02/26/2026
European Bread. I saw this photo and was shocked! Shocked I tell you! I didn’t think there was that big of a difference so I looked into it.
I have a friend of a friend who has celiac disease and can’t eat American Bread but she can eat European Bread. I had put it down to the fact that they have better laws about pesticides in Europe than we do here in the US and let it go at that.
The Bread situation is very similar to the way more and more people are wanting meats that are not raised in Confined Animal Feeding Operations. The stuff that is closer to nature is just better for you. There is more to it though. There is always more to it.
Here is the deal on bread:
European bread is mostly made of flour, water, salt and yeast. You can get raisins or sweetener now and then but nothing like in the US.
American bread has an ingredients list as long as your arm and a good number of those ingredients are added so that the stuff lasts longer on the shelf.
I have news for you. When something lasts longer on the shelf, it is harder to digest. The reason something goes bad on the shelf is because some bugs are digesting it and leaving toxic waste products for you.
This is true of meat products as well as bread products. Don’t eat stuff that is ‘shelf stable’ and your guts will probably like you for it. Young guts are better at taking a licking and keeping on ticking than old guts. You will learn that as you get older if you haven’t already.
Does that mean you need to start making your own bread? Well… That is up to you. Do you need to? I can still get away with the higher end sourdough from the store. My sister who is two years older than me basically can’t eat gluten bread at all. I think she still does once in a while but suffers for it.
I am certain the quality of the wheat makes a difference also. If you get some wheat that was raised in Mesopotamia from seeds that they got from their ancestors and ground into flour on their ancient mill, your flour is probably good to go. Thousands of years of farmers and flour manufacturers going for what they think is perfect wheat is going to change things no matter what.
Back before the US revolutionary war, wheat was a lot the same as it was when it originated back in the day. People ground it into flour in stone mills. A lot of people had their own small mills. The whole seed was there and thus there was more oil in the flour. Oil goes rancid, so the shelf life wasn’t very long. Thus lots of small mills.
In the 19th century (1860’s to 1870’s) steel roller mills became a thing and production of flour went way up. Shelf life had to go down because the mills got much bigger and flour sellers were making way more than they could sell in a small area. They had to ship it. Shipping takes time. Thus more shelf-life is needed.
They got more shelf-life by cracking the wheat germ and bran off the seeds. Grinding flour without the germ and bran. They went to white flour instead of whole wheat flour. Started marketing the white flour. Higher gluten content! More fluffy! etc. Of course, there were fewer minerals and different protein compositions. But they could sell more from one mill and the profit margins went up so that was good, right?
Then the green revolution came along (shorter wheat stems, bigger yields) and a lot fewer people died of starvation. More mechanization and more need for shelf life, so more white flower.
I guess it depends on who you talk to about white flour being better. To someone who would be starving without it and who gets it at the end of a long shipment line, it is better. To someone who wants the germ and bran in their flour it is worse.
It really is up to the consumer. You can vote for whole wheat with your wallet. You can vote for white flour with your wallet. Someone will come along and produce what you want if you are willing to pay for it.
It is the same in the meat business. Someone will come along and produce grass fed for you if you are willing to pay for it. Even though it is sometimes cheaper to raise grass fed beef than grain fed beef, this is not always true because of subsidies, economies of scale, etc. In other words, it is complicated. Maybe when there gets to be a lot of grass fed beef, it will get cheaper.
If you want to find out more about what we do, here is the website: https://northpasturefarms.com/homepage
I also write articles about farming and what it takes to grow what you want: https://northpasturefarms.substack.com/
