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.
Grocery Shopping With Me is an Experience
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