Bread lament

I promised rants, so here's one:

Why is the typical American bread so very boring, so lacking in color and structure and personality? Why are most of the loaves on our supermarket shelves loaded with additives? How could something as wonderful as bread come to this?

Bread, after all, is the ancient "staff of life." When properly made, it provides complex carbohydrates, B vitamins, and fiber. Sadly, most American bread delivers nothing but empty calories. Staring at my supermarket shelves, I want to scream. But I don't. I just turn on my heels and go shopping someplace else, where quality is the raison d'etre.

Fortunately -- VERY fortunately -- I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where food artisans are plentiful, so I have several fantastic bakeries within a few miles of my home. The "real bread" movement is alive and well in other parts of the country, too, providing people with chewy, thick-crusted bread, fermented with high-quality natural yeast, sometimes using whole grain flours, sometimes studded with rosemary or olives or garlic. In short, bread as it was meant to be.

Check out your local options. Maybe there's a baker in town who takes pride in her products, who uses traditional techniques and top-notch ingredients. If she makes a crusty loaf of whole-grain wheat or rye bread, you're in luck. If she doesn't, ask her to start and promise to become her best customer.

Go on, speak up. Demand excellence. It's a revolutionary act in our bleached out, polluted, over-processed culture when we take a stand for what is authentic, pure, and simple.