Jeff, kneading the dough, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from erica_marshall's photostream
There's a reason that dough and bread are slang words for money and it's because people used to value what their baker's produced for them. They valued the ingredients that went into the bread and the skill and time that the baker used to perform the alchemy that transformed these base ingredients into the food equivalent of gold. However during the rationing of the world war and the years following it we became increasingly reliant on industrial scale bread production. The industrial bread baking process uses refined white flour which has nearly all of it's nutrients stripped out of it by roller milling, introduces additives and fungicides to the mix to prevent mould growth and keep the bread 'fresher' (i.e. remaining soft) for longer.
There's a fantastic campaign called Real Bread which has been set up to encourage all of us to buy and eat bread made using traditional techniques from local and sustainable sources. You can read more about the campaign here; http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/ and use their bakery finder to discover where you can buy Real Bread from in your local area. Even better than buying Real Bread is making it yourself and you'll find that they've got lots of recipes which will see you baking a loaf that is not only tastier and healthier than what you can buy in the supermarket, but cheaper too!
We've already got a number of great millers and bakers signed up to sell their flours and breads through the site when we launch this Autumn so if you'd like to find out more about the site we're going to be launching click here to sign up to our mailing list.
