there certainly seems to be a lot of it. One big hurdle for acceptance by farmers’ wives is it takes longer and requires more water to cook, unless you soak it overnight.
Also interesting is that many city folk until about the 60s would look forward to spending weekends in the countryside to have brown, red, or black rice. (There was no health hooha back then so there was no resistance to “healthy” fads) Maybe as it was more scarce and a novelty.
My insight on the preference for white food, sweet food, etc, is that human beings are predisposed towards these easier (too easy) absorbed forms of energy, but in a “natural” state without energy in the form of concentrated fossil fuels (or near-slavery, among servants or housewives), they are not very efficient or fun to produce. In a very crude biological generalization, coming across a concentrated, easy-to-digest form of energy is kind of like a jackpot.
Later on, it could be a symbol of status (not so much purity here except for sugar) as more work was put into it. In the case of sugar, a lot of the processing of “azucar mascabado” was very unhygenic so impossible to tell whether or not there was soil or other dirt in the product.
Thanks Bea. Lots of respond to here. No time today but I hope to over the week end.
Rachel, I think there are various aspects to this. First, of course, it depends on whose ancestors you are talking about (in the case of bread). From Germany to the East are the ryebread/wholegrain countries – Germans to this day eat white or dark bread or rolls for breakfast and dark bread for dinner; rye bread is even more popular towards eastern Europe (rye has a relatively high protein and lysine content). It is Scandinavia, England, Benelux, and the Mediterranean countries that prefer white bread. Perhaps because they had better access to other protein sources, like fish? I don’t know, that’s just speculation on my part.
White bread was a status symbol for a long time, apparently from Roman and Greek times onwards. Not only does it require less chewing, it also requires the necessary funds to complement the diet with protein and fat and various other minerals and vitamins from other sources. In all of the grasses, the embryo (germ) and the outer layers of the seed are rich in these nutrients, and a very important source of these substances in poor people’s diets.
However, these same nutrients also go rancid after a while, as was mentioned in some comments. White flour can be stored for years; whole grain flour only for months or up to a year, perhaps somewhat longer if the conditions are good. Also, they absorb smells from their surroundings (whole seeds themselves, as they are living organisms, generally stay edible longer).
So, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when large populations had to be fed on a massive scale, there was a synergy between the desires of people (status) and the necessities of commerce (long shelf life of the processed product) – and we get the white bread on a massive scale. The white rice story is somewhat similar, but more recent.
In the west of Mexico (Jalisco/Sinaloa) people prefer white, soft tortillas, by the way; somebody told me the maize was often deprived of its hull or seed coat for that, but I don’t know if it’s true. Here in the Central Valleys we prefer the creamcolored (or blue/black) and somewhat more substantial ones, where the hull is part of the “masa”.
Heike, thanks so much for the comment. As with Bea’s I have lots to respond to and will try to get to it this weekend.
ha Rachel
Interesting question, that I read just now.
A question that not yet has been mentioned: phytic acid.
All grains contain it, just under the branlayer. Phytic acid holds the minerals strongly chained (this chain is given up when the seed is in the moistly, warm ground, so in the spring, so if the seed should grow out to a plant. Than the enzyme phytase is born, unchains the chain and… there the minerals are available for the seed to become a plant.)
White flour contains no phytic acid, whole wheat flour does. This phytic acid not only keeps the minerals of the wheat strongly chained, it also can chain minerals on their way through or body.
To go further: in sourdough whole wheat bread – due to the longer rising time and due to the degree of sour – the enzyme phytase is born and breaks down about 80 % of the phytic acid; in yeast bread this break down is never – even with longer rising time – more than 40%.
So: whole wheat sourdough bread gives more available minerals than whole wheat yeast bread.
I’ve read somewhere that people used eating whole grains can digest them better because this enzyme has become part of their intestinal flora. I can imagine it, like the ability of some parts of the world to digest milk, while other parts get sick from it.
To make ‘healthy or not’ even more complex: during the last ten years phytic acid seems to prevent some sorts of cancer… Find on internet the article: ‘Phytate – a natural component in plant food.’ Or the review of Ulrich Schlemmer1, Wenche Frølich2, Rafel M. Prieto3, 4 and Felix Grases3, 4.
So: is phytic acid unhealthy for humans. (In recent years, there also seem to be healthy aspects).
The other thing is preserving white flour (no germ, so no fat) and whole wheat flour (with germ, so with fat, so can get rancid.)
Monsieur Raymond Calvel thought whole wheat flour food ‘for pigs only.’ (French association.) Calvel has done a lot for French bakers, making good tasty (white) breads without preservatives, and: baked on a stone floor (which requires a higher gluten content, so better to use white flour.)
German people used have a combination of mill and bakery. They just could not imagine milling the grain and storing for some days. The fat in the germ would get rancid, so the baker would mill and than make bread of that – whole wheat – flour. German breads are both baked on stone floor, or baked in a tin (which always comes out well, also when the dough has less gluten.)
My last point on whole wheat flour and white flour: a baking-technical aspect. In Holland, Belgium, France, we think that the flour should ‘rest’ for at least three weeks, before baking with it. Because of oxidation this flour makes breads with stronger gluten, so ‘higher’ breads.
In Germany people think we are crazy to let this flour rest.
So: what is culture and what are facts and how the both of these interact?
This is why your blog is so interesting, Rachel.
Ineke, Fascinating comments. I have edited them a bit. Please look and see if you have any problems with my changes. I am going to have to do another post to bring this whole white/brown bread debate up-to-date. I am not sure when I will be able to do this but soon I hope.
Rachel, thanks for editing, o.k.
So when you write “our” ancestors are you specifically talking to Europeans? If so, you should make that known since people all over the world adapted to a variety of subsistence strategies.
Unconscious Eurocentrism is clearly very pervasive.
Better, more nuanced explanation:
“The story is more complicated than the dates suggest, however. Although wheat had its origin 11,500 years ago, it didn’t become widespread in Western Europe for another 4,500 years. So if you’re of European descent, your ancestors have been eating grains for roughly 7,000 years. Corn was domesticated 9,000 years ago, but according to the carbon ratios of human teeth, it didn’t become a major source of calories until about 1,200 years ago! Many American groups did not adopt a grain-based diet until 100-300 years ago, and in a few cases they still have not. If you are of African descent, your ancestors have been eating grains for 9,000 to 0 years, depending on your heritage. The change to grains was accompanied by a marked decrease in dental health that shows up clearly in the archaeological record. “
Dear JJohnson, Thanks for these provocative comments. Now that I am settled I hope to be replying to them in the next few weeks,
Rachel
More importantly than all this, I think, whole grains, especially in wheat, keep a lot of harmful components and more gluten (a gluten that will be useless for volume in bread because the bran wouldn’t allow it to rise even with the added gluten of the whole grain). This makes for a tougher digestion overall and some harmful effects, like difficulty in absorbing nutrients and minerals. Maybe they didn’t have the scientific studies, but they did have the experience from millenia since the Egyptians and they had to be capable to notice demineralization and other damages from too much whole grain?
Cultures that use a certain type of grain in great quantities and daily, like the Roman and the European with wheat or the Asian with rice, had refined their flours to avoid the damaging effects of phytic acid and other natural defenses grains have. Leaving bran and germ in wheat wasn’t such a huge problem as with rice because they used to ferment it with wild yeast and long fermentation which makes gluten more digestible and eliminates natural toxins. Moreover, if they started with flour that was at least somewhat refined, they’d have a dough that from the beginning had less of those toxins to degrade and so you wouldn’t have people with problems absorbing minerals like people have today. The problem todays is people stopped using wild yeast (sourdough) for daily bread, shortened fermentation times by many different methods, added more stuff that probably doesn’t help the problem and worse yet, adopted a fad for whole grains without respecting the processes that make whole grain more apt for consumption. Even worse, we started using wheat and whole wheat for everything and with no fermentation whatsoever.
Also, even if the poor couldn’t afford to refine their flours like the rich did, they still had some methods to somewhat refine it. I also assume they would care for the volume that relatively refined flour would yield?
Very interesting Alex. Can you point me to some literature on this? I’d be really grateful.
About the history itself of these cultures, I don’t have much, that’s why I used many question marks! hehe
What I know is that it’s been found how components of whole grain can be very damaging. You don’t find in history much wisdom against wheat as you do today that it has become a synonym to fatness and bloating. Many studies are being made, but it is ironically a new science and the reasons are many, even wheat today is naturally different than that of before. Many people blame industrialization and white flour, but it goes deeper. As we didn’t know much about this, many studies about the culture and history didn’t focus on the effects of whole against white as a means of molding culture, we pretty much knew about the minerals and vitamins and fiber we’ve always known whole has, but not the whole effect of the grains themselves and of the processes for final products.
So here is some information about the actual grains that I can find right now:
Rice:
– http://ancestral-nutrition.com/why-white-rice-is-healthier-than-brown-rice/
– http://www.dietriffic.com/2013/05/28/white-rice-vs-brown-rice/
Wheat:
– http://ourheritageofhealth.com/still-eat-refined-flour/
– http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.mx/2010/05/traditional-preparation-methods-improve.html
– PP presentation about a study about the negative effects of wheat germ and the effect of “souring” it:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDgQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffoodprocessing.inahosting.co.kr%2Fboard%2Fdownload.php%3Fpath%3Dboard_Student2%26fv%3D98_0_13545164720.pptx%3AChracteristics%2520of%2520sourdough%2520fermentation%2520wheat%2520germ%2520and%2520used%2520as%2520an%2520ingredient%2520for%2520bread%2520making.pptx&ei=9UFhU8aKEIuuyATYo4DoBQ&usg=AFQjCNHUSWVrtDBZV7zSaknXLkhnmGEgYA&sig2=Xq2I0ZRdkRDH2WTnZk-DUg&cad=rja
– Here is the document: http://research.avemar.com/files/documents/HM/2010__rizzello__food_chem__119_2010_1079-89.pdf
– http://www.thegearpage.net/board/archive/index.php/t-1034849.html
– http://essentialstuff.org/index.php/2011/05/22/Cat/the-problem-with-unfermented-grains/
Thanks a ton, Alex. Being a an enthusiast of scientific papers, I particularly like the article in food chemistry.
I’m somewhat confused with what the conclusion of this article is? Maybe that’s my fault and I’m just not understanding. Are you saying white bread is easier to digest?
My goodness, I wrote this six years ago. It needs revision. Thanks for drawing my attention to this Ian. I will be updating it today. Check back tomorrow!
Very interesting, thanks. Don’t you think that white bread’s sweetness has something to do with its popularity (once it became cheap enough to be popular)? Even without jam, our salivary amylase breaks it down into sugar while still in the mouth.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on why white bread seems to be less popular in some affluent societies, such as in Germany. Is it because of rye? Francophobia?
David, I’m not sure of the answer to your first question but I will mull it over. As to why Germany, Russia and some other central and east European countries remained with rye, again I am not sure. There are not many good histories of the food of these countries available in English.
Why remain with rye? I am no scientist but here are some ideas.
1) Rye grows where wheat would not.
2) Wheat bread is quite bland while rye has character. Eastern European foods can often have a very distinct taste and rye bread complements it well. When you are poor you can just spread some mustard on it (watch out, Russian mustard is like wasabi with jalopenoes); when you are rich you can heap bacon or sprats on it; it goes well with goulash or stschi or solyanka or any Eastern European soup or stew … In my childhood we never got vegetables and greens out of season. A slice of rye bread spread with butter and liberally sprinkled with green onions was the harbinger of Spring, a symbol of all the good fresh things to come from cucumbers to strawberries to new potatoes to currants to apples.
3) Not sure about the Germans, and the Russians had some very lofty nobility, but most Eastern Europeans are grandchildren of relatively poor peasants. So memories of Granny and her homemade bread give them this warm fuzzy feeling for rye. And ‘relatively poor’ meant acorn meal, ground tree bark, and whatnot in your rye bread during bad winters for many centuries while on a feast day you might have had a small wheat bun.
In the Soviet time I once took a train from Moscow to Kiev. The journey was long but somewhere midway the Russian word ‘bulka’ (wheat bread) outright disappeared and ‘hleb’ (daily bread) henceforth meant wheat instead of rye. My, was I confused! (And anything but constipated as I am allergic to wheat but let us avoid going there.) Coming back again (after a month of natural and cultural sights thickly peppered with good old outhouses) the appearance of black bread in the dining car was almost like reaching home.
My native language, too, has very different words for (rye) bread and wheat bread, and the latter is also used for various cakes and sweet buns. However, you English speakers are no better. Just imagine a foreigner attempting to make sense of sweetmeats and sweetbreads!
Ganna, thanks for all this. I love rye bread with butter and green onions as the harbinger of spring. Even growing up in rural England we had no vegetables out of season, though the cabbage just about lasted the winter. Even so I remember my Father saying in March, “Oh for something green.” And thank you for your Kiev story too.
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I’ve been meaning to post a link to this great article to my own blog for some time, but finally got around to it today, on the 100th anniversary of Wonder Bread being introduced.
In doing that, I searched through piles of articles on this blog looking for it, and have a lot of other interesting things to now read. One slight suggestion, would it be possible to add an index by date of publication gadget to this blog? It’d be great for folks like me who just newly discovered it.
That’s a great idea, Pat. I’m a bit pushed for time right now as my slow pace of blogging shows. I am hoping to find someone to help me and that would be a good place to start.