The mayo thread got me to thinking about white bread. Seems like white bread is ubiquitous even, or even especially, where people don’t have much. In India, there is naan. In central America, I never, ever, saw whole wheat bread, but white bread is eaten. Why? Seems like you have to take stuff out to make white bread, which should be costly in the process and the fact that you are losing the part you are taking out. How did white flour become the norm?
They don’t lose whatever they take out. They sell it as bran. I’m often surprised by how little the food industry wastes.
The OP made me think of several places where you only really see white bread (perhaps brown in a more upmarket supermarket, and it’s always dry and horrible). The one I know best is Brazil. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bran-anything there (again, possibly more upmarket supermarkets in cities sell breakfast cereals with bran). What would they do with all that bran? I’m not sure, considering the amount of white bread, all the bran would actually be useful.
I wonder if precisely because you take stuff out, white bread came to be seen as “the posh bread”? Of course, then we had all sorts of health food revolutions in the Europe and the US, so brown bread became the thing here, but maybe not there?
I’m not sure, they could always feed it to livestock?
I do believe white bread was originally more expensive than wholemeal (maybe because they take stuff out, or it requires more work) and only the rich could afford it - same for white flour, and white rice, and maybe white sugar? So its initial popularity was due to it being “high-class”. Ironically, now the rich eat wholemeal - it’s like the vacuum cleaner no bags/bags/no bags cycle.
Hey, I found a cite! http://www.enotes.com/class-social-reference/class-social
But why is it LESS expensive? “processed wheat (white bread), which is less expensive, is more often the choice of working-class consumers.”
Doesn’t make sense to me. Sure you can use bran in animal feed, but no way is animal feed going to be equivalent or higher in price than human feed. Bran does not seem to be eaten by the poor, or in substantially higher proportions than present in grain by the rich. And you have to factor in the cost of the process.
One assumes that if whole wheat bread were cheaper than white bread, the poor would eat more of it. But it is not. One thing for sure, you can get more slices per pound of lightweight, gluey, cheap, white bread, so maybe there is just more food in the whole wheat bread. But one can only take that part of the way. White flour is cheaper than whole wheat flour in the market. Is that because of just less turnover? In central and south america, India, and China, only white bread is eaten as far as I can tell, at least by the masses. Why?
Whole grain flours have a shorter shelf life than refined flours. This is conjecture, but the longer storage time may make white breads cheaper to sell than whole-grain breads once the spoilage rate is factored in.
Yep.
White flour lasts a VERY long time. Whole grains retain the germ which can go rancid much more quickly. The perishable nature makes it more expensive.
You mentioned one factor already, there’s less flour in white bread. It weighs less, takes less prep and cooking time. But the sheer volume of white flour products is a big factor. Bakeries produce tons of white bread daily using huge machines that do all the work. Materials go in one end, bagged and sliced bread comes out the other end. A friend of mine in the bakery supply business says a baker’s knowledge now consists of knowing when to turn the red dial to 3. Even in the old fashioned bakeries more white flour products are produced than whole wheat several times over. In the end, the bran will get used for something, but if it’s used for human food products more care and additional steps have to be taken in the processing. For a low volume product this adds an extra level of cost.
I always thought it’s economy of scale, like everything else. Also, animal feed doesn’t have to be more expensive than human feed. White bread + animal feed only has to make more profit than wholegrain.
Another potential factor is that while it is simpler to make whole wheat flour than white flour, it is much easier to make bread from white flour than whole wheat flour. White flour has more gluten by weight and is much more forgiving than other flours.
Thanks, all, there are some good answers here that I had not thought of, and I think that in totality they probably explain the conundrum.
As for India, while leavened bread (nan) tends to be white, their unleavened breads like chapati and paratha are made of whole-grain flour, and are actually much more widely made and consumed daily than nan, which is usually encountered at dinner parties. While nan, like other white leavened bread, can be made in advance, stored, shipped, and storebought, chapatis need to be handmade on the spot and consumed immediately while still fresh. If your impression of Indian bread is formed from Indian restaurants and groceries in the West, where nan is prevalent, actual food in India is much more whole-wheat based. In northern and western India, that is. In the east and south, rice rules. White rice, mind you. Always white.
Here’s the thing, whole wheat flour is easily diluted with cheaper products like for example dirt. Throughout history, in times of severe hardship, this is exactly what people have done in order to increase profit. Having white flour is proof positive of the “purity” of the wheat.
Historically, not a very good proof though, as white flour (and white bread) was also often adulterated with chalk, talc, lime, or (less corruptly) potatoes, pea meal or other non-wheat starches.