Interesting Facts

According to "The Grocer", Brits are shunning sliced white bread in favour of freshly baked loaves and healthier wholegrain alternatives. (In 2015 Britain's biggest bakers, Warburtons, Hovis and Kingsmill, lost £121 million in revenue, and a large 750g or 800g loaf costs 13.3per cent less than it did a year ago. There's a saying in English, "The best thing since sliced bread", this may be irrelevant now.)

Ac cording to a survey commissioned by Love Food / Hate Waste, nearly 1 in 5 UK households admits to binning an entire loaf of bread before even opening or slicing it. (Emma Marsh, head of the Love Food / Hate Waste campaign, run by the government’s waste advisory body Wrap, said: “...sometimes if we don’t finish a loaf, it goes stale and ends up in the bin. There are simple things we can do to use it up or store it differently, to reduce food waste and save money.” I often throw away parts of a loaf, but rarely the whole thing.  I usually make breadcrumbs from stale bread.)

A poll, by decorating brand Harris, has revealed Britains favourite (and least favourite) smells. (The top 20 smells were:- Freshly baked bread Bacon Freshly cut grass Coffee Cakes baking in the oven The seaside Freshly washed clothes A Sunday roast  Fish and chips Fresh flowers A real Christmas tree Roses Vanilla Scented candles Log fires Lavender Lemon Chocolate Barbeques Cinnamon The most hated smells were: Bins Drains Body odour Sewage Vomit Rotten milk Rotting food Public toilets Nappies Old trainers Feet Manure Morning breath Burning plastic Garlic breath Exhaust fumes Sports changing rooms Blue cheese Bleach Fish What are yours?)

According to The Canal & River Trust  in the UK, every year, Britons throw 6 million loaves of bread into the waterways, rivers and canals of the UK. (The reason?  We love feeding the ducks and swans.   Apart from the waste, there are other problems: Firstly it's not their natural diet, and secondly the bread is damaging Britain's waterways, casing algae, disease and encouraging pests. The trust is asking people to feed the birds with grapes and peas instead. I wonder what the birds will make of that.)

According to a survey conducted by sweetener manufacturer Splenda, chocolate, cheese and crisps are the treats that are most likely to tempt people away from a diet. (Half the respondents said chocolate was their downfall, for a third it was crisps, and a quarter said cheese was their biggest temptation. Other foods mentioned were bread, cakes, biscuits, sweets and Chinese meals. The fourth biggest craving mentioned was a glass of chilled white wine on a night out. What! No beer?)

A survey carried out by linguistics researchers at Manchester University found there were 7 different words for a bread roll in the UK. (In the South it was generally called a roll. In the North a bap or a bun. In the North-west a barm, or a muffin. In the Midlands a cob. In Yorkshire a tea cake! Now I'll go along with roll or a cob, but to me a bap is a softer, more floury bread roll, a muffin is an American cake, a bun is sweet and hopefully full of cream, and a tea cake is full of dried fruit and has to be toasted and served with lots of butter.)

Supermarket store Asda charged a customer £450 for a loaf of bread. (The receipt, which contained their motto 'Saving you money every day', showed that the loaf of Roberts multigrain bread, advertised for 69p, had set him back £450. How could this have happened? The customer used their self-service checkout. Now I know why I don't trust them.)

According to research commissioned by Millgate Homes the perfect scent to sell a home is a mixture of white tea and fig. (To date it has been traditional to brew up a pot of coffee, bake bread or put out freshly cut flowers when prospective buyers come to look round a home, and indeed the smell of baking bread and freshly brewed coffee can still be used to sell older properties, because they are associated with feeling homely and warm, but the scents of white tea and fig are better for new builds because they have fresh and clean designs. I don't even know what white tea smells like.)

According to retail consultancy Conlumino, food prices will soar by 17.8% by 2018. (Global food shortages will put an extra 25p on the price of a loaf of bread. The household food bill for the average family in the UK will shoot up; a family spending £500 a month on food six years ago could now have to find as much as £800 – an extra £3,600 a year.  The UK's annual food bill will rise by £19.6 billion. Erratic' weather, and growing global demand for meat and grain are to blame. Time to get the spade out and start digging those vegetable patches over, or maybe if we didn't waste as much:- http://www.afactaday.co.uk/2013/01/interesting-fact-waste_12.html.)

According to research carried out by WRAP (the UK's Waste and Resources Action Programme ) , the average UK household throws away enough food to make 6 meals every week (The waste costs almost £60 a month per family, but, according to farming UK if you add it all together it's worth a whopping £12.5 billion a year.  The top three foods that we are throwing away uneaten are those every day essentials: bread, potatoes and milk. The equivalent of 24 million slices of bread, 5.8 million potatoes and 5.9 million glasses of milk are wasted daily.) Source

L-Cysteine is an amino acid used to prolong shelf-life in commercially produced bread. (It can be found in duck and chicken feathers and cow horns, but most of the L-Cysteine used in food production comes from human hair. Most of the hair used to make L-Cysteine comes from China, where it's gathered from barbershops and hair salons. You can avoid L-Cysteine baking your own bread, as it is not an additive in flour, but if you find the idea of eating other people's hair, steer clear of fast food places such as McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and Burger King, who allegedly use L-Cysteine as an additive too.) Source

According to a survey carried out by website Just-Eat, people in the UK buy at least five kitchen gadgets that they never use. (From herb scissors to bread making machines, it all adds up to a scary £2 billion of gadgets sitting around doing nothing. I have to hold my hand up to being guilty of this, but only because the bread making machine I bought is useless.) Source: Daily Express

According to the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) the cheapest lunchtime meal in Britain is the toast sandwich. (This shouldn't be confused with the toasted sandwich, or toasty. A toast sandwich, popular in mid-Victorian times, consists of two slices of bread around a slice of toast. The meal, which will cost you 7.5p to make, was first promoted by Victorian food writer Mrs Beeton. Here is the recipe:- Ingredients 3 slices of bread Butter Salt and pepper Method 1. Toast a thin slice of bread. 2. Butter two slices of bread and sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. 3. Place the toast between the two slices of bread-and-butter to form a sandwich. 4. Eat. Bon appetite!)

The first bread slicing machine was invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA in 1912. (His first machine was destroyed in a fire, but he got another machine up and working in 1928 and the first commercially sold slices were sold by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, who produced their first slices on July 6th. Nowadays we call any good idea of invention "the best thing since sliced bread".)

powered by ODEO According to the Observer, four ingredients have been added to bread by law since WW2 – niacin, thiamine, iron and calcium. (There is now a campaign underway to have folic acid added to bread in the UK. The FSA (Food Standards Agency) is going to advise the Department of Health to introduce the mandatory fortification of white and brown flour, but to exempt wholemeal flour. In America a wide range of products have to include set amounts of the vitamin - bread, corn meals, rice, noodles, macaroni and other grain products. A total of 39 countries now add folic acid to flour, including Canada, Israel and Mexico. The Republic of Ireland, Australia and Canada are considering doing the same. But, folic acid is found naturally in green leafy vegetables such as spinach and broccoli. So, just eat your greens. )