Have you ever gone on a trip to another country and thought, “Why does the food here taste so much better than the food in America?”
That’s the question Kate called in recently to Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “When I was in Japan recently, the produce and the meat were amazing,” she told Vox. “Same thing about food in Europe: The bread, the yogurt just tastes better. Is food actually higher quality elsewhere, or do we just think it is? And if it is, what would it take for the US to have food that tastes and feels that good?”
Yes, the fact that you’re in a new and exciting environment is a factor. But you also aren’t imagining things: other countries have different ways of preparing and producing food that factor into what you’re tasting as well. Take the French baguette: that iconic bread that brings to mind berets and bicycling along the famous Champs-Élysées avenue as accordion music plays in the background. According to Eric Pallant, the author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers, that image is no accident; France is so invested in its bread that the country made a law protecting it from the encroaching mass-produced bread market. “By the 1980s, premade breads, breads that have a dozen or more ingredients in them, were starting to take over the market, and that’s un-French,” Pallant said. And so they said, “If you’re going to sell it in a boulangerie — and there are thousands of them in France — it has to meet criteria.”
So what is that criteria? And why are America’s standards so different? Pallant tells us on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Pallant, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. We love to hear from you.
Does the bread in France actually taste better? Or does being on vacation make us think it does?
It really is better bread. But there’s a caveat. If you go to a supermarket, you can buy industrial bread in France just as easily as here. But go to a boulangerie and that bread will be fresh and taste of wheat and leavening and love and time and patience. Nothing you can buy in a colorful plastic bag will ever match.
Why is the bread so different there?
A law passed in France in 1993 dictated that the bread you’re buying in a boulangerie must be made that day with four ingredients: flour, water, a leavening agent, yeast or sourdough, and some salt.
Meanwhile, in the US, I can walk into the grocery store right now, and I will find so many bagged loaves. What’s the story behind the type of bread that’s more common here in American grocery stores?
For 6,000 years, nobody knew what made bread rise. It was just magic. You put this glop called sourdough starter into a dough, and like magic, it rises. By the 1870s, 1880s, Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast are living things. They reproduce, they grow, they consume the starches, exhale carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide makes the bread rise. Once we know that yeast is a thing, we can make bread much faster than we do with sourdough. Sourdough takes two days. From a capitalist’s perspective, it makes sense if you’re a baker to bake a lot of bread very, very quickly.
As the 1920s and 1930s roll around, we have the mass production of everything. Picture this: the dough is mixed in a machine that can hold 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of flour and water. There are blades on the inside that will mix the flour and water in about three minutes. To modify the dough so it can withstand that kind of intensity, you need to add dough stretchers, dough elasticizers, dough conditioners, dough destickers that keep it from sticking, oils that will make every tiny little bubble inside of a loaf of Wonder Bread exactly like the bubble next to it, whereas your French baguette has big holes and little holes and all in between.
So, we have modified food production and bread chemistry. I’ve looked at the ingredient list on Wonder Bread, and there might be 30, 35 ingredients. From beginning to end, you can have dough on one side and bread in a bag on the other side in under four hours. We’re all about speed and convenience in America.
And there’s really a fifth ingredient that’s in sourdough bread: time. Time is that fermentation process. If it’s slow and methodical, flavors develop, aromas develop. You just need your nose to know that it has flavors a speedy bread doesn’t have.
Do we have any laws in the US on the books about bread?
If you look, the first ingredient on your loaf of bread is called enriched white flour. Enriched white flour has five things added. Thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, iron, and folic acid.
In the 1920s and 1930s, we were making the transition from whole wheat flour – heavy, dense breads that were what your grandparents ate from the old country if you’re a white immigrant from Europe – to white bread, which has the germ and all the dark parts removed, which contain the vitamins that the plants provided.
By 1942, in the middle of World War II, the US Army was seeing so many potential recruits who were suffering from vitamin deficiencies — they had pellagra and beriberi and anemia. They were part of a society that, as a whole, moved to this white flour and white pasta for primary carbohydrates. In 1942, the Army said all of the flour we buy to feed all of our soldiers who are going to go fight for us in World War II has to be enriched.
Here’s the kicker. By law, countries all around the world require their flour to be enriched. The law in the US says if your label says that your bread flour is enriched, it must be enriched; it’s a label law, not a flour law.
It seems more like a law that’s about truth and advertising than it is about the actual bread itself.
Every public health official will tell you that you need to have enriched flour if you’re going to have a healthy population.
Do you think people will ever rave about the bread in America the way they do about France? Like people will visit here and be like, I ate the best bread in the United States.
That’s a tough one. Inside the sourdough world, what’s circulating like crazy is that Taylor Swift has become sourdough-obsessed. So every time she appears on a late-night talk show, she brings a sourdough now. She made a loaf that was good enough to show up in one of her videos. When she first announced this, [fans] cleared the shelves of every sourdough bread they could find. But then, commercial bread has taken over, right? They’ve since filled shelves with something called Taylor Swift’s Funfetti bread.
Wow, capitalism sure does jump in, doesn’t it?
So fast, right? So fast. It’s going to take a revolution of sorts, and I’m a big believer that bread is the place to start in reshaping and rethinking our cultural attitudes. We would be different people if we took time and put it back into the ingredient list of our foods.
