French effort to save good bread is going down pan, says historian

FRANCE is losing the battle to save good bread, the historian considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject has warned.

American Steven L Kaplan, who was decorated by France for his services to bread, says government efforts to begin a baking renaissance have failed to topple the tasteless white baguette throughout most of the country.

Mr Kaplan added that France was facing a “perfect storm” of factors – from globalisation to complacency – that have blunted the ability of bakers and consumers to care about or even recognise a top quality loaf.

He has long warned of slipping standards, dating the decline in quality to the Twenties transition from slow bread making with a sourdough base to a quick process using yeast. Mechanisation in the Sixties also contributed.

Bread consumption in France has fallen from 600g per person in the late 1880s to just 80g today.

There was hope in 1993, when the French government issued a decree to create a special label called “the bread of French tradition”, made with just flour, salt, water and leavening and no additives or freezing.

“But my hopes have been shattered,” lamented Mr Kaplan, who this week released a book called Pour le Pain.

He says instead of a widespread rise in top-quality bread, the government decree only resulted in a “niche renaissance” among elite bakers, some of whose loaves are “up there with a Cheval Blanc or Chateau Latour wine”.

“That’s great for people in the bourgeois bohemian districts of Paris but it just hasn’t touched the vast majority; among France’s 29,000 so-called “conventional boulangers”, only 10 per cent at best are interested in such things,” he said.”

One “scary” sign of the decline, Mr

Kaplan added, was France’s absence from the podium at this month’s bakery world cup in Paris, where the winners were China, Japan and Denmark.

‘I don’t think France will collapse if bread declines but it’s an impoverishing cultural experience to lose touch with something that was so closely linked to French identity and consciousness,” he said.