My dog is odd. If you tell him it’s time to go for a walk, he isn’t impressed, but if you say “bedtime” he runs round barking and wagging. He’s got strange priorities.
One of his peculiarities, apart from snoring and wanting to sleep under a blanket, is his love of bread. I used to buy Tiger Bread from the supermarket, and when it eventually went stale (what chemicals must they use in that stuff? It lasts way too long), I’d give him the – what my mum always calls – knob end.
Now, a normal dog would eat the bread, or ignore it. Not Bub. Bub runs upstairs into the spare room, and guards it. He doesn’t eat it, he just hoards it, like a dragon on a pile of gold. He was a stray, so I assume he has some deep-seated psychological eating disorder that makes him want white bread. Perhaps he found some in a bin or something. Perhaps his body recognises its calorific value. He obviously doesn’t particularly LIKE it, or he’d eat it. He occasionally leaves his precious horde and comes downstairs to eat, go for a walk, do his ablutions, but he anxiously returns to his bread stash, and gets very upset if he thinks someone is going to steal it. He acts like an addict, and I usually end up removing it while he’s not looking, and as soon as the bread is gone, he relaxes and goes back to his happy-go-lucky life of sniffing and sleeping.
Over the last year or so, I have been learning to bake. The bread in my house now is made to the exacting standards of the Real Bread Campaign – it has four ingredients, flour, water, yeast and salt. It goes stale much quicker, and I value it so much more. I rarely let it go stale, and if I do, I’m not likely to waste it on a dog who isn’t going to enjoy it, when I can use it for bread sauce or bread pudding. So Bub doesn’t get as many knob-ends as he used to.
It’s a shame really, as the bread he used to get was rubbish, and this home-baked stuff is way healthier. But it does make me wonder about bread. I mean, maybe it’s just me and my dog, but I’ve always found shop-bought sliced white bread addictive. There’s something about it that makes me want it more and more. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I am strongly tempted to go buy petrol station bread and crisps, and make myself the ultimate comfort food – crisp sarnies.
So is, as Jay Rayner once said on twitter (and got abuse from the Real Bread Campaign as a result) bread evil? I have come to realise that some breads don’t agree with me, and some turn my dog into a mentalist. If I ever have kids, I’m going to be very careful about the bread they eat. I assume it’s about the speed the complex carbohydrates turn into simple ones or factory improvers or something, but at the end of that day, I’ve become like my dog – I don’t trust other people with my bread.
