Читать книгу Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own - Andrew Whitley - Страница 13

It is not just a question of potential physical discomfort (or worse). As the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the late 1990s demonstrated, the way food is produced is of growing concern to many people – from the biological integrity of seeds, through farmers’ rights and animal welfare, to the impact on the physical and social environment. In other words, people may make moral judgments about provenance and production methods, even if these appear to have only a marginal bearing on the nature of the actual food they ingest.

For the food enzyme industry, all of nature is a chemistry set. No organisms are too exotic or repulsive to be investigated for possible active agents. As can be seen in the table above, the dough that goes into a loaf of standard factory bread may contain the strangest stuff – a reducing agent derived from animal hair or feathers, or enzymes from the pancreas of a pig. It may come as something of a shock to a Muslim or a Jew or a vegetarian that their daily bread is produced using animal by-products. It is possible that little or nothing of the original substance survives the baking process. But that isn’t the point. Bread has been made using an ingredient or process that some people find offensive. If you don’t know what’s gone into your bread – in the fullest sense of those words – how can you exercise any meaningful choice over whether to eat it or not?

‘Choice’, of course, is the mantra intoned by private business to promote product proliferation and by government to justify the intrusion of free-market economics into social provision. It is ironic therefore, that in their reluctance to declare what really goes into bread industrial bakers inhibit the exercise of informed choice and the regulatory authorities connive with a labelling regime that is geared more to commercial convenience than to true transparency.