Soft white bread is a con – no matter what the boffins do to it

It’s being heralded as a culinary breakthrough. Scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales reckon that within two years they will have created a soft white loaf with all the nutrition of wholemeal. So you can get that floaty texture, that melting mouth-feel in a cheese and ham sandwich, or that thin crispness when toasted and buttered, bursting with umami when spread with Vegemite.

“We are trying to produce a loaf that mimics white bread, that has the softness, the long shelf life and reduces costs,” said one of the project researchers recently, Dr Amanda Lloyd. Part of the nutritional value will come from legumes and oats. Joy all round, bakers of the world high-fiving, white-loaf lovers cracking open the champagne.

Except it’s all dangerous nonsense. It’s like encouraging someone to have a snake bite because you’re brandishing the antidote. Because of the fallacy, the myth, the lie, perpetuated by big baking giants over decades, that soft white bread is actually bread. Which it isn’t.

I’ve been lucky enough to have enrolled on two particular bread-making courses that stuck in my memory. One was with Raymond Blanc, the other Richard Bertinet. Mr Blanc started the day at his restaurant in Oxfordshire by telling us, straight out, that the typical supermarket soft white loaf was not bread. He brandished a slice and then rolled it up in his hands so that it became a small ball of gum-like substance.

“Which of you honestly wants that in your stomach?” he asked. And then a few years later Richard Bertinet, at his cookery school in Bath, broke a baguette in front of us. “When you hear the noise of bread breaking, the crack of the crust, your mouth starts to salivate, you produce the liquid that will help your body digest.” I’d never realised that the sound of bread was also important. You can’t do that with a white-sliced loaf.

When a well-meaning boffin finds they can inject a natural ingredient into something bad ... you should be worried, not rejoicing.

As Chris van Tulleken writes in his brilliant book Ultra-Processed People, aside from what’s in – or not in – that loaf, the softness is a problem: “The bread disintegrates into a bolus of slime that is easily manipulated down the throat.” The lack of chewing, he writes, explains why about a third of 12-year-olds have an overbite, “a jaw that’s too small for their face”. The lack of jaw work required in consuming such items as ultra-processed white bread, he says, “is why so many children today need orthodontic work”.

What van Tulleken calls “pre-chewed” food is so easily absorbed that it is not slowly digested along the length of the intestine, which means, he says, “it doesn’t reach parts of the gut that send the ‘stop eating’ signal to the brain”.

And there’s what’s in the bread, of course, a terrifying set of additives; those e-numbers, those things that if you don’t have them in your kitchen cupboards then commonsense dictates that you shouldn’t put them in your mouth. Cheap bread is the triumph of the big manufacturers. They trace their endeavours to the moment in 1961 when the Chorleywood boffins created “bread” with high-speed mixing and fast-working yeasts. Then in went stuff to make it seem like bread and to make it last for days before, as you know, it, suddenly, weirdly, becomes a blue and dusty mould bomb.

When this edible substance called bread is sold so cheaply it makes the case for sourdough tough, at first glance. But then sourdough is bread – nothing more than water, salt, wild yeast and dough – the eating of which is an entirely elevated, satisfying and nourishing experience and while it may cost more you’ll eat less of it. And it won’t cause obesity, diabetes and cancer.

When a well-meaning boffin finds they can inject a natural ingredient into something bad, to add some good to the evil, you should be worried, not rejoicing.

It’s nothing more than a con to persuade people who are suckers to the white loaf and who have heard those nasty rumours that all is not good. The big boys, worried at the constant noise against their loaves on TV cooking shows, in award-winning books and seeing the growth of independent bakeries, are fighting back.

But ultra-processed bread, if consumed without moderation and especially in tandem with a diet of other ultra-processed foods, is not good for you. And if it’s had some nutritional nuts and veg whizzed up to a degree that you can’t notice them when injected into that bread, it’s still not good for you.

The Telegraph, London