Most of us are divorced from reality

SOMETIMES we consumers can feel as confused as a homing pigeon with a helmet full of electro-magnets clamped to its head. That is what I was thinking this week as one of the UK’s leading experimental bakers – a man working on a vast commercial scale – told me that some bread sold as “sourdough” in our major supermarkets is actually the real deal, i.e. made from a naturally-fermented dough consisting of nothing but flour and water.

He said it because some stuff on the market is a kind of cheat that requires tricks of the baking trade to make it look and taste like it’s the real thing.

“Some commercial loaves are authentic,” the man told me. “We have huge vats of industrial ‘starter’ which we keep at extremely precise temperatures – and we make real sourdough for at least one of the major chains. However, I can’t tell you more, because it is a tightly-held commercial secret.”

“Food labelling is complicated,” he added. “For example, no one in Britain has really been able to buy a ‘free-range’ egg for months, because all the chickens have been locked indoors thanks to avian flu. But eggboxes still say ‘free range’.”

Looking into this later, I stumbled across the surprising fact that – while more than 70% of British consumers are willing to pay extra for so-called ‘free-range’ eggs – only a paltry 3.5% are willing to shell out on free-range chicken meat. Why the difference? Looked at in one way, it means we are 20 times more likely to feel concern for a creature that hasn’t yet been born than we are for a real living, breathing bird.

What lesson do I take away from all this? Only one. It is the idea that most of us are pretty much divorced from reality when it comes to the very stuff which fuels our lives.

I don’t think it’s ever been done, but a university research department ought to look into the matter. Because I reckon they’d come up with some statistic like: 99% of consumers know less than 1% of the facts, figures and realities relating to the substances which they are happy to put in their mouths.

The more I write about food, the more alarming this vast void in our knowledge becomes. Imagine a scenario in which you are far from home – in a rainforest, for example – and a local farmer tries to tempt you with a strange edible object.

“It is delicious and good for you,” he says.

I wonder how many of us would have a taste, right there and then? My bet is most Brits would be worried the item was unsafe or unclean.

Yet few of us ever question the basic items we buy in supermarkets, no matter how crammed full of weird and not-so-wonderful chemicals ingredients they happen to be.

We are more interested in exotic shampoo formulas than we are in the contents of something like bread – even though it is a foodstuff which we expect our internal organs to deal with on a daily basis. Shampoo adverts are forever banging on about some wonder ingredient (sea-buckthorn and tamanu oil are two I’ve seen recently), but the industrial baker assumes, probably rightly, that most of us are not interested in the story of the flour which creates our daily bread.

People marketing skin-carelotions happily make claims about the benefits of something like “rich Shea butter” – while a West Country dairy farmer would be forgiven for thinking most consumers have no interest in the type of grass that helps create the butter they actually eat.

On a farm walk in the Cotswolds this week I watched as a regenerative farming expert showed a group of commercial bakers several types of wheat. He explained how a highly productive modern variety in one of his fields required seven to nine passes with farm machinery, along with vast quantities of artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and so on. The neighbouring field had been sown with heritage varieties that required just two passes and no additional chemicals or fertilisers.

Yes, the yield of the modern stuff was going to be much higher but, to counter that, the old-fashioned strains had cost the farmer far less to grow. Moreover, the old style cereals are deep rooting, meaning they are far more resilient when it comes to drought, flood or any other kind of weather – which could be vital if climate change really does wreak more and more havoc.

Added to that, they can produce a deeper flavour and be more nutritious – containing many more of the trace elements our bodies need.

And, because of the non-intensive way these cereals are grown, the soil beneath them locks away considerably more carbon – which is, of course, a necessity when fighting climate change.

The bakers and the other industry experts were impressed. But they asked: “If we start using these old styles of wheat, how do we tell our customers this fascinating story? And will they be interested?”

The answers are in your hands, dear readers. For it is we consumers who will ultimately decide upon such matters.

And, from what I am learning, the future food security of this nation is at present hanging by some fairly slender threads.

Few of us ever question the basic items we buy in supermarkets