Right, but that is because it essentially was a necessity. Its fortification also aided in the developmental health of generations of children. Snark about it all you like; it was valuable.

People in fact don't eat dull white sliced bread in anything like the quantity they did. The majority of bread sold might be like that but we just eat less bread full stop.

But first, when you say "this godawful bread", what exactly do you mean? Chorleywood is a process, not an outcome. It's not just the template pre-sliced white/wholemeal/brown loaf thing from the three big brands. Quite a lot of bread you might think is not Chorleywood essentially is.

Go to even a larger French supermarket and buy a baguette, and that will very likely be a Chorleywood-based process. Much in-store-bakery bread is a modified Chorleywood process (if it is not, it is another similarly "ultra-processed" method, apparently called Activated Dough Development).

Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.

I don't really eat "cut loaf" bread anymore for quite immediate health reasons — it invariably causes acid reflux and then skin irritation, so I gave it up a long time back. But I do still eat the odd part-baked bread roll and even some of those are Chorleywood process.

There is a good chance that if you're in a posh café you're still eating a Chorleywood-type bread. Because it is a way of making bread at scale; it is not a single product outcome.

It's slightly depressing how much better the everyday food is just some 300kms east of London (i.e. in France). I was shocked the first time I pitched up in a random Carrefour and saw that their basic food is an essentially unobtainable level of quality in the UK.

British food has come a long way over time, though there is still that subculture the rejoices in shite, or "proper" as they call it, food.

At least we can feel superior to the US on this front, who produce the worst bread I've ever eaten.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’m old enough to remember the great British bread strike of 1977 https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/11045641.look-back-chaos-c...

One of the effects of the strike was that white sliced was in short supply and mangled people ended up with weird granary loaves etc as they were all that was left in the shelves. They liked them.

And from that day granary and seeded breads became a lot more popular over the bland spongy white sliced stuff.

I will say that whatever the failings of white sliced, I still prefer it to over-sweetened US bread.

"separate taps for cold and hot water" (even in public places)

The reality is that the process is used all round the world these days (as covered in the article), not just in Britain, and its done that by being fast and cheap. It's also doubtful that it's any worse for you than American supermarket breads which are pumped full of sugar, emulsified oils etc etc.

Frankly all the pre-processed, plastic-wrapped supermarket loaves can get in the bin as far as I'm concerned, I buy sourdough from the local farmers market. But that's significantly more expensive and I recognise it's a position of privilege.

Harsh but true. It's the same phenomenon as defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great -- to save on copper.

But we all do this with our own stanky poop.

This is true, but I want to add that FODMAPs are not inherently bad for you (unless you have something like IBS), on the contrary!

Fermentable carbohydrates are prebiotics and feed your gut flora, which produces short-chain fatty acids that are healthy for you.

But yes, you also get gas from FODMAPs. And no, I am not advocating for processed foods - just wanted to comment on the FODMAP aspect.

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> At the time, it was, it allowed the country to feed itself on (largely) its own wheat. They didn't know it could contribute to IBS, they did know there was national food security at stake. Beyond that it made cheaper, mass-produced bread more viable in a bunch of places. Historically, globally it's hard to see cheaper staple food as an entirely bad thing.

That's just not true. It allowed to industrials using british wheat to compete against industrials using canadian wheat. Another approach could have been to protect artisan baker instead of going all in with the industrialisation of food production.

> How do you think it has it caused real bread to become expensive? Is it not more likely that real bread is more expensive to produce and therefore people buy the cheap shit?

Because bakery are seen as a specialty, and do not sell high volumes. You just have to cross the channel to see that real bread doesn't need to be that expensive and small bakers can compete with industrials.