Me; The fact that whole wheat flour is more expensive than bleached white flour is elitist bullshit.
Some poor person in the baking aisle of Hy Vee “What?”
My husband; oh no
Me; WELL IT ALL STARTS WITH THE DOMESTICATION OF GRAIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE CLASS SYSTEM
Okay kids buckle in you asked for it.
White bread, for a very long time, was something that only the wealthy could enjoy regularly since white flour takes considerably more time and effort to produce than whole grain flour. You have to grind it extra fine, sift it, ect. Therefore, it has historically been more expensive, and still should be because it takes more steps to produce.
HOWEVER, since it was something that was harder to produce, serving white bread was a ‘special occasions’ sort of thing, which led to ‘rich people showing off how rich they were by serving it regularly’. Poorer people, meanwhile, got their regular whole wheat flour, which incidentally is better for you but we didn’t know that at the time.
(Also, whole wheat tastes better, white bread is just bland. Whole wheat bread tastes sort of nutty and delicious.)
So for the vast majority of time this was how things were. Until modern industrialization made producing white flour on a large scale easier, and all of a sudden you had white bread that ordinary folk could afford!!! So of course it is hugely popular immediately amongst the middle and lower classes. Enter the age of Wonder Bread, where you can buy your bread pre-made and sliced!!! White bread with no labor from you, cheap enough for ordinary folk to afford!
So of course, when everyone can have white bread, the upper classes now have to find a way to be Better again. This dovetailed nicely with the discovery that, hang on, whole grains are better for us than bleached white flour, and the rising craze among the upper classes for fitness (Because being soft and plump is no longer something that only the rich can achieve, so of course now being slim and toned is more desirable)
Enter the rise of the popularity of whole wheat sprouted grain artisanal bread for $10 a fuckin loaf, and the fact that if you want to buy 5 pounds of whole wheat flour, that logically should be cheaper as it still takes less effort to produce, you’re going to have to pay about a dollar or two more than if you buy the same amount of bleached white flour.
And don’t give me shit about supply and demand, because whole wheat and white flour are made from the same exact thing, but one just has more steps involved in production. You’d think companies would be thrilled about this, but nah, they know that upper class people feel More Important Than The Peasants when they pay extra for their whole wheat flour so here I am, a humble middle class drone who wants to make her own whole wheat bread because it is tastier and better for you, paying $5.17 a bag for whole wheat flour when white flour is $3.48
It’s classist bullshit.
In Victorian era (do I love some silly Victorians, ha), the fashion for white bread and its more or less general availability came with an interesting side effect: with their… love for substitutes, bakers pretty much had no choice but to replace flour with substances with no nutritional value if not harmful. It was easier on the health of the richer, as their diet had more variety, but very harmful for the people for whom bread was the main source of calories.
Yep. The number of bakers cutting their white flour with plaster dust, chalk, alum, or similar was absolutely stunning.
It led, eventually, to the establishment of trading standards legislation and the appointment of inspectors who could sample and test food products like flour and level heavy punishment on people selling products not up to standard.
The British Sale of Food and Drugs act was the ancestor of the United States’ modern FDA.
Haven’t bread sigils been a thing since Roman times or something, to prevent bread from being cut with bad shit, or from bad flour being used?
Yep the romans had laws about it, but that whole legal system kinda crumbled with the empire.
You and I can never go grocery shopping. It’d turn into an episode of Good Eats meets Adam Ruins Everything but with us.
This just makes me want to go to a Whole Foods store with you TBH
I want to watch and munch popcorn.
Episode 2 is me finding the spice aisle and going on a three hour rant about the total discrepancy between the prices paid to the producers of spices and the prices paid by the end consumer, because it isn’t 1640 anymore we can ship a lobster from Maine to Tokyo in half a day there is no reason my spice merchants should be paying the Badanese women who own the trees and actually produce the spice a few dollars a pound and then turning around and charging me an arm and a pint of blood for a handful of whole nutmegs.
The second half of the episode is me showing you how to make a recipes from the 1640s in a microwave, but only after an educational segue from the part of the world the spice comes from and how the locals use it.
Pearls are clutched as it is revealed that authentic Italian blends should not contain garlic, as garlic use in China predates it’s existence as a wild herb in Italy by some 6000 years. Your meatballs are a lie but that’s okay, here’s how to make them anyway.
Yo @systlin and @thebibliosphere do either of you happen to know why all of a sudden so many people are gluten intolerant? Like, what happened?? What’s going on??? Why is this happening to us??
(Speaking as a person who has gluten intolerance, I love bread so much that it hurts, and I gave it up (along with everything else that has gluten in it, which is a whole lot of stuff tbh) for six whole months, but then I just completely snapped and went back to eating whatever I want.)
It’s not so much that more people are ‘suddenly’ gluten intolerant as ‘we’ve figured out what causes the thing and are diagnosing it accurately now rather than shrugging and saying ‘guess demons cursed you to suffer when eating’’
And a lot of people currently avoiding gluten out of some idea that it’s bad for them even thought they do not have celiac disease or gluten intolerance, because gluten free is the current ‘low fat’ diet fad.
Though I suppose it DOES make gluten free foods more available for people who DO legitimately need to avoid it, but seriously, people, unless you actually have celiac or gluten intolerance you can eat some bread.
Due to the prevalence of celiac in my family we’ve had a lot of discussions about how many more people are getting diagnosed with it in these last few years. I think at least some of it has to do with how many more people with the genetic predisposition for it are growing up and having kids of their own- my mum was ill throughout most of her childhood before anyone figured out why and, especially before mainstream vaccinations for kids, a disease like measles would easily wipe out the kids already suffering from a compromised immune system.
Studies into how our gut fauna aids digestion of gluten and how those particular types of bacteria are potentially passed on through generations convinced my brother that the current rise is due to the changes made to diet in the last century along with greater survival rates of people with the condition and more awareness for people with less severe types of gluten intolerance to be diagnosed.
Still, I’m by no means an expert on any of this and for all I know the ideas have already been debunked and I just haven’t been looking in the right places. Please correct me if this is the case.
The fad dieters don’t annoy anyone in my family too much since while at times we haven’t been taken as seriously, at least it’s far easier to find decent food in regular shops that we can afford and actually eat. yeah, it’s a horrible idea for most people to cut such a large and important part out of their diet but we certainly aren’t complaining about the rich people who’ll probably move onto the next new thing in a couple of months when they realize it isn’t helping them.
Very probable. In a world where the main form of caloric intake was bread and there was no vaccination to protect people with weaker immune systems, people with celiac disease likely died far younger. Now, of course, we can realize what’s wrong and say ‘yeah no, just avoid gluten, get vaccinated and have regular checkups, and you can live a long and happy life.’
But yeah. If nothing else, the gluten free fad has put gluten free food in a much more obtainable position, so that people who actually need it can get it.
I can bore people about the colorful history of celiac disease forever! but the BEST takeaway Fact is this:
In the 1940s, the connection between celiac disease and gluten was discovered by the Dutch physician Willem Dicke, who oversaw a hospital ward of children with celiac disease. The mortality rate of these children was over 35%, until –
Oh! Sorry! Was that shocking or something? Yes. Over thirty five percent of children would die. The children were taken from their parents and put in the hospital because they could not grow. They were malnourished, their brains couldn’t develop, they were weak and disabled and cognitively impaired – and over a third of them were expected to die. Heartbreakingly and in pain. That’s celiac disease, you know, that’s just what it does…
Is that surprising? You know what’s funny – in the Victorian era bananas were marketed as the first superfood, because babies fed on banana seemed to be protected from death by celiac disease. Desperate Victorian parents in Europe would scour the cities for the priceless and rare banana, in the hopes of protecting – or saving – their children from this ghostly and horrific disease. This scourge, this wasting illness that took your bright-eyed chubby cheerful nursling and turned them dull-eyed and listless, screaming when touched, their hair falling out, failing to thrive and all your dreams failing with them. So that’s partly why bananas had such a marketing boom! To this day, people are obsessed with giving bananas and banana-flavoured things to babies, a hangover from a time when people thought they could prevent a deadly and incurable disease! Fun fact. Fun fact.
Anyway, more than a third of little kids with celiac disease were expected to die and the disease was incurable – a life sentence. Back to Dr Dicke, a Dutchman in the 1940s in the Netherlands; you can see where this is going.
Dr Dicke stayed with his ward when the Nazis invaded and began the Hongerwinter, the Hunger Winter, the Dutch famine of 1944. This was very hard for the medical staff, who fed the sick children on the water that they had boiled tulip bulbs in, and so on. But Dr Dicke noticed that his celiac ward, while starving to death and being lightly poisoned by tulips, were also cheering up a bit. The other kids were dying as normal, but the celiac mortality rate went from 35% to zero. “Weird,” said Dr Dicke, who was an admirable scientist despite the stress of looking after dying babies in a starving Nazi-occupied city.
Then the Nazis agreed to let the Canadians air-drop in some food. Naturally, bread was an obvious choice. The Canadians dropped bread on Amsterdam. People grabbed the bread, and some of it made its way to the Hospital for Sick Children, because people are kind. And Dr Dicke took some of the precious life-saving morsels and went straight to his sickest kids, his celiac kids. He was being kind.
aaaaaand they went right back to dying.
“Fuck me!” Said Dr Dicke, “I have solved the medical mystery of a disease that has plagued Western civilisation since the ancient Greeks.”
And just like that, it really was just like that, celiac disease stopped being a death sentence for little weanling babies.
Fun fact!
I mean, I know it’s obvious that modern culture has mindlessly forgotten the events of WW2, but fun fact: we don’t shove bread-and-milk down the necks of three month old babies anymore AND WE KNOW BETTER NOW, and all those babies who would have died from it got to grow up, and got to pass that critical stage of growth where you die from malnourishment.
they got to grow up into a generation that laughs at the accessibility and availability of gluten free food.
Fun fact!
i mean, going back to @thebibliosphere‘s point, “traditional” European foods are heavily influenced by foods introduced in the 15th and 16th centuries, largely because by that point people were starting to bounce back from the Plague and were finding out that European farming was shitty and they couldn’t produce enough food to feed everyone. When maize and potatoes made it to the Old World people lauded them as the saviors of Europe because they had so much caloric value and were so easily grown. Shits like tomatoes didn’t reach the height of their prominence until the 19th century, partly because people thought they were poisonous.
(btw: if ya wanna learn more about culinary history, I strongly recommend Consider the Fork. Really good book!!)
Well, I know what book I’m asking for for Christmas! Thanks for all that, I wad unaware of a few of those things 🙂
Grocery Shopping With Me is an Experience
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