The science of bread production and bread digestion makes for a fascinating political story.

It’s also a bit of a rabbit hole, if I’m honest, but throw in Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine and the “wheat war” that we may all be facing, and you’ve got a political discussion worth forming an opinion on; and that’s before we get sidetracked by fibre content and nutritional benefits… Wheat and bread are topics to be informed about in 2022.

Bacteria; nutrition; food labelling; traditional foods; modern diets; ancient civilisation; twentieth century food production; factories; grain markets; shelf lives; urban life; local foodways and international economics... It’s all in the science of bread and it’s incredibly interesting. If you want to get started on this discussion, here is a podcast. We all love a good podcast, right?! (It’s not long and it’s a good overview!)

Can bread be healthy? - podcast by ZOE Science & Nutrition (on all the usual podcast channels)

One of Minchin’s beautiful wheat fields. Canterbury, New Zealand, 2022

The ZOE podcast blurb goes as follows: “It’s no exaggeration to say that bread shaped modern humanity - it was the cultivation of wheat for flour that transformed our ancestors from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers. Today, millions of us start the day with a slice of toast, and most lunches in the US and UK are wrapped in a slice of bread or a burger bun as a cheap, flexible, and delicious energy source. But modern industrial processes designed to reduce the time and cost of baking mean today’s bread would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Today’s bread tastes good but has lost most of its nutritional content. With most of its fiber gone, and no time for bacteria to work its fermenting magic, bread has become a simple starch, rapidly turned into sugar in our blood and offering little to support our gut bacteria. For this reason, bread is increasingly demonized as an evil carb. In today’s episode, Jonathan speaks to two authorities on the subject to ask: Can bread can ever be healthy?”

“Vanessa Kimbell is an author, founder of the sourdough school, and a specialist in bread nutrition and digestibility.
“Tim Spector is a co-founder at ZOE and one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world.”

https://feeds.captivate.fm/zoe_science_and_nutrition/

Gluten is found in rye, barley, and especially wheat. It is used as an additive in many unexpected foods in the supermarket and has had a fair bit of (mostly bad) press in recent years. Pretty much everyone has heard of gluten, but do you know what gluten is and what work it does inside bread?

Basically gluten gives bread its structure. Without it, you get crackers or a brick of some sort. (Gluten is also degraded in a baked sourdough, because the fermentation process breaks it down!) Stephen Yafa explains the work of gluten:

“Gluten, which provides food storage for the germinating seed, is actually a complex comprised of two amino-acid proteins, gliadin and glutenin, that bond to form long, tangled molecules. Its stickiness - gluten comes from the Latin word for “glue” - adds elasticity and extensibility to wheat flour when mixed with water. The cohesion enables kneaded dough to stretch and hold its shape, a delicate compromise between strength and flexibility that gluten alone provides.
Bakers, for that reason, depend on gluten to create structure and resilience in their bread doughs. With the addition of water, this amino-acid bead string produces a web matrix of dough, the crumb. Carbon dioxide, the escaping gas released as a yeast by-product, fills the air pockets - named alveoli, like the lung’s balloon-like structures. That causes the crumb to swell inside the rising crust as it bakes.” (Ref: pp.10-11 Stephen Yafa (2015) Grain of Truth: The real case for and against wheat and gluten. Avery, Penguin Random House: New York