Why are we routinely buying disgusting bread in Britain?

‘Bread is simple. Or is it?’ That is the question David Wright poses about a keystone food that spans the globe and the whole of history. Breaking Bread examines the science behind the ur-loaf, the development of the Chorleywood method, the economics of selling the stuff, the role that it has played in religion and politics – and what its future might look like.

The author is a third-generation baker. After a childhood spent in the Suffolk bakery his father owned and ran (Wright’s birth was announced in the bakery shop window: ‘I smelled bread, played with the dough, tasted it even before I have memory’), he left it all behind for university and a career in the theatre. But he returned to the family business in 2012 to try to save it as it floundered financially. Nine years later, unable to clear the crippling debt, he made the decision to close the 75-year-old establishment. While he remains a professional baker, he is now employed at the renowned Pump Street Bakery in Orford, a hop, skip and a jump away from the place he was forced to close.

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As he observes:

Every baker’s bread tells you something about their character. I am unable to escape my own, and when I speak of bread in this book, despite my best efforts at impartiality, I will be tethered to my perspective.

His life has been shaped by the bread he has baked and still bakes, and also by his bakery’s closure. As much as it is a global history of a fundamental food, the book is a reckoning with the loss of a family business and an attempt to make sense of a craft and industry that has been upended by the ‘Faustian pact’ of selling the soul of bread to increase profit.