WHOLEMEAL AND OTHER BREAD • [To the Editor of the
SPECTATOR.] SIR,—One of my English friends has been so kind as to send me a copy of your issue of January 17th, in which, under the caption " The New Bread " you in a very serious and determined and uninformed manner throw your influence behind the campaign now on in your country to change the demand from white bread to wholemeal bread. - We are certainly not presuming at American Institute of Baking to cross the Atlantic to enter the campaign--we are still engaged in presenting modern, scientific facts to a lessening but still vociferous group of whole wheat bread advocates in our own country. We do, however, have some pity for our colleagues in England whom you classify as " naive and optimistic men of science," and we would be false to the cloth if we allowed some of your statements about scientists to stand unchallenged.
You say, for instance, " over ten years ago scientists dis- covered that wholemeal bread was much superior to ordinary white bread." What scientists made this amazing discovery ? And, having made it, are we to assume that they immediately closed their laboratories and sealed forever the book of knowledge ? Surely you must know that scientists have been doing more work in the field of nutrition during the past decade than ever before, mad that the data they arc accumulating is never dry from the press before some new discovery reveals its errors. No modern seientilit claims ' superiority for whole wheat bread over the kind of bread which is now being generally made, at least in our bakeries.. Nor does any dietitian, whose mind is in the least responsive to the facts of modern science, advance the theory that any single food should be a complete food. If he did, he would- be far more concerned over the fact that butter is but one• of the elements removed from whole milk than he is over the fact that white flour does not contain the bran of the wheat.. It is quite as foolish to expect bread to be a complete food as it is to look for completeness in nutritional value in butter, or spinach, or potatoes, or apples, or cabbage or meat, or in other of the unlimited list of splendid foods, no one of which: is anything like a complete food and every one of which is far less satisfactory as the only article of food in the diet than white bread, which to you spells disaster to the race.—I 1135 Fullerton Avenue, Chicago.
Previous page
