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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

I've always been fascinated by how disgusting the bread is in the US. Do we know what lead to this ?

You might be interested in the book "White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf" by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

A lot stems from the late 18th century concern that filthy immigrants were making unhealthy food in local bakeries. It was better -- so they said -- to eat mass-produced breads baked into identical loaves with small, evenly distributed air holes by clean machines and in a pure, clean white color to make it clear there weren't any bugs or other impurities.

From there it was a process of mass industrialization and tweaking the ingredients to minimize costs and optimize baking times.

That's an interesting read to add to my list thank you !

The US has no food culture, come on they sell cheese in spray cans.¹

Generally food in the US is sold for size, not flavour or nutritional content.

For example US roaster chickens are huge but basically live short sick lives and taste bland.²

Chickens sold in France are smaller but have more flavour.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Cheese

2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1541-4337.1...

Processed cheese is a miracle. I wish there was a greater variety of it, so I didn't have to make my own when I want something other than "cheddar."

Food quality might be lower on average, but saying the US has no food culture is just snobbery.

I've heard of many shitty foods like that spray can cheese that Americans eat, and cringed hard at them, but I've always assumed they can also get good stuff if they want to. If they can't, though, that's honestly very grave.

A lot of American can neither afford the good (usually imported) stuff, nor have never learned to appreciate it either.

I dont understand either, they should call it long-life cake or something. My supermarket has racks and racks of bread, and I dont like any of it.

Bread in the US, and to be fair a lot of of supermarket bread in a lot of countries (UK, Australia, I'm sure tons of others) has a variety of ingredients added to help keep the bread "fresh". It used to be common to buy fresh baked bread on a daily basis and only use it during that day, or perhaps a day or two afterwards. There are still some places in the Western world where this is common, for instance in Munich, Germany you can't walk more than a couple of blocks without finding a bakery with fresh bread for relatively cheap prices. In the US and UK fresh bread is now a luxury item and can be quite expensive compared to the bread laced with preservatives to keep the bread "fresh" for a couple of weeks.

The trouble with a lot of UK "bakeries", unless they are not part of a chain, is they don't actually make anything. They just oven finish part-baked factory crap, or bake factory dough. So all it gets you is different branding on the plastic bag to go with the mass-produced taste.

A proper family bakery where bread is just the 4 basic ingredients or sourdough etc, and the pastries and cakes taste home-made can be really hard to find now.

Greed. There's no simpler explanation. It starts with trying to find bread-like material that tastes even better. You can do so by adding sugar. You want it to last even longer on the shelves so you make it non-perishable with chemicals that weren't previously used in food that are just grandfathered as "safe" to appease industry.

Thus you get US Bread.

That assumes that people in the US are greedy and not in other places. I think one can are that every other place had some sort of efficient mechanism to stop that greed.

If the US is the outlier the question should be what condition that are US specific made it happen, not a general concept like greed.

Long distances and shipping times, the lack of a coherent food culture, the demand for cheap food, the destruction of culinary standards between 1930 and 1960.

Bread is bad even in many places where shipping is not a problem.

The lack of coherent food culture I have considered and it might make sense and it would explain why the US is a special case.

Demand for cheap food exists everywhere.

Not sure how culinary standards got worse, depending on what standards you are talking about. Many things got better in most food groups.

After the depression and the war, we started eating a lot of frozen dinners and other cheap crap. That meant an entire generation just didn't know how to cook anything but subsistence foods.

"Factory" bread can be "disgusting" because it's made to feed the masses and gain market share, not taste good. For the same reason hamburgers at McDonald's are not as good as those made at a quality restaurant or at home.

Good bread, as with any good food, typically takes time and quality ingredients. You won't find that in mass produced food. That costs too much.

Good, fresh bread can be produced cheaply. When I lived in Spain I could buy a large, fresh, delicious baguette on almost any street corner for about $0.55.

The problem is that after about 24 hours it gets hard and after 48 it's basically inedible. So your diet needs to include a lot of bread or else you end up wasting a fair portion of every purchase.

Yep. That's what I've heard.

I bake sourdough and other breads every other day at home but baguettes are one bread I have not been able to get right yet though I haven't spent enough time trying to figure it out. I know there must be one simple step I'm not doing or doing wrong.

I don't know, bread is literally cheaper and better-tasting in France (and many other countries).

And it's also available on every street corner (an exaggeration I know) managed by shopkeepers who stayed up all night but they aren't feeding millions of people.

> they aren't feeding millions of people

Collectively they are :-)

> who stayed up all night

Technically they wake up at 2-4am

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