Just how bad is British (Chorleywood) bread for you?

/\/\ theres a few threads on this forum you could feed into that machine with enough output to reclaim Doggerland

Make your own soil. How difficult can it be?

Edit: Not that difficult:

My grandad was a gardener.  Their front garden was a riot of colour and anything planted grew like all buggery, we were still getting flowers he originally planted like 40 years after he died.

The secret, prior to living in a mid-terrace they were farmers.  When they sold up and moved, the front garden was constructed using soil lifted from the farm.  It was probably as much horse manure as actual soil when it went in.

4 pages and no mention of candlestick makers. The humanity

Aside from on page 2.

Aside from on page 2.

Whatever

@alpin: I hope Herr Pfister washes his hands before he starts work…

Both @Sandwich & I worked in the flour milling industry for years and there is little if no difference between UK or any other European milled flour as its mostly milled using the same equipment from a Swiss company. The wheat we used came from all over the world. In fact Warburton’s supply the wheat to you from Canada for consistency.

For years Spanish bread was utter pish and might as well been made from the Creta we had to add to UK flour by law to boost the calcium level. At the end of the day it’s what you do with the flour that makes the difference. Sure the C&C process adds a few ingredients but most bakeries try to keep that to a minimum as it adds to their costs.

The UK probably has one of the most diverse range of breads (and food ingredients) available to buy in the world. Sadly many people don’t venture outside of their little bubble of what they buy?

Where does everyone stand on floury baps?
Always a good thing, yes? 

The secret, prior to living in a mid-terrace they were farmers. When they sold up and moved, the front garden was constructed using soil lifted from the farm. It was probably as much horse manure as actual soil when it went in.

When they moved they took their soil with them? Sounds like horseshit to me.

Were they farming horses btw?

When they moved they took their soil with them? Sounds like horseshit to me.

I can only relay what I was told, I was very young and only have vague memories of the farm.  Their new house had a few flower beds built outside an 1890s mid terrace, it wasn’t half an acre.

I don’t know the logistics, though I’m sure if you put your mind to it you’re just as capable as I am of considering how a farming family neighboured by farms run by other family members might have the means to transport several barrowloads of dirt two miles down the road, and how that option might in fact be preferable to buying it in from elsewhere when they had tons of the stuff. I didn’t know there was going to be a test half a century later or I’d have taken more detailed notes once I’d learned to write..

Were they farming horses btw?

Don’t be obtuse.

It was a dairy farm.  We had shire horses to pull the drays and my mum had a regular horse of her own.  I know this because aside from anecdotes I have photos.  Beyond that I cannot say, I’d have been maybe 5 when they sold up and there’s no-one left now to ask.

Ah, sounds like a scene from The Darling Buds of May. Although didn’t even they have tractors?

Presumably a dairy farm had more cowshit than horseshit? Cowshit no good?

What is wrong with you?

Alpin, buy some Alpen and add some water to that

No…. Not available here.

Having been on a bit of a health kick the last year and half, including trying to remove most UPF’s from my diet, I got sick of scouring supermarket shelves for bread products without loads of rubbish in them. Even Waitrose and M And S wholemeal loaves are often made with palm fat which I’d rather not have for environmental as well as health reasons. The list of ingredients on some bread products is ridiculous. So I purchased a bread maker and ordered a bulk load of organic yeast and various flours from Shipton mill. Absolutely delicious, filling loaves that take less than 5 mins of hands on time and even with the fancy organic flours the loaves come out around £1. My favourite so far is 200g stone ground wholemeal, 150 white, 50 rye, 1tbs olive oil, 1 tsp raw honey, 1 tsp salt, 1tsp of yeast, 300ml water and 2 tbsp of golden linseed for an extra omega 3 boost. 3 HR setting on Panasonic.

Lost a little weight despite eating more bread, butter, eggs, oily fish and loads of veg. Haven’t been ill for at least a year, guts have improved and just feeling really good. Sleeping really well too. There are  studies coming out regularly showing the harm of various UPF’s but not sure specifically about bread. It is difficult to do studies on people’s diets and takes a very long time too but there’s evidence that they can harm the gut microbiome which is widely only fairly recently being acknowledged to be a very big factor in our overall health and wellbeing. So whatever you can do to look after your gut whether it’s eating better bread or adding fermented foods is likely to help you be healthier.

Is a fairly simplistic way of looking at it, that if it comes in a plastic wrapper , it’s processed shite, or is even ‘fresh’ made stuff in supermarkets still full of crap ?

That’s not a useful measure at all unfortunately as supermarkets really do want to trick people into paying more for supposedly freshly baked bread.

Hardly any bread is baked in supermarkets now. Frozen, massive produced, part baked loaves are sent to the store and then finished off there so they can technically say ‘baked in store’

Someone up there said it’s supply and demand and that the British people are lazy and vote with their feet. I really disagree with this. There are huge pressures from big food companies and supermarkets to persuade us in a direction. It’s a huge and complex issue around all food in the UK not just bread and has many factors that are affected by the politics of our country.

It shouldn’t be so hard or so expensive to access quality, healthy food and it shouldn’t be considered snobbish or elitist to want a quality loaf of bread.

I went to a meeting in my local community centre about access to healthy food. It’s not a rich area and there was a range of people there including several young mum’s from the local estate. They were really concerned about the advertising pressures on their children and how difficult and expensive it was to get quality food Vs junk food.

Below the article about how supermarkets seek to decieve us and at the same time devalue what real bakeries do.

https://www.sustainweb.org/blogs/jul24-supermarket-loaf-tanning-salon-lies-not-so-great-british-fake-off/

I shouldn’t be so hard or so expensive to access quality, healthy food and it shouldn’t be considered snobbish or elitist to want a quality loaf of bread.

If the government banned for example emulsifiers then the products would just be changed.  You can already buy alternatives to common foods with no emulsifiers in them but they cost more because they are smaller scale but proves the point that they are not technically required

Make it only possible to sell non UPF foods and the providers will respond.  When 99% of stuff in a supermarket (outside of fruit and veg) is UPF or bordering on it then what do we expect people to buy?

I think ‘the food industry’ is increasingly looking like the next cigarette or oil industry as they  seem to want to sell us more an more products that are less and less made from real/actual food items, or items so heavily modified, and seem so willing to sacrifice health to profit.