The Curse of Sliced Bread
22nd March 2022
A regular loaf of leavened bread has four key ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast. But reading the wrapper on the shop-bought bread that replaced my failed loaf, I discovered not four ingredients but 27. Why?
It struck me, while rinsing off-white gunk down the sink, that the reason for this is that bread has a fifth essential ingredient: time. And the difference between my home-made ingredient list and the longer shop-bought one is mostly additives that reduce the need to treat time as an ingredient.
But this goes well beyond just bread. Much of what’s distinctively modern about modern life can also be understood as the consequence of waging war on time in the name of productivity. And if this drive for time-saving seems at first to have no downsides, the costs are growing increasingly apparent.
The reason I buy commercial bread rather than make my own is because Real Bread goes bad after about three days, and my wife and I won’t use up a whole loaf (not even a baguette) in that time; I depend on the additives to keep it viable for as long as it can.