I always know I’m properly depressed when I start in on the white sliced bread crisp sandwiches. I’ve always had eating disorders of one sort or another, and have been adamant for some time that white bread is addictive. Jay Rayner, the TV chef and One Show stalwart offended the Real Bread Campaign recently by tweeting that “bread is evil” so clearly I am not alone.
When I’m miserable, like many people, I head to comfort food to make things better. When I said I was depressed recently, friends suggested everything from Ben & Jerry’s to bacon. And I went to the corner shop for a loaf of Warburtons and a tube of Pringles (other brands are available).
But I also picked up a book to bring to the bakery for our bookshelf. It’s called The Hungry Years, by William Leith, and is a memoir of food addiction. I’d been meaning to read it for a couple of years, but it was too close to home. As much as anything, the cover illustration of a sexy, shiny glazed donut put me off – I once ate 18 donuts in one afternoon, and just the sight of one makes me hungry.
Anyway, I could hardly put it on the bakery bookshelf without reading it first, so I bit the bullet. So to speak. And it was a revelation. Leith, like me, is someone for whom moderation is an alien concept. He’s someone who has stood over the toaster poised with the next round of toast to go in when this lot comes out. And he understands bread addiction. He offers proof for my long-held belief in bread addiction.
I should put that in capitals. Bread Addiction. Now, yes. I’m sure a good many people would think Bread Addiction is a joke, or a daft pretentious middle class affectation. I had always felt self conscious just thinking about it in such terms. But there’s interesting, valid science going on here.
We evolved eating mostly meat and fruit. We were Atkins Sapiens, following the Caveman Diet (a real, quite popular, diet that involves eating only what you would eat if you had to catch it or collect it on a savannah 10,000 years ago). Then agriculture happened, and urbanisation happened, and suddenly our ancestors had bakeries. They found that hungry mouths could be easily fed with carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates, things like white bread, potatoes, rice, starchy things, give you a sugar rush akin to chocolate. This causes your body to do two things. One, it releases endorphins, which make you feel good. Two, it releases insulin to mop up all the sugar, which makes you hungry again. So your poor brain says “well that sandwich was good, let’s have another.” And thus begins addiction.
Why, you may be wondering, am I sitting in a bakery writing about the evils of baking? Well because bread is NOT evil. Bad bread is evil. I’ve got a brown sourdough loaf proving at home, it’s been proving for hours, and when I bake it, it will be the antithesis of a sliced white loaf. It will be complex, both in flavour and in the type of carbohydrates it contains. It will release energy slowly, and sustain me for longer. It won’t make me hungry for more, more, MORE! It won’t create a need that only it can meet.