“I find that a duck’s opinion of me is influenced by whether or not I have bread. A duck loves bread, but he does not have the capability to buy a loaf. That’s the biggest joke on the duck ever. If I worked at a convenience store, and a duck came in and stole a loaf of bread, I would let him go. I’d say, ‘Come back tomorrow, bring your friends!’ ― Mitch Hedberg
Oh squishiness definitely exists in traditional styles. It’s also the type of bread you eat the same day as it was baked, though.
In an American context yes it does: They abandoned sourdough. A good bread takes time, most of it ripening the dough, having microorganisms pre-digest the thing while producing aroma and no I’m not talking yeast, those come on top of that.
If you look at the ingredients of Germany’s top-selling Toastbrot, what you’d call sandwich bread, you see:
That’s what passes as a highly engineered industrial process bread in Germany. There’s actually nothing in there that shouldn’t be: Sodium acetate occurs naturally in bread as bacteria form acetic acid and that reacts with salt, fava bean flour is in there to mess around with consistency, crumb texture etc and it’s definitely not terribly traditional to control those things with that ingredient but it’s a native plant that we’ve eaten for millennia so its kinda hard to complain about it.
You can bake something very similar at home, the main difficulty won’t be the ingredients but replicating the factory’s rising and baking process.
I don’t disagree that American bread has a bunch of stuff (added or removed) that makes it less nutritious, but I hate the “natural is good” concept. There’s plenty of stuff made in a lab that’s healthy, and potentially healthier than naturally occurring alternatives. There’s also plenty of natural things that aren’t healthy. Things like GMOs, for example, should be promoted because they can make better use of limited resources to make proper nutrition cheaper for more people.
Natural is not synonymous with good or healthy.
I was defending traditional, not natural. For starters, modern grain is anything but natural and with “modern” I mean “even back in antiquity”.
Tradition is the sum total of successful innovations, removing autolysis from the bread making process is not a successful innovation it’s enshittification. Traditional bread can be shelf-stable for months and even years: A good sourdough bread in earthenware wiped with vinegar will not attract mold for a very long time, and crispbread I don’t think the stuff ever spoils as long as you keep it dry.
It’s possible to breed better and worse strains with GMO, it’s possible to breed better and worse strains with more established methods, in that sense GMO really isn’t the issue. An example of a non-GMO strain that shouldn’t exist is clearfield rapeseed: Brassicaeae really like to exchange genes cross-species, if you put a pesticide resistance you’ll very soon have it in every weed that happens to be a brassicaeae. Not to mention that rapeseed itself is a nasty weed if you don’t happen to be growing it. The agriculture ministry over here tried to outlaw it, couldn’t because EU rules said it was non-GMO and thus fine, they had to settle for sending farmers brochures telling them about the damages they’d be on the hook for should those genes land on their neighbour’s plot.
There’s also “we’ve got a hammer, where’s the nail” type of behaviour going on around GMO, best example is golden rice. No, the problem isn’t that rice doesn’t contain beta carotene, the problem is that there’s people so piss-poor they can’t afford half a carrot and a spoon of beans, some onion and garlic, with their bowl of rice. It’s completely perverse: Rainbow capitalism is bad enough, now we have charity fucking capitalism. Zizek has a couple of things to say about that.
Anti-GMO sentiment is driven by the impression that something’s not right with modern agriculture, and that impression is dead nuts on – but it’s not GMO that’s the issue, it’s that by and large agricultural techniques are developed by chemical companies wanting to sell farmers products, seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, the whole package. This is actually modern agriculture, based not on trying to beat nature into submission but a deep understanding of it.
And btw we have enough food, and will have for the amount of people we’re going to have (world population growth is going to plateau this century). The issue is not amount, it’s distribution and sustainability. Those phosphorous mines aren’t going to last forever, we can’t continue to depend on that stuff to make our plants grow. How about using GMO to add nitrogen fixing to a crop that depletes nitrogen, or make it compatible with a symbiote that does the nitrogen fixing, or such things. That would be an actual advancement, a step towards a post Haber-Bosch agriculture.
I agree with everything in your comment except still appeal to tradition or appeal to nature are both fallacious. That isn’t to say traditional methods are bad, but traditional doesn’t mean better either. New methods, tools, techniques, and ingredients can be better potentially.
I also agree we have enough resources for everyone on the planet and it’s distribution that’s the issue, but that doesn’t mean efficiency isn’t useful. It allows for either more room for error in a good system, or our fucked up system to make up for it’s issues slightly. There’s no reason not to increase efficiency of produce while also trying to fix perverse systems.