20 BIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 



The short list as given will be sufficient to justify 

 the statement that bread is pre-eminently cheap as a 

 food-stuff. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that 

 it always forms a relatively large proportion of the 

 food of the poor. In the case of families with very 

 small incomes, bread often supplies as much as 

 60 per cent of the whole energy in their food, where- 

 as in middle-class families it supplies less than 40 per 

 cent, and among the wealthy considerably less than 

 this. When prices rise all round under uncontrolled 

 conditions, bread still always remains the cheapest 

 food, and its consumption, unlike that of other foods, 

 tends in such circumstances to increase rather than to 

 diminish. 



After the later 'seventies of the last century, and 

 until the beginning of the World War, the British 

 public was accustomed to bread which was absolutely 

 as well as relatively cheap, and although the Sale of 

 Food and Drugs Act, of 1895, permitted the use of 

 many other cereals in bread-making, the British loaf 

 has in practice been nearly always a pure wheaten 

 loaf, of light and porous character, and particularly 

 white in colour. When war broke out we had come 

 to look upon a supply of very cheap and very white 

 bread as part of the course of nature. 



When the danger of acute food shortage arose the 

 British public had nevertheless to face the results of 

 a different policy in bread production, and in the 

 minds of some people a certain degree of anxiety 

 arose lest the change should affect the public health. 

 The changes in our loaf which we have had to face 

 are due first to the presence of a higher proportion of 

 the whole grain in wheat flour, and, second, to the 

 presence, or the occasional presence, of cereals other 

 than wheat in the bread. From time to time potatoes 

 also make their appearance. The presence of the more 



