To be fair the best French baguettes are crunchy and soft at the same time and have only water, flour, salt, sugar? and yeast, so nothing much to be afraid of there.
The number of bakers in France has steadily gone down over the past half century or so. It's been going up a bit recently due to the new phenomenon of upper class white collar workers who quit their job in their 30s to find meaning in their life to do something more "noble" like baking, but it remains to be seen what the long term impact of this will be.
You can manufacture Twix and Cheetos at scale, but not baguettes.
It uses enriched flour (which I doubt makes much difference), but also adds conditioner which really is the culprit of being engineered for mass production.
My mother used to work with a woman who later opened a bakery with her husband and they were well known in the surrounding area for their great bread and bread rolls (this was in Belgium - similar style of bread as in France, baguettes not quite as good but often very close; just saying this wasn't some American sogginess). When I got into making bread at home, I asked him about his special trick to make great bread. The first one was 'experience', i.e. practicing the procedure dozens of times until its perfectly repeatable. And the second was 'a pinch out of my special jar' which he bought from a generic wholesale baking supplies vendor, and which contained the things I mentioned above.
I always add a crushed vitamin C tablet to bread I make; it really helps with the gluten development and the quality of the rise. But most online bread making communities are full of idiots who recoil in horror at such sacrilege - they're all like "if I wanted bread full of chemical additives, I'd buy it in the store" rollseyes. But if you suggest they add a squeeze of lemon juice they they're all cool with it, they just complain about they don't want the slight lemon taste to their bread. Sigh.
Don't get me started on nitrate as a preservative in sausage making and the idiocy 'biological sausage makers' spew about that...
MSG = Kombu Salt
Nitrates = Celery Juice (though this is already done)
HFCS = Artisnal Corn Sugar
The equation of American bread with Wonder Bread is really tired and offensive. Maybe you should spin some tale about how American flour is so, so, different that making bread with flour, salt, yeast and water is so different than in Europe and it comes out completely inedible to those of refined palate.
This varies a lot with the store and in what town you buy the bread. I didn't have this complaint as much in the Northeast as I did out west. But out west, you can find the good stuff if you are more selective and pay more.
I've been ruined by learning about bakeries and good crusty loaves with texture and flavor. Won't eat anything else now.
So I don't know about 'tired', its a real thing.
Im comfortable saying any deli meat or bacon marketed “no added nitrates” is either over priced or subpar quality and , in most cases, being hawked by charlatans who thrive on their customers being low information.
Industrial one may be crispy but have nothing like a good one.
I don't know how it would be better, but I don't think it has to be worse.
The end result is nowhere near what a competent baker can do, working manually and especially when using for instance a wood fire oven
Yes, but a better product can be sold for more. That's why they are making something resembling baguettes in the first place, and not just the cheapest loaf possible.
(Not saying that in practice the factory baguettes are better than what your favourite baker does. Far from it.)
Why?
Oh, perhaps because I wrote 'Yes, but a better product can be sold for more.'?
To be more explicit: Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than a worse product.
(Not: "Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than price of ingredients.")
top sellers on amazon France: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/bestsellers/kitchen/57878031
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/france-bakery-bread...
Even quite on par with what gets sold as artisanal bread in a lot of places. (Though the factory bread is not as good as the real good artisanal stuff, of course.)
So, you can get pretty good quality food from an industrial process, if there's a big market willing to pay for it. It's not even expensive.
Of course, if your consumers don't care or only care for the 'wrong' things, you get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
If Americans had sushi and baguettes they wouldn't be slim like the French and Japanese, they'd eat sushi till they are 110% full (the Japanese aim to not stuff themselves at meals) and then carry around a bag of baguettes for in-between grazing (the French prefer set meals).
They'd also blame everything on their delicious national cuisine, rather than on themselves.