Battle Green’s organic cotton bread bag

Battle Green organic cotton bread bag is the ideal way to keep your bread loaves fresh, so you can buy plastic-free loaves at local bakeries or supermarkets. It can easily handle a large loaf or several bread rolls, and is wrapped in a recycled card ‘belly band’.

Wash on a cool setting and allow to air-dry. Made from organic cotton, so it won’t release plastic microfibers during washing.

Real Bread Campaign’s Honest Crust Act

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.

This Honest Crust Act 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 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’).

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

• Kingsmill had to remove nutritional claims, after Real Bread Campaign made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. It was claiming that its 50/50 loaf (with white flour) was meeting UK nutritional guidelines (it was using US guidelines).
• Ocado had to rename its sourdough loaf as it was ‘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 also contains palm oil (from Indonesia).

Keep fresh dough away from pets. Read up on food safety for people and pets. For tinned ingredients, rinse/remove lids (or pop ring-pulls over holes) then step on upper cans to pinch rims together, to stop wildlife getting trapped. 

Unless you have food waste bins, just bin pepper and allium scraps (onion, leeks, garlic, shallot, chives), citrus/tomato/rhubarb scraps. To avoid acids harming compost creatures.

Use a real bakery to only buy what you need. Or choose rolls in stores, rather than big loaves. If you do buy more than you need, you can freeze bread, just pop slices in the toaster straight from the freezer.

Never give leftover stale bread to garden birds or wildfowls. As well as being a choking hazard (same with pizza crusts and crackers), it can harm due to mould, salt or butter from sandwiches (that smear on feathers, affecting waterproofing and insulation). Birds need their own food in safe garden havens.