What’s so good about Real Bread?
EVERYthing!
The charity Sustain runs the Campaign because we love Real Bread, we love home baking and we love small, independent bakeries. But why?
Let’s have a look at some of the good food values that go into making Real Bread a great value food.
Real Bread is delicious
Objectively, the flavour and aroma of Real Bread tend to be deep and complex. In other words: very tasty. This is even more likely if the Real Bread has been lovingly crafted from wholemeal (or other high extraction), stoneground flour, milled from a more flavoursome (perhaps ancient or at least heritage) variety or mixture of grains. Skilfully using a sourdough or other long-fermentation process tends to retain, and even enhance, the natural flavours and aromas.
Subjectively, many people love eating well-made Real Bread because it tastes great to them - probably on account of the above.
I don't have statistics or other evidence to back up these observations (and even additive-laden, industrial dough products have their fans) so let’s move on to other factors.
It's additive-free
Will scarfing one piece of sliced white, industrial, dough product kill you on the spot? No, it won’t. Nor will you be cut down in your prime by chowing down on a single ultra-processed wrap, pizza, bagel, croissant, burger bun or whatever.*
As Big Food is quick to tell us: each additive has been tested individually and declared safe. Taking a lesson in caution from history, though, there's a long list of additives that Big Food once assured us were safe, but which were later withdrawn or banned on health grounds. In industrial flour production and loaf fabrication alone they include azodicarbonimide, potassium bromate, nitrogen trichloride and other flour bleaching agents.**
There are also a growing number of questions and concerns gathering around ultra-processed food (UPF), in which category industrial dough products lurk. A lot more work is needed to unpick exactly which factors (specific additives, methods of processing, and levels of salt, sugars and particular fats, for example) are causing an increase in each health risk that has been linked to UPF by one study or another.
Even harder is working out which cocktails of these individual elements, across the diet, over time, is leading to negative health outcomes; or factoring in the individual responses each of us (not to mention each of our multi-trillion population microbiomes) has to them.
For now, what we can say with certainty is that countless generations of people have enjoyed and thrived on eating Real Bread, which is categorised as a processed (rather than ultra-processed) food.
*Obviously someone who has coeliac disease or a food allergy has to be particularly careful about what they eat.
**Though some of these are still legal in the USA and elsewhere. Conversely, in 2022 the EU banned the use of titanium dioxide in food but it is still permitted in post-Brexit Britain. It's not used in loaf manufacture, but illustrates the point about UPF fabricators' assurances about 'safe' additives.
No hidden additives
Knowing that many people are wary of additives with unfamiliar names, and E numbers in whose shadows some of those additives reside, manufacturers are turning to 'clean label' options. These either have more reassuring names, or the manufacturer can choose to leave them off the ingredients lists altogether if they claim they're 'processing aids'.
Real Bread is truly clean label because it is a clean product - no additives of any kind, declared or otherwise.
Real Bread is great value and can be very cheap
By hand or by machine, you can bang out your own Real Bread at home for pence. Yes, it takes time, but most of that isn’t your time – especially when using an adopted bread machine. Even if you shell out an honest price for an honest crust from a local, independent bakery (see below) it represents great value: just think how many meals you can get out of a loaf of Real Bread. For about the price of just one takeaway coffee, frozen pizza, readymade sandwich, or pint in a pub, you can get the main component of, what, half a dozen meals?
All that said, some people on the tightest budgets cannot realistically justify paying what a local, indie bakery needs to charge for Real Bread. Some people's days are overfilled (with multiple jobs or caring responsibilities, for example) so don’t even have the headspace to spend a few minutes fiddling about with a bread machine. We're working on these issues through our Real Bread For All initiative. Real Bread on The Menu of schools, hospitals, care homes and other public sector institutions is one of the proposals we included in our Real Bread Manifesto ahead of the 2024 UK General Election.
Real Bread can help to provide local jobs and keep your high street alive
Elephant in the room: Real Bread, lovingly crafted in small batches by skilled craftspeople at a local, independent bakery, costs more than pence.
One of the main reasons is that investing in Real Bread from an indie supports more jobs per loaf than buying mass-produced industrial dough products from highly-automated factories. Each time you shop at a small, independent, local Real Bread bakery (or support any other small, independent, local business, for that matter) you are helping to create skilled, fulfilling jobs for people locally and – in the case of bricks and mortar businesses - to keep your high street alive.
Even a supermarket ‘in-store bakery’ might well only employ one person to push a loaf tanning salon button to re-bake products that were prefabricated in a factory many miles away - perhaps even overseas. Rather than a good chunk of your cash being re-invested in your local community and with other small businesses, much of it is likely to end up in the pockets of the supermarket’s fat-cat shareholders.
(If you’re thinking of comparing a small bakery’s retail prices to the cost of ingredients and energy needed to make a loaf at home, please remember that a bakery also has to factor in a load of other things that the homebaker doesn't: covering wages and other staffing costs, rent, buying and maintaining expensive equipment, insurance, taxes, marketing, professional services, loan repayments, packaging…)
Real Bread is healthy and nutritious
For a minute let's consider wholemeal Real Bread specifically. It’s packed with fibre (good for your gut microbiome) and micronutrients – vitamins, polyphenols, antioxidants and more. The majority of us in industrialised countries get more than enough protein in our diets, but if you share the current obsession with the stuff, there’s plenty of that in there, too.
Even a white loaf in the UK has reasonable levels iron, calcium and a couple of B vitamins – though, admittedly that’s because they’ve been added to the flour by law, and might not all be in a form that your body can make much use of.
Even better bred bread
Are there ways of making Real Bread even better for us, our communities and the planet? Many people in and beyond the Campaign’s supporter network are working towards these aims.
Here are some examples:
- Adhering to organic or biodynamic certification standards, or at least using agroecologically-produced ingredients.
- There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that there might be a range of health benefits to making Real Bread by the sourdough process.
- Following the Campaign’s No Loaf Lost guidance to minimise, or even eliminate, surplus and waste.
- Schemes and business models that make Real Bread available, accessing and affordable to more people – see our Real Bread For All guide.
- Choosing flours (perhaps stoneground, heritage grains/mixtures) to prioritise better flavour profiles and higher natural micronutritional values.
- Using flour from emission-free, carbon neutral wind and water powered mills.
- Being part of a regional non-commodity grain network.
- Not exceeding target maximum salt levels.
- Operating as a social enterprise or Community Supported Bakery.
Want a slice of Real Bread?
Yes? Great!
There are all sorts of ways in which you can be part of the rise of Real Bread. Most obviously you can make it (as an amateur or professional) or buy it from a local, indie bakery.
Other ways to get involved in the Real Bread movement are by:
- Sharing your Real Bread making knowledge and skills.
- Growing or milling grain to be used in Real Bread making.
- Being an activist: for example working to get Real Bread onto public sector menus, or by challenging misleading marketing.
If you'd like to help enable our charity to keep playing our part, here are ways that you can get involved in and support the Real Bread Campaign.
Happy baking!
Published Monday 14 October 2024
Real Bread Campaign: The Real Bread Campaign finds and shares ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet. Whether your interest is local food, community-focussed small enterprises, honest labelling, therapeutic baking, or simply tasty toast, everyone is invited to become a Campaign supporter.