"Annabel Smyth" wrote in message
...
All shop-bought bread has ingredients that one might not add to bread
made at home - preservatives and stuff. Our bread *is* made with 100%
wholemeal flour, or it's not allowed to call itself wholemeal.

I think that's still a huge difference between the USA and Europe, and
that's what you're seeing. We buy our bread in bakeries, while most
Americans seem to buy it at groceries. I haven't visited the UK for a while,
so I don't know how the situation has evolved there. But in France, even
when shopping in a large supermarket, I can buy my bread at a bakery booth
where they do cook their bread (though they don't bake it, they receive raw
frozen bread sticks and cook them - legally, they're not allowed to call
themselves a "bakery"). Bakeries have pretty tight regulations on what they
can call category X bread. Whole bread has a minimum amount of whole flour
in it, less than that, and it's illegal to call it "whole". For instance,
"traditionnal French bread" can only be made with flour, water, levain and
salt - no conservative, no fat, no colouring... This even applies to
industrial bread sold under plastic in supermarket, if it's not whole, it
cannot be called whole (usually, it will be called "brown American bread" or
something like that ).
Europe does have the advantage that we put a very strict definition on what
a food product exactly is. That why we have so many products called
"fermented milk product" instead of yogourt (didn't meet the definition of
yogourt), "milk based spreading paste" (wasn't close enough to the
definition of cheese), "chocolate flavoured candy" (it's not REAL
chocolate)... This ensures that what you buy is actually reasonnably close
to what you're expecting, once you have learnt to pay attention...