WHOLEMEAL BREAD.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4847, 1 July 1925, Page 1

WHOLEMEAL BREAD.

THE ARTICLE BEING SOLD.

A PROTEST IN ENGLAND.

“Wholemeal bread is necessary for the physical well-being of the race,” writes W. A. G, F. Stokes, in the Spectator. “The so-called wholemeal bread at present sold by the bakers is not germ bread at all, but white bread made with devitalised flour, to which lias . been added a certain amount of ‘offal’ or bran, almost worthless as food and withal indigestible. .

“The true wholemeal, or germ bread, which was the staple food of England seventy or eighty years ago, can, only be made from .flour from which the vitamines have not been extracted by over-milliYig. This flour, so vital to the stamina of our race, the elaborate roller mills of thii’ country are unable to produce. Only the old-fashioned mills, most of which have been dismantled, could pioduce it. The majority of us at some time or other have held a few grains of ripe wheat in the palms of our hands, and noticed that they are covered with a golden coloured skin, with a hard and somewhat shriny surface. If one of those grains be cut in half with a sharp knife we see that the interior consists of- a dead white substance, which bears much the same proportion in bulk to the skin that encloses it as does the contents of an egg to its shell. Now, this dead white interior is little more than starch, and comparatively worthless a»s a food,, whereas the skin contains almost all the blood and bone producing vitamines of the wheat. As corn is at present milled in England this skin is entirely eliminated. Consequently, when eating white bread we are simply eating starch ; and when eating tlie so-calied wholemeal bread, as at present supplied, starch plus a little meal or hr,an, fibrous, indigestible stuff which the bakers mix with the white flour to discolour it, so that the public may be led to believe that they arc eating the old-fashioned stone-milled vitalising germ bread of our fathers, the true staff of lifeSuch a condition of things in the production of the most vital item in the food of the nation inust Surely be ot the utmost importance to all. It call,s for immediate legislation. It JS an Imperial matter.”