Friday, December 9, 2011

Bread has no respect!

Bread has no respect!

Bread is one of the most important foods in human history!
And yet people completely underestimate bread.

What do you need to eat to survive?
Basically you need energy and very small amounts of vitamins and minerals.

The best source of energy is carbohydrates (protein is not a good source of energy, and I doubt if we have to eat protein at all).

And the best sources of carbohydrates are rice and bread.

There is a very interesting article about this on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_food

What kind of food would you like to eat every day?

- It needs to be cheap.
- It needs to be something you can stockpile for times of emergency
- It needs to be a good source of energy
- It cannot have a strong taste otherwise you would get tired of eating it every day.

For many Asians rice is the chosen staple food. It fills all the requirements of a staple food.

But rice is not the only staple food. Another one is flour, the main ingredient of bread.

Flour is cheap, can be stockpiled for a long time, it is essentially made of carbohydrates, and it doesn't have a strong taste, so you can eat it every day without getting tired.

Most of humanity has survived by eating bread, not rice, every day.

But, at least here in Japan bread is completely underestimated.
Japanese people don't eat bread as the main food of a meal.
Bread is always viewed as a light food, something you may eat between meals, or to accompany a meal.

That is completely WRONG! Bread has the power to REPLACE rice as the main food of a meal.

I go to McDonalds and sometimes get puzzled by how much fillings the hamburger has and how disappointing the bread is.

The bread is the main ingredient of a sandwich. You eat a sandwich because of the bread, not because of the fillings. You put the fillings basically to put some taste, since bread itself is essentially tasteless.

But in our "modern" times the roles are completely reversed, people eat a sandwich because of the fillings, not the bread. The fillings are usually expensive, have a very strong taste, are not a good source of energy.
The bread is completely relegated to secondary role.

The same thing happens with pizza.
What is a pizza? It is essentially a crust with some toppings.
But the main food in a pizza is the crust. Because the crust is basically bread. The toppings are there just to give some taste to the crust.

You should be able o eat pizza every day as a full meal! And yet nobody does it. At least not these days.

I go to a pizza shop and always get annoyed by how thin the crust is.

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