Over the last decade I have visited about 30 countries. I always note the bakeries, not just the markets and supermarkets. Are they bustling (sign of cash)? Are people happy (sign of cohesion)? Are there queues or genial mayhem (sign of the type of social order)? What is the product range (depth/confidence of culture)? Is it cooked on-site (big Western companies aren't here yet)? I am sure you, too, have your equivalent questions. We are not talking science here, but impressions.
One of the most brilliant lectures I have ever heard was by an anthropologist describing the world's different flatbreads, the simple loaves one gets in real peasant or nomadic societies. It is ironic that while real peasant food cultures are being consigned to history, the value of simple foods like bread is now dawning.
Malta, for instance, a country at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, has a cuisine shrouded by British colonialism. But the local bread is divine and, since independence, a new, more confident cuisine is returning to its Mediterranean roots (while applying for EU membership).
Bread always tells a story. Bread is the simplest of food, yet to deliver a great product requires skill. In northern Russia a few years back, working for the World Health Organisation on a public health summer school in a former Soviet holiday camp, we had pretty drab food, but the bread was quite good. Hope indeed.
Britain I currently judge to be bread schizophrenic. We gave the world Chorleywood bread, the recipe for most mass, tasteless spongy loaves. Developed to cut baking plant costs, the mixture is whipped, not risen, and the yeast is added for taste. A bakery worker taught me 25 years ago that the product is really better suited to clean shoes with (try it!). Yet alongside this masterpiece, we also have some superb breads. In my mother's Northamptonshire village, a small bakery struggles against the odds but the products are to die for. In Wandsworth, two former bankers have taken over a bakery and produce great bread.
In Albania, I asked our guide, a teacher who earned more from tourism than teaching, about the food. He soberly told me that of the three million population, nearly half a million live abroad. Our agriculture is dying, he said. Young people go abroad. Germans and Greeks complain of Albanian criminal rackets  are they fall-out from the collapse of Communism?
But in my view, in the long term, if a culture has the confidence to produce products like good, simple breads, it will right itself.
Two weeks ago, the World Health Organisation published its immense global study into the burden of disease. It has calculated the huge financial and social cost of preventable diseases such as cancers and heart disease.
Although pharmaceutical companies are spinning' that drugs can control coronaries, the public health evidence is that dietary prevention is best. Eat healthily now and we prevent problems that could cost a fortune later.
Bread that is so good that you don't want to eat it covered with fats or jam ought to be our cultural goal. Bread, not drugs! Sounds like a Home Office slogan, but it ought to be DEFRA's food policy.
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One of the most brilliant lectures I have ever heard was by an anthropologist describing the world's different flatbreads, the simple loaves one gets in real peasant or nomadic societies. It is ironic that while real peasant food cultures are being consigned to history, the value of simple foods like bread is now dawning.
Malta, for instance, a country at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, has a cuisine shrouded by British colonialism. But the local bread is divine and, since independence, a new, more confident cuisine is returning to its Mediterranean roots (while applying for EU membership).
Bread always tells a story. Bread is the simplest of food, yet to deliver a great product requires skill. In northern Russia a few years back, working for the World Health Organisation on a public health summer school in a former Soviet holiday camp, we had pretty drab food, but the bread was quite good. Hope indeed.
Britain I currently judge to be bread schizophrenic. We gave the world Chorleywood bread, the recipe for most mass, tasteless spongy loaves. Developed to cut baking plant costs, the mixture is whipped, not risen, and the yeast is added for taste. A bakery worker taught me 25 years ago that the product is really better suited to clean shoes with (try it!). Yet alongside this masterpiece, we also have some superb breads. In my mother's Northamptonshire village, a small bakery struggles against the odds but the products are to die for. In Wandsworth, two former bankers have taken over a bakery and produce great bread.
In Albania, I asked our guide, a teacher who earned more from tourism than teaching, about the food. He soberly told me that of the three million population, nearly half a million live abroad. Our agriculture is dying, he said. Young people go abroad. Germans and Greeks complain of Albanian criminal rackets  are they fall-out from the collapse of Communism?
But in my view, in the long term, if a culture has the confidence to produce products like good, simple breads, it will right itself.
Two weeks ago, the World Health Organisation published its immense global study into the burden of disease. It has calculated the huge financial and social cost of preventable diseases such as cancers and heart disease.
Although pharmaceutical companies are spinning' that drugs can control coronaries, the public health evidence is that dietary prevention is best. Eat healthily now and we prevent problems that could cost a fortune later.
Bread that is so good that you don't want to eat it covered with fats or jam ought to be our cultural goal. Bread, not drugs! Sounds like a Home Office slogan, but it ought to be DEFRA's food policy.
{{COMMENT - GUEST }}
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