Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 February 1892 — OLD-FASHIONED BLACK BREAD. [ARTICLE]

OLD-FASHIONED BLACK BREAD.

It Contained Much More Nourishment than White. Improvement and advancement are too often confounded with changes in fashion and custom. Thus it is with wheat bread, which fashion demands shall be white. To meet this demand science puts forth her every effort and now that perfection, so far as to quality, has been reached we have the satisfaction of knowing that in the effort to satisfy fashion we have destroyed those elements in the wheat that were the most useful and nourishing. It seems strange, in this enlightened time, that more scientific attention, as well as common sense, is bestowed on the manufacture of beer than that of bread. In Germany the brewer so hardened as to adulterate beer is immediately imprisoned and is reviled by his friends and the public, but so long as he uses no poisonous substances a baker may adulterate his bread with impunity. Wheat and water contain, according to a prominent English physician, all the elements necessary for man. Besides lime, salts and phosphoric acid, the creators of nerve, bone, and tissue, the fat, cellulose and cereolinc are removed from wheat in the present processes of Hour-making for the sake of procuring a perfectly white bread. To remedy this it would be necessary to entirely change the fashion, but we need not go hack to black bread, such as our grand parents were so familiar with. With our present knowledge of bread making it would be easy to perfect a machine that would thoroughly pulverize every part of the bran so as to avoid its irritating tendencies. Until that is done we must use stimulating food, which will imperfectly supply the lack of the necessary elements which we remove from wheat flour. In doing this we at the same time unduly increase the heart action and shorten our lives proportionally. This question has received the careful consideration of London scientists and a whole-wheat bread is made there which, if it was introduced among the bread-eating public, would completely revolutionize th» present bread-making system and the life of man would be lengthened.