‘Bread Is Broken’
17th July 2016
The New York Times continues its uninterrupted string of lectures on how you ought to do things their way.
What most people picture when they think of flour — that anonymous chalk-white powder from the supermarket — is anathema to Jones. Before the advent of industrial agriculture, Americans enjoyed a wide range of regional flours milled from equally diverse wheats, which in turn could be used to make breads that were astonishingly flavorful and nutritious. For nearly a century, however, America has grown wheat tailored to an industrial system designed to produce nutrient-poor flour and insipid, spongy breads soaked in preservatives. For the sake of profit and expediency, we forfeited pleasure and health. The Bread Lab’s mission is to make regional grain farming viable once more, by creating entirely new kinds of wheat that unite the taste and wholesomeness of their ancestors with the robustness of their modern counterparts.
This may seem to contradict the usual ‘progressive’ attitude that what is old is bad and what is new is good. But it really doesn’t — it is founded in the deeper ‘progressive’ attitude that what we do now is inadequate so we have to change. This allows ‘progressives’ to make noises that in any prior century would suggest deep-dyed right-wing reactionary attitudes. Let them eat cake is okay so long as it’s understood that it is locally-sourced artisanal cake using heritage strains of flower and gluten-free, which only the 1% could possibly afford.