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enzymes currently in use has the same kind of toxic potential as was recently identified in transglutaminase.
3. Much more research should be conducted to compare the digestibility and nutrient availability of fast-made and long-fermented breads.
4. Roller-mills should use all the constituents of the wheat grain in their reconstituted wholemeal flour or should indicate clearly what has been removed and why.
5. Roller-milling procedures should be adapted to produce white and other low extraction-rate flours with at least as high a nutrient profile as stone-milled flours with the same extraction rate.
6. Baseline standards of important micronutrients should be established for wheat (and other cereal) breeding programmes, with the aim of gradually restoring (and in time exceeding) levels found in older varieties. Breeding (and farming) methods should also aim to produce grain with as little of the harmful gliadin protein as possible.
    The aim of these measures is simple: to make all bread (white, wholemeal and in between) as good as it can be. If the milling and baking industries adopted them, they would no longer need to hide behind obscure labelling, devious marketing and defensive public relations.
    For the consumer not prepared to wait for this happy day, there are two options: seek out an artisan baker or bake your own bread.
    A world away from Chorleywood, in villages and industrial estates, farm shops, delis and food halls, selling at farmers’ markets or on the internet, a new breed of artisan bakers is using skill not scale, time not trickery, to reach an increasing number of customers attracted by the openness and integrity of real baking. Here are no additives, enzymes and high-speed doughs – just good ingredients, often organic and local, transformed with patience and effort into loaves full of life.
    Although the number of new artisan bakeries has grown significantly in the past ten years, they still account for only a tiny percentage of British bread. But I sense a growing interest in ‘slow’ bread, both from consumers and from the steadily increasing numbers of people who want to learn real baking. Even as the supermarkets’ in-store ‘bakeries’ (many of which simply reheat bread made elsewhere) struggle to retain staff, my ‘Baking for a Living’ courses are over-subscribed, often by people drawn to bread and fermentation from comfortable but unfulfilling professional careers. Home bakers, whether they use traditional methods or bread machines, like to decide for themselves what goes into their bread and how it is made. If you are one of them, or would like to be, what follows will tell you all you need to know to do it well.

Time to choose
    British bread is a nutritional, culinary, social and environmental mess – made from aggressively hybridised wheat that is grown in soils of diminishing natural fertility, sprayed with toxins to counter pests and diseases, milled in a way that robs it of the best part of its nutrients, fortified with just two minerals and two vitamins in a vain attempt to make good the damage, and made into bread using a cocktail of functional additives and a super-fast fermentation (based on greatly increased amounts of yeast), which inhibits assimilation of some of the remaining nutrients while causing digestive discomfort to many consumers.
    There are some signs of a renaissance of small-scale artisan baking. However, the whole ‘craft’ bakery sector accounts for only 6 per cent of UK bread so, unless something changes, most people will have to put up with bread from the industrial plant bakers or the supermarket in-store bakeries for a long time to come, perhaps for ever.
    The concentration of commercial power into ever bigger corporate units is often presented as being necessary to keep prices down and enlarge consumer choice. And on the face of it, the consumer has never been offered so many choices before. Scores of brands and hundreds of ranges compete for shelf space