Kinds of Bread and Health Aspects

Although many grains have contributed to a variety of breads, wheat has been pre-eminent. Its gluten content ensures a lighter, more appetizing texture. With few exceptions, a light and refined loaf has been viewed as a better loaf. Wherever a distinction has been drawn between bread for the rich and bread for the poor, the poor get the heavier, browner loaf. This preference has long been remarked as peculiarly English, dating back to the Middle Ages; but which then wreaked havoc on the wholesomeness of the urban diet in the heroic phase of the Industrial Revolution. But it was not only an English phenomenon. Seventeenth-century Parisians plumped in large numbers for the softer doughed, so-called Queen’s bread (raised with yeast, with a tenderer crust). And by way of analogy, dietary nirvana for the Japanese was a diet of white rice (ignoring the fact it might provoke beri beri).