Have your cake and eat it

Ihave an aunt who says if she eats wheat she’ll die. Actually die. Well, until she’s offered one of my mum’s mince pies at Christmas, or a slice of triple-layered, ganache-smothered Ridyard chocolate cake, and then she manages to make an exception. Even Death understands that sometimes a girl needs cake.

But when did wheat start getting such a bad rap? Poor old wheat: there it was minding its own business, feeding the world, and suddenly it’s the devil’s work.

Yes, I understand a very small number of people are exceedingly allergic to wheat, and they have my huge sympathy – it’s worse than jail: a life sentence without cake! But as for the rest of us, forgoing gluten and bypassing cereals seems to be the new normal.

A woman I vaguely know, a disciple of the paleo diet, has banned all wheat products from her house (along with dairy and sugar, so there’s definitely no cake). When her kids go to parties, she sends “special” food with them with strict instructions that they may touch nothing else.

Wheat is toxic, she says, akin to giving children cigarettes.

The other day a note was slipped under her bedroom door. “Please can we eat bread, Mummy?” it said plaintively.

She laughed, but the answer is still no.

Imagine though: her children have never even had a sandwich. Frankly the UN should send in troops.

An acupuncturist I was once seeing about my allergies – pollen, dogs – told me I should cut out wheat too.

Now, I have been allergy checked by an actual medical doctor, and I know I’m not allergic to wheat. I told her so, to which she replied that the wheat we eat now is not the same as the wheat our grandparents ate: it is poison.

So I gave it up for an entire … day.

Yes, I lasted until dinner, when there was soup and a crusty loaf.

And maybe that’s the problem: not the wheat (unless you are truly allergic) but the form in which we eat it. A loaf of “proper” bakers bread will contain yeast, flour, salt, sugar and oil – five basic ingredients. It’s the bread our grandparents knew.

However, my shop-bought “batch” loaf lists 15 ingredients.

Perhaps then we should adopt our grandparents’ most sensible dietary habit: everything in moderation. And that includes cake.