The little holes in your bread are telling you something

124 20 15 Share My new book, Trade World, is out NOW. In an effort to try to nudge you into buying a copy, here is a little essay featuring one of the most fascinating, obscure stories from the Trade World. And, as an added incentive, if you buy a copy in the next few days and email me at preorder@edmundconway. com attaching a proof of purchase, I will send you an exclusive essay with even more bonus material! The next time you eat a sandwich, one of those triangular ones you get from a supermarket or Pret, or put some sliced bread into your toaster, pause for a moment and take a close look at the bread. On the surface of it you will see hundreds of little holes - cells, as bakers sometimes call them. I suspect you’ve never paid them all that much attention. That was until I discovered that those cells are a clue to one of the most fascinating stories in postwar history. For the little holes in British sliced white bread - not to mention bread in everywhere from South Africa to Australia (though not America or Singapore - as we’ll get to in a moment) are the surface manifestation of an extraordinary shift in the way bread was made. It is thanks to this shift that, unbeknownst to most of the people consuming it, sliced bread in Britain is actually made in a starkly different way to how bread used to be made for thousands of years. Indeed, , British bread is a markedly different foodstuff to bread elsewhere; some purists would go so far as arguing that it isn’t actually bread. But this isn’t just about taste. This is about a little-known revolution in food that, grandiose as this will probably sound, represented one of the most significant industrial strategy interventions in modern British history. This bread revolution changed the entire equation of this country’s food chain, transforming farming throughout the nation in the process. So, yes, this is a very big deal. But, this being bread - plain, simple sandwich bread - few are even aware of what has become known as the Chorleywood Bread Process. Even fewer know about its backstory, a backstory that begins, you’ve guessed it, in the Trade World. There are a few straightforward reasons I chose bread as one of the three products whose story we follow in my new book: for one thing, if you understand the origins of bread you start to understand the very beginnings of trade - as grain was traded around the earliest civilisations in the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia.