BLACK VERSUS WHITE BREAD.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 983, 1 March 1910, Page 4

BLACK VERSUS WHITE BREAD.

During the recent electioneering campaign in Britain the use of black bread by the German working classes was exploited for political purposes by those opposed to Tariff Reform, the assumption being that the eviscerated type of element which finds so much favour with the mass of the British people was superior to the German article, and that its consumption was owing to Britain's free trade policy. As a matter of fact, however, black bread is superior to white. The black bread in general household use contains, as a rule, a small proportion of wheaten flour, but it is none the less known as black bread, and is of a colour at which the British working man, who has grown used to the product of modern bakeries, would louk with amusement or contempt. The smooth grayishbrown German loaves are not only more nutritious than the excessively white ones now supreme in popular English favour, but to the taste of many English residents in Germany are distinctly better eating. Black rye bread is not only in general use in the wheat-growing parts of Germany, but is also popular in Holland. Freetraders are fond of pointing to Holland as a free trade country which is immune from the burdens which are imposed by protection upon its eastern neighbour. It must be feared, therefore, that the Dutch eat black bread merely because they like it, and do not yet understand that it is a form of diet debilitating to their constitutions and derogatory to their political dignity. The .British working man has little real ground to congratulate himself on the quality of the loaf with which he feeds himself and his family. The whiteness which he demands is obtained at the cost of those nutritive elements which give its tinge of yellow to old-fashioned home baked bread; and medical science has repeatedly and authoritatively condemned the excessively white bread now generally sold as being inferior in nourishing power and especially prejudicial to the healthy development of growing children.