“Growing a loaf of bread! We planted the wheat in April and harvested in September. In October, we threshed the wheat, winnowed it and milled it in Mr. Banham’s coffee grinder. On 14 October we baked our flour as bread and ATE IT. DELICIOUS!”
So wrote the kids and staff at South Haringey Junior School in London, of their ‘Bake your Lawn’ experience, last year.
Bread – such a simple thing – except, as the Real Bread Campaign from Sustain highlights, the bread enjoyed by the kids of South Haringey Junior bears little resemblance to the soft, squishy, white loaves wrapped in plastic bags, lining the supermarket shelves. And, perhaps alongside the flour, water, salt and yeast needed to make ‘real’ bread, you may also find any number of additives listed on the back of those plastic packs – from lecithin and E261 (Potassium Acetate), to bleaching agent L-cysteine hydrochloride (E920) and trans fats.
To illuminate the disparity between real bread and highly processed loaves, the Real Bread Campaign launched their ‘Bake Your Lawn’ campaign and supporting book, demonstrating that all you need to bake a small, wholemeal loaf from scratch is one square metre of soil and 15-30g of wheat seeds.
But it’s the process itself, that has been the real eye-opener for children and adults alike – realising that the bread we so often take for granted is the result of different jobs, skills and processes, from the sowing of seed, growing and harvesting of wheat, to the threshing and milling of the grain… skills, jobs and knowledge we are at risk of losing, as our real bread is increasingly replaced by highly processed loaves.
When asked about the widely permitted use of such additives, The Federation of Bakers, which represents the industrial manufacturers of around 80 per cent of the loaves we buy, commented: “Additives are not new. Additions to food have been made since pre-historic times, mainly to help preserve food and make it safer to eat. Salt, vinegar and sugar are traditional methods of preservation.”
“So when was the last time you stirred a spoonful of sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate into your tea or sprinkled mono and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids onto you chips?” responds Chris Young, co-ordinator of the Real Bread Campaign.
He has a point. And if it’s one you’d like to learn more about – or get your own kids, school, or community involved in the Bake Your Lawn campaign – you can find out more, and order the accompanying book, here.
The ‘Bake Your Lawn’ and ‘Lessons in Loaf’ projects created and run by the Real Bread Campaign have helped thousands of school children not only to follow the journey from crop to crust but also to discover the connections that Real Bread has with almost every aspect of learning and life in general.
What a typically cynical reply from the food industry. I suppose bread that’s expected to sit on the shelf for two weeks would need rubberising chemicals for cosmetic edibility. But even the freshly baked bread at grocery stores omits an ingredients list, so are these additives in there, too?
Thankfully, I have baked my own bread for years (miso-fermented sourdough being my current obsession!). The only preservative I add before baking is a tiny sprinkle of ascorbic acid.
Hats off to those clever kids who went as far as to grow and ground their own flour. I wish I’d been as clued in at their age.