Why Are Loaves Square?
Apparently, we’ve now had the square sliced loaf for fifty years. In my years, that’s fifty years too many.
But have you ever wondered why Britain fell so much in love with this awful product? Here’s an e-mail, I’ve just written to the BBC.
In the 1970s, I did some work for a major bakery group in the UK. I dealt with top management, some of whom had been bakers. And very much of the old school, who knew their bread.
So I asked why we had so much bad sliced bread and did they eat it.
They didn’t eat it and to a man, they took a sack of flour home and then baked it themselves.
The reason there was so much square sliced bread was that van drivers in those days were paid by commission and they could get most commission by cramming that sort of bread in the van. So they wouldn’t distribute the better class of bread, which didn’t fit so well.
Another interesting fact from this period, was that a lot of bread got returned to the factory. Harold Wilson and his government felt this waste pushed up the price of bread, so they banned returns. Do you remember happy bread, which was a different colour for each day?
In fact, the non-return policy, meant that the price of bread rose, as the returned bread had a whole lot of uses like animal feed, which then became unprofitable. The returned bread just went into the waste bin at the shops and then probably into landfill.
All in all it’s a sad tale, which shows that often the reasons for things being the way they are, are not what you’d expect.
I’ve also just watched the BBC Breakfast report on 50 years of the awful sliced loaf. No wonder there are so many coeliacs or those that are allergic to wheat-based bread in the UK, judging by what goes into it. All of those bakers years ago were right!
Waking Up In Cloud-Cuckoo World
I woke at about five this morning and put the radio on to listen to the news. One of my favourite books is The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
I felt that I’d woken up in a world where everyting was being run by idiots, who had lost their sense of where they were supposed to be, but were still of course getting all of their perks and salaries. Or in the case of various dictators were still milking all their subjects for ever cent they’d got.
The first story was the problems in Syria, where all sane people agree that President Assad must go. The president used to be an opthalmologist, which in my book is a sort of doctor, so why is he blinding some of his people and killing others in an effort to cling to power? And why were we still supporting this despot until recently?
Then there was the story about Greece having a referendum on cuts. Turkeys and Christmas come to mind. Of course they’ll vote yes to the cuts!
The Germans are supposed to be efficient. But they can’t seem to find the source of their e-coli outbreak. So what does the EU do about it, have a meeting?
I could add other stories, where those in charge are going one way and doing their utmost to keep their high-salaried jobs.
Don’t get me going on the NHS, where at present I just need a repeat prescription and it seems to take days at my GP. At the previous one, I sent in an e-mail and either collected the drugs or the signed prescription on the next working day. How many highly-paid civil servants does it take to not impliment that very simple policy?
And now to cap it all, BBC Breakfast is talking about the lack of cuckoos this year. They’re all alive and well and living in politics and government, all over the world!
The Anonymous Widower 