Support The Real Bread Campaigns’ Honest Crust Act!

Most supermarkets sell part-baked loaves that are shipped to be heated in ‘bread tanning salons’ and not real artisan bread.

Real bread is made with water, flour, salt and yeast (quick-breads without yeast like banana bread or gingerbread are not technically breads, they are more cakes). Obviously there are add-on flavour ingredients, but real bread does not contain chemical improvers, palm oil, milk etc.

If making bread, keep fresh dough (and salt, dried fruit, onion, garlic) away from pets. Also don’t give leftover stale/mouldy/crusty bread to garden birds or wildfowl (due to salt and fat, which can smear on feathers, affecting waterproofing/insulation).

Real bakers get up at 3am and knead the dough, and you can buy a freshly-made loaf in the early hours that is far more nutritious.

In France, bakers don’t go on holidays at the same time, ensuring everyone can visit a boulangerie on any given day, as freshly-baked bread is deemed an important part of life.

As well as supermarket bakeries not making real bread from scratch, they are not supporting local wheat farmers, they are often adding palm oil (from thousands of miles away).

And most loaves are sold in plastic packaging (more litter, and the bags also make the bread sweat). This makes bread go off quicker, and contributes to the massive amount of bread waste.

Real Bread Campaign’s Honest Crust Act

This campaign has been submitted to DEFRA, to ask that a full revision of bread and flour regulations comes into place, so that people know what they are buying. This would mean that anything sold as ‘bread’, could not use processing aids or other additives.

All loaves would need to display a full list of ingredients, including at point-of-display (say for loose rolls in supermarkets). It also must legally say if the item was baked from scratch in the last 12 hours, or just ‘baked’ in store from delivered pre-made products.

There would also be a ban on ‘wholemeal’ products that contained refined ingredients, and stricter legislation on items sold as sourdough loaves.

Keeping the real bread industry alive could support up to 75,000 meaningful and sustainable jobs (twice that of present ‘big baking industry’, if more support and transparency was used.

Recently, some big brands have had to amend their labelling, due to ‘greenwashing’ the public:

• Kingsmill had to remove their nutritional claims, after Real Bread Campaign made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. It was claiming that its 50/50 loaf (with some white flour) was meeting UK nutritional guidelines (it was using the US guidelines).
• Ocado had to rename its sourdough loaf as it was not really sourdough, more ‘sourfaux’, made with additional ingredients.
• Marks and Spencer has launched a range of five-ingredient items. But Real Bread Campaign found  the bread rolls had 11 ingredients!
• Their granary loaf sounds healthy and natural. But look at the ingredients, to find palm oil (from Indonesia) and ascorbic acid (a flour treatment agent).

Real bread is made without chemical raising agents or processing aids. It hasn’t been stripped of its soul, just to be cheaper and faster.

The industrial dough sector should come up with a more appropriate name, for the additive-laced products they churn out. Real Bread Campaign