Bread

For years I bought bread in a local bakery or at the bread counter of Balduccis or Citronella in NYC. And I made bread with my own two little hands. Bread requires flour, water, yeast, salt and maybe a pinch of sugar to start the yeast feasting. I have made flat breads, crackers, english muffins, slicing loafs, artisanal pain de levain and bread where I have coaxed wild yeast to grow in my own kitchen. I like bread and I never had problems finding bread in NYC. There was a darling little whole grain loaf at Citronella that they would slice up and it was wonderful on sandwiches and it was not huge so it was a good size for a two person household. And it toasted up so warm and crunchy that it really made you appreciate the handmade artisanal butter in the European style that you put on it. Yum.
I usually buy bread at the health food store; I like brown bread, whole grain bread, bread that has fiber in it. Well, actually, I usually buy most everything at the health food store. But we had to buy grocery store things and so we popped off to an actual grocery store to shop and I wanted to have a sandwich for lunch so I went to the bread aisle.
Now, I was actually prepared to not want to buy 98% of the bread in the bread aisle. But it's granola tofu fuckin' California here, we invented health food, you think you could get a whole wheat loaf of sandwich bread.
I actually looked at the ingredient lists of the bread, because I had no clue about the brands. This was actually harder than it sounds because I didn't have my reading glasses on. I don't really wander around with my reading glasses on, because they distort everything far away and so I tend to fall down if I just wear them. And I'm too vain to carry them around. So it's often hard for me to read menus in dark restaurants or ingredient items or fine print. However I persevered and found out something horrifying and shocking. In every loaf the second ingredient was high-fructose corn syrup.

Which means it is not bread.

Which means that diabetics should not be in the same room with it.

People think they are being "good" when buying these ridiculous "whole wheat" products that have absolutely no nutritional value. This is NOT BREAD. Bread does not contain CORN SYRUP. In my "Baking with Julia" bread bible book there is no entry in the index for corn syrup. Corn Syrup is something that mega-agri-business invented so that coca cola didn't need to have expensive sugar in it, it could have inexpensive corn syrup. CORN SYRUP is evil!!!!
And that is NOT bread!

So fear gripped me, what if I had been eating corn-syrup-fake-bread all this time. I had never checked the ingredient lists at the health food store! What if, like Canola Oil, it was all a crock o' shite, and we had been conned into thinking this was a better choice that we were willing to pay 2 dollars more for?
The next time I went to Whole Paycheck I checked the bread ingredients. We are safe. No corn syrup. In fact, often no sugar and when it is present it is like the last ingredient, which is where it should be. I was really worried that I was going to have to bake bread on a regular basis, which is one thing when you are unemployed, but another when you are employed.

Read the ingredients!