On The Loose: The war on bread

Before there were bakeries everywhere in Delhi, most of us lived on bread sold in these plastic packs. We still do. What would school tiffins have, if not a cheese sandwich? I’m sure there are many mothers heaving a sigh of relief that this cancer suspicion has emerged in the summer holidays. In city living, bread is notoriously hard to avoid, being so very convenient.

Over centuries, poets and writers have written odes to bread and entire civilizations can chart their history through the varieties of dough. Metaphorically, bread is diligently earned and endlessly savoured: to be broken with friends in times of celebration and cheer, which makes the association with cancer especially shattering.

Recently, on one of my yearly clearing fits to toss out the obsolete items occupying my kitchen cupboards, I stumbled on my old bread maker. Some years back, in a valiant attempt to try not to eat anything from a packet, I had taken to baking my own bread. Predictably, after baking precisely 10 loaves (at the cost of Rs. 1,000 per loaf), the machine was shoved into a cupboard never to be retrieved again. However, it was a brilliant machine that even a five-year-old could use with foolproof instructions on measurements. It’s where I learnt what a racket brown bread is. In the home bread makers at least, it is not possible to bake a bread that tastes like bread, without white flour. Every brown bread recipe I tried involved copious amounts of flour, negating the low calorie effect. Still, baking your own loaf is therapeutic and the fragrance wafting through the house is nothing short of heavenly. And it’s easier than it sounds. If not the gluten, it can at least be carcinogen free.