Bread is not simple

Bread is in many ways not simply a food, it is for us in the west the Ur food. It's nickname is The Staff of Life. The phrases "give us this day our daily bread," and living on "bread and water," suggest that bread is not just any old nibble, it is the one food we need every day, the one food that sustains life. (Recent low carbiness aside.)

And yet for most of us, bread is a mystery. Some people apparently have the notion that bread is one thing: that sort of happens like magic. (And no Virgina, that's not magic, that's yeast.)
I got into it the other day with someone who was mad that Chicken McNuggets had more than two ingredients: chicken and bread. They were outraged that it's something like 30. While I don't want to defend the McNugget, (30 is excessive) I do want to defend the notion that food is complicated. And that things like the McNugget can't be 2 ingredients. 10-15 might be a better call.

The simplest bread is 3 ingredients: Flour, salt, water. This bread tends to suck. Sorry about that, but unless it's hot off the grill, it's rarely that good. The next simplest tends to go something like this: Flour, salt, water, yeast, milk, sugar, fat. Then you step it up to add other kinds of flours, milk, maybe some Vit C, or various other flavor perkers, etc to improve the taste and the way it feels in you mouth. Whole Food's basic white bread, for instance, has 17 ingredients. Then, since I assume you probably won't eat it all that day, you will want to add more of a preservative than salt.

Preservatives: I can hear some of you going, icky-bad -no! Actually, they aren't all bad. They especially aren't if you are a woman. Especially if you aren't a rich woman. Preservatives allow for bread to be made in Texas, and shipped to New England via train, not airmail. They allow for bread to be eaten on days other than the day it was made. They also allow for the savings of mass production to come to bread. They mean that the person who is responsible for food in the household doesn't have to either make bread everyday, or buy bread every day. (That person, btw, is generally a woman, with a lot to do, and not a ton of money, hence the line at the beginning of this paragraph.) Now sure, I'd like to have a bakery near by, fresh bread I could pop in and buy each morning. But unfortunately, I live in the suburbs. And in America, if you want to live in walking distance of nice food shops you generally have to be rich. Middle class people live in burbs and poor people live in places where they only food for sale tends to be pork rids and chips. (That's a whole nother post.)
So if it weren't for preservatives I'd have to make bread daily, buy bread daily -- which is a drive to the store and back, plus waiting to check out, -- or have fresh bread once a week and switch to toast the next day, or move from the burbs.

Now, personally, 1&3 are the way I go. But my homemade bread really isn't that good. So don't get entranced by the notion. But I fully acknowledge that is not how lots of women want to live their lives. Making bread by hand takes 20 minutes of work, but 3 hours of rising, and an hour of baking. (Or turning on the bread machine.) Both of them require being in the house when the bread is done, so you can tend to it. And yes, it would generally be women who do this. Other women prefer to spend their time cleaning their houses, or playing with their kids, or going to the gym, or a dozen other things.

I would like to go to a baker's everyday, but reorganizing the physical layout of America is more of a challenge than I'm up to this morning. Over the last 60 years we have developed a car based housing layout in this country. In that time the population has gone from 132 million to 320 million. The car has done lots of nifty things for us, but it has also trapped many of us in the burbs. The car lets us live in single houses, on plots of land, far far from the expensive city centers or our jobs. On the other hand it means we are far far from the city center and shopping. So in order to go buy bread most of us have to get in the car and drive to the shop and then drive home. That's what's technically known as a hassle. When you do it with a bunch of children, it's known as a pain in the ass. So, if people are going to go to that kind of bother it makes sense for them to be able to get EVERYTHING in one place to minimize the hassle of getting to any given shop. Think about it, if you were going to go to a shop for aspirin, then another for glass cleaner, then another for meat, and another for fruits, and another for veg, then one for bread -- in a driving based set up, that's a lot of get in the car, find parking, out of the car, and repeat. It's not so much of a bother when you just stroll around the market street and walk into whatever little store you want. But in the car, with a bunch of kids... You will drop by the liquor store at the end of it. Sensible retailers noticed this and began offering massive selections, so women didn't have to go to a dozen places. Of course, once you have a Wall-oger-lix the size of a football field that has three knock-on effects. One) smaller, specialty stores have a harder time competing; two) the customer radius expands, so more people come to that shop from father away than walking distance; three) the stores need a massive amount of food, and it has to be logistics compatible. That means it has to be preserved enough to come from a factory, and it must be mechanized enough that Wall-oger-lix can count on the same amount of food showing up in regularly plannable times.

So anyway, Food is complicated. Food ties in with mass production, and money, and feminism, and city planning.

Just wanted to get that in there.