It is crazy to me how much our modern ideas on food and clothing are more modern than we realize. Always fun to point out that places that have what we call "spicy" food got there by import.
Even bread, I suspect, is probably a lot different than we realize. There is a wide range in what that can cover, with many of the types of bread that last longer being popular for their longevity in older times.
And that doesn't even get into the drastic shift in diet that came from rationing times. There are a lot of parts of the animal that we used to directly eat.
Bread is indeed different nowadays, specially in the americas.
Modern wheat was "invented" by Norman Borlaug in the 60s. It was genetically modified (through breeding and other means) to provide higher yield.
Some places, like Italy and France, still use the old low yield "original" wheat.
I learned this painful lesson when I thought I had gluten allergy. I can't eat any kind of bread in the US. But when I went to France, I had no problems. Turns out (AFAIK), high yield wheat is also really hard to digest...
Bread in the USA is an abomination. There. I said it.
Any bread in the normal isle that you can buy and have on your counter for over a week, where it still looks and feels and tastes the same is an abomination.
It is not bread. It is a super-processed food which makes you initially feel full but digests very rapidly, leaving you hungry again.
100 calories of engineered US bread compared to 100 calories of steel cut oats is a good example. The latter will keep you full much longer.
I remember going to an actual bakery in Belgium, you know, the guy who wakes up at 3AM to make bread. Get a fresh bread. Still warm. If you leave it on the counter for 2 days it is rock hard. Because it is unprocessed (or at least a lot less).
I guess we have to thank Kroger for putting the bakeries in the US out of business.
I remember my first trip to Germany, would pick up off the shelf supermarket bread, white, wheat, whatever. It was great. Especially pretzels. I ate so much bread, and was surprised at how much regularly I was still pooping. I'm not even going to touch on local bakeries, because that shit was fucking fantastic.
But in the U.S, we're forced to be the slaves of Metamucil to poop. Eat white bread here and you basically have cotton stuck up your ass. Good luck.
> I remember going to an actual bakery in Belgium, you know, the guy who wakes up at 3AM to make bread. Get a fresh bread. Still warm. If you leave it on the counter for 2 days it is rock hard. Because it is unprocessed (or at least a lot less).
> I guess we have to thank Kroger for putting the bakeries in the US out of business.
While I agree with you about typical bread found in US grocery stores, there are plenty of small bakeries in the US that make "real" bread. Every city or even decently-sized town that I've been in had a least one solid bakery with bread/pastries/etc baked fresh every day. Find them and support them!
They exist in some cities, sure, but across wide swathes of the country, they are nowhere to be found. The craft is dead, and in its place we have industry and logistics.
Where I see 'real' bread for sale in the US, it is marketed as a luxury good for the affluent, and the price reflects this. I see this as scandalous - charging a premium for what I would consider ordinary 'natural' food.
What really pains me is that an ordinary loaf of industrial spongebread at Walmart costs the same as a very high quality (and heavier/denser) loaf of proper bread (such as a standard Mischbrot) at a bake shop in Germany. It's obscene given that labor and especially energy costs are considerably higher in Germany, so it isn't like comparing a US price to a dirt cheap low-wage country.
I have noticed that since the pandemic there seems to be a lot more interest in quality home baking in the US, but it seems that people are rediscovering fire in a vacuum without any real training or knowledge - because the traditional craft is dead.
I am growing a little spelt in the garden this year from organic seed sourced in Germany. If it works, I will save my new seed and try it on a larger scale next year.
> Any bread in the normal isle that you can buy and have on your counter for over a week, where it still looks and feels and tastes the same is an abomination.
Most grocery stores have a "fresh" bread section where they're at least giving it the final bake in the store. Some grocery stores have quite competent bread selection.
Yes but it's all squishy. Bread is not supposed to have that texture, ever. I can only guess that most Americans object to actually having to chew their food.
The form of iron "supplementation" universally added to flour in the US is little more than that. There's some theories that this impacts gut bacteria, particularly the ones associated with B-vitamin.
Iron shavings -> bad bacteria -> poor Vitamin B status -> intestinal lining damage -> celiac, allergies and autoimmune
TLDR; bread in the US makes people sick, not in Europe
This seems to be a common thread throughout history. It's hard to distinguish old traditions from very old traditions from ancient ones, so they all become a blurred jumble, and the traditions just are whatever they are at any given time.
Tradition is anything your grandparents did that you also do. Few people remember their great-grandparents well enough to know if they also did something, (with modern medicine this is somewhat more likely, but still not common) and thus few have any clue if it is something their grandparents started or not.
Unless of course it was written down. Some religions have things written down as of a few thousand years ago. Just looking at them though we can see plenty of examples of things written down being ignored for a while and then some reformer comes and revives the tradition. Anything not written down is questionable in ability to survive for long.
Even bread, I suspect, is probably a lot different than we realize. There is a wide range in what that can cover, with many of the types of bread that last longer being popular for their longevity in older times.
And that doesn't even get into the drastic shift in diet that came from rationing times. There are a lot of parts of the animal that we used to directly eat.