Ah, bread. Is there anyone left in the Western world who doesn’t have some sort of dysfunctional relationship with the staff of life? To half the female population bread is The Enemy, the bloaty fasttrack to a lardy bottom and a straining waistband. If you doubt it observe a group of women in a restaurant when the bread basket arrives and see how most of them recoil as if being offered a pannier of live snakes. To men too bread is frequently the first “sinful” thing to go when they start a new health regime. Protein – good. Carbs – evil.

And, as if the reputation of bread as a food-stuff isn’t suffering enough, the economics are not looking good either. Global demand for wheat has ratcheted ever higher under pressure from countries such as China whose consumption of meat – and hence wheat-based animal feed – is expanding. Add to that freak weather conditions in the world’s traditional breadbaskets – such as Canada and Australia – and it’s no surprise that the price of an ordinary loaf has passed the £1 mark. And now we hear that scientists have warned the Government against its plan to add folic acid to bread because it could lead to health problems.

Until a couple of months ago I would have been there banging the anti-bread drum, even without the price rises. When I reached 35 I began to notice that whenever I ate it, usually lunchtime sandwich from the supermarket, it felt as if someone had left a house-brick in my abdomen. All that wheaty stuff – ugh, it must be clogging up my digestive system. So I joined the neurotic sisterhood, expelled it from my diet and for nearly two years learnt to ignore the supermarket bread aisle. It was only this summer when I went on a cookery course in the Lake District that I had an epiphany. Under the tutelage of Dale, a patient chef, I realised that bread proper – in its natural, unadulterated form – has suffered a gross miscarriage of justice.

For the first time in my life I made a loaf from scratch using only four ingredients – flour, salt, water and yeast, and kneaded it in the old-fashioned, therapeutic way. Watching dough rise into a smooth, pale rump is deeply satisfying on a very basic level, like when you were an 11-year-old at school and sewed your first pincushion.

If you’ve never made bread you probably think that the fluffy, slightly synthetic, vaguely tasteless sensation you get from supermarket sliced loaf is normal. But the real thing is about as different as chalk is to cheese. Which is why champions of proper bread ate taking action. Andrew Whitley, founder of the Village Bakery in Melmerby and author of Bread Matters, is gearing up to launch a nationwide “real bread campaign” early next year. The idea is to challenge the “industrialisation” of bread and lobby for a return to loaves made by skilled bakers using good-quality ingredients and traditional long fermentation, and do for bread what the Real Ale Campaign did for beer in the 1970s.

“What is extraordinary is the growing number of people who say they can no longer eat bread,” Whitley says. Those people who have coeliac disease (a serious intolerance of gluten in wheat) are, he reckons, only the tip of an iceberg, the rest of which is made up of people experiencing anything from discomfort to real digestive difficulties. “The scientific community and the big bakeries rebuff the connection between digestive problems and the way bread is produced as anecdotal. So I say, let’s find out exactly what is going on and, if what I believe turns out not to be the case, then I’ll shut up. On the other hand, if we can show that it is true, then what are we going to do about it?” Whitley explains.

The campaign will highlight what goes into a mass-produced loaf – the emulsifiers, the processing aids, oxidising agents and preservatives that make it possible for factory-style bakeries to churn out a finished loaf in 15 minutes.

Today, of the nine million loaves we buy each day, around 95 per cent are made using a process invented in 1961 known as the Chorleywood process, which replaces traditional slow fermentation with high-speed industrial mixers. These can whizz-up dough in no time and with this method it’s possible to use low-grade wheat flour and still make a bread that is soft, voluminous, long-lasting and cheap with the help of a few fats, improvers, emulsifiers and conditioners.

Instinct tells us that the use of all these chemical agents is much more likely to irritate the gut than a loaf produced according to the laws of natural chemistry. The number of people with a genuine allergy to wheat is very small. Allergy UK says that it has no statistics as it is so often misdiagnosed. Coeliac UK estimates that there are around 125,000 people who have the disease.

“I think there should be a new labelling law saying that for a food to be called bread the basic recipe should consist of flour, yeast, salt and water. If it is full of additives then it should be called a ‘bread-type product’,” says Richard Bertinet, a French breadmaker whose breadmaking classes at the Bertinet Kitchen, in Bath, are designed to enthuse everyone from first-timers to committed chefs, and whose second book, Crust is out this autumn.

“In France, there is still a tradition of buying bread every day, or, if you want bread that will last, you buy a sourdough or pain de campagne, but you accept that it will mature and become drier and you use it for toasting,” Bertinet says. “You don’t buy a loaf once a week and expect it to stay ‘fresh’, if that is what you can call something wrapped in plastic that is kept unnaturally soft for a week. Explain to me how that is fresh?”

Asda defends supermarket bread: “We make fresh bread in virtually all our stores with fresh incredients and dough using the Chorleywood process,” says a spokeswoman.

But isn’t that the problem, and if so what is the answer? Linda Hewett, who runs a breadmaking school in Lincolnshire – fulbeck-bread.co.uk – believes that the “greed and speed” of modern living has ruined the taste and nutritional value of most shop-bought bread. Many people, she says, don’t realise that to make a batch of dough takes just four minutes and that people can easily fit breadmaking into their way of life, especially if they freeze the results.

“This is my complete passion,” she says. “Bread is a staple throughout the world. A good-quality piece of bread is incredibly nutritional, giving you carbs for energy and protein from the hard wheat. Most of the time supermarket bread doesn’t taste of anything at all.”

She often encourages people to take a slice of white shop bread and manipulate it in their hand for a few minutes. “It becomes a soft, white glutinous mass, such as chewing gum or putty,” she says. “This is not good for your digestive system.”

But in our cash-rich, time-poor lives do we take any notice of this? Do we hell. We just grab it off the supermarket shelves in its cellophane wrapper as part of our crazed, Saturday-afternoon trolley dash and shove it down our throats, not noticing that we are also ingesting – and I quote: dextrose, E481, E472e, E471, ascorbic acid and preservative calcium propionate, which, in case you were wondering, inhibits mould growth.

Of course, I still buy supermarket bread – I am not an earth mother and I do not live in an episode of The Good Life. But I do try to make it whenever possible.

It’s sad really, but getting flour in your hair can make you feel peculiarly smug.

Bread Matters, by Andrew Whitley, published by Fourth Estate, £20 – www.breadmatters.com
Crust, by Richard Bertinet, published by Kyle Cathie, £19.99

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