bread and circuses

From Mother Jones magazine, comes a fascinating profile of an academic research facility in Washington state and the bakers who are striving to reverse the trend in production that have made bread instead of what has been regarded “as the staff of life,” symbolically and historically, into “the spirit of disease.”
There are legitimate cases of course of celiac disease of individuals who cannot tolerate gluten, but impatience in the industry—white bread and some seemingly whole wheat cognates (fortunately, for now, this is not a problem in Germany, though I understand there is an increasing amount of baked goods prepared in China and elsewhere that employ the same short-cuts) does not allow the yeast to fully digest the gluten and the preservatives added and has a knock-on effect up the food-chain and may yield false-positives, in addition to such dietary fads that revile processing but not necessarily the process. In the facility's experimental kitchen, bakers are returning to traditional methods, yielding a far superior and better tasting product.