I’ve just finished listening to the Modernist BreadCrumbs Podcast. Some of the guests often had interesting things to say.
Flour power: why every revolution begins with a piece of bread in Prospect magazine also occupied me for a couple of minutes. I suppose it is a marker of the new grooviness of bread that the piece even exists, but does it have to peddle quite so many alternative facts?
- No need to quote a pundit’s opinions when experts have actually studied food prices and social unrest.
- What does “A bowl of gruel for one becomes dinner for six out of thin air.” actually mean?
- The Big Mac index is not about “basic economic theory”; it is about the relative value of currencies, as The Economist helpfully tells us.
- "[S]omething abysmal-sounding about mixing yesterday’s stale crusts with today’s fresh ’wheaten dow’” would not, I fancy, seem at all abysmal to the many bakers (mostly German in origin) who regularly add stale bread (altes) to their dough and make perfectly fine loaves that actually depend on the stale bread for their flavour.
- It is not “a historical fact that Victorian millers’ habits of adding alum to the flour gave children rickets.” ((Was it even the millers, rather than the bakers?)) It is a historical fact that the great proto-epidemiologist John Snow hypothesised that this might be the case, but he offered nothing like convincing evidence, which yet might be obtained from the Victorian bones.
As an antidote to all my naysaying, treat yourself to Paul Levy’s Let them eat bread in the Times Literary Supplement, a lovely review of several books, including Modernist Bread, my point of departure for this little rant.