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       CHAPTER TWO DOES IT REALLY MATTER WHAT BREAD WE EAT?

      ‘I know that “man cannot live on bread alone”. I say, let us get the bread right.’ DAVID SCOTT, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 1998)

      Mixed messages

      The food industry argument goes like this. Thanks to modern agriculture and technology, we all have more than enough to eat these days; everyone can afford a variety of foods from which they derive reasonable nutrition; if this or that food is less than perfect, it doesn’t make any real difference. We should enjoy the unparalleled choices now open to us and stop criticising the food industry.

      According to this view, it doesn’t matter if industrial bread is nutritionally depleted because any missing nutrients are available in other foods. The words ‘in the context of a balanced diet…’ are often used to justify questionable products. The large food processing groups and multiple retailers in the UK give public support to healthy eating policies but only in so far as they are not prevented from marketing pretty much any edible substance they choose. Their general strategy is to avoid discussing the particular nutritional profile of any one product. A healthy diet, they insist, results from a combination of food choices, but don’t blame us if legitimate promotion of our brands results in over-consumption of nutritionally depleted products. That’s down to individual choice. The balanced bit of the diet, the message seems to be, can be provided by some other sucker.

      Notice how the tune changes, however, when food companies are promoting their special (perhaps a bit more profitable) ranges, all promising ‘wellbeing’ from a ‘lifestyle’ involving ‘healthy eating’. Now the particular, ingredient-specific attributes of this or that product are highlighted: its low-fat, low glycaemic index or high-fibre status, perhaps, or the presence of prebiotics, probiotics or obscure additives that ‘have been linked to heart health’.

      Whenever I see an advertisement for a new ‘healthy-eating’ addition to a product range, I itch to ask the obvious question: if all the qualities with which you have so generously endowed this new line are as vital for my health as you imply, why are your ordinary ranges not as good?

      So what are they recommending: nutritionally enhanced products or a balanced diet?

      The ‘whole diet’ approach to nutrition is useful because it takes account of the variety of foods that people actually consume. It recognises that we do not (and, in my view, should not) see foods solely as bundles of nutrients. After all, food performs many functions additional to mere survival – as a source of comfort, celebration, indulgence and sensual pleasure, for example. But whole diets are composed of individual food types and products and in healthy people the good is balanced with the less good. Limitations of information, money or access mean that some people struggle to achieve this balance. For them, it is crucial that basic foods are as wholesome as possible because they cannot or do not consume the range of foods that contain a satisfactory spectrum of nutrients.

      According to the government’s 2002-3 National Food Survey, 99 per cent of UK households eat bread. It forms about 9 per cent (by weight) of the average diet. But low-income families eat more than twice as much white bread and 25 per cent less wholemeal than high-income families. For some people, bread amounts to as much as 20 per cent of their diet. It matters that this bread is good. But the cheapest, most basic British bread, the standard white sliced loaf that accounts for about half of the market, is also the least nutritious. It contains smaller quantities of several important minerals and vitamins than plain wholemeal bread. This leads to another problem. Most people in the UK get enough nutrients, though certain population groups are low in iron and magnesium and almost everyone consumes less fibre than recommended. But the density of everyday foods is important: the fewer nutrients a food has in it, the more portions we have to eat to get what our bodies need. Poor-quality basic foods are programmed for over-consumption. Is it any wonder that obesity is on the rise?

      The industrial bakers give out very mixed messages. They promote all bread as being healthy. When challenged to explain how loaves whose nutrient profiles differ considerably can be equally good, they say that the public demands cheap white bread and that it is absolutely fine in the context of a balanced diet. They then promote their speciality breads on the basis that they provide the very things that are glaringly absent in the standard stuff.

      By emphasising the low cost, convenience and neutral taste of its primary offering – the white sliced loaf – the bread industry has pandered to a public that knows what it likes and is resistant to change. Why would anyone change, if they were constantly assured that all bread, whatever its type and content, is ‘good’?

      Who decides?

      The baking industry argues that it is embracing the ‘health agenda’ with new, more nutritious products and that a wide choice of breads is now available to everyone. But to make real choices, you have to have enough information and you need to know how to evaluate it. The ingredients list is where you look if you want to know exactly what is in a product. Even if you understand all the terms used on a bread label, you may still be in the dark – for instance, if added enzymes were used to make the bread but are not declared on the label, with details of their origin and effect. By not stating in clear and simple language how their product is made, industrial bakers make it difficult for ordinary people to judge whether their bread is good to eat.

      The basis of choice is effectively controlled by the industry. And, in the tart estimate of academic nutritionist Professor Marion Nestle, ‘nutrition becomes a factor in corporate thinking only when it can help sell food’ (Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press, 2003). There is a long history of industry reluctance to make good the deficiencies of white bread. The millers and bakers fought tooth and nail against the scientific consensus in the 1930s that roller milling had removed so many nutrients from flour that many people, especially the poor, were subsisting on considerably less than was physiologically required. Then, as now, they sidestepped the lamentable quality of their basic product and agreed to ‘fortify’ white flour with a small number of minerals and vitamins derived from synthetic sources.

      Fortification has now become ‘nutrification’ – an approach to food described by one apologist as ‘the most rapidly applied, the most flexible, and the most socially acceptable intervention method of changing the intake of nutrients without a vast educational effort and without changing the current food patterns of a given population’. Industry, having fought against it, now loves it because it leaves the structure and direction of food processing untouched. Any new nutritional problems can be solved by recourse to its increasingly sophisticated chemistry set and a whole new commercial opportunity has emerged to ‘add value’ by creating ‘functional foods’.

      Adding relatively large amounts of synthetic nutrients to basic foodstuffs is scientifically primitive because it must assume that everyone will

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