Bad Bread

We walked into the Montauk Bake Shop last weekend, looking for some bread to eat for breakfast. They had a pumpernickel loaf that looked suspiciously identical to the white loaf, just brown, but I bought it anyway. At least it's made by a bakery, I thought.

It turned out to be a truly wretched loaf. Tough, flavorless, and unappetizing. So much so that we bought an industrial rye bread the next day, and resolved to think about what to do with the pumpernickel later. I am trying to find a way to use it. The rye bread wasn't any good, of course, but it was a perfectly acceptable vehicle for apricot jam.

The whole episode made me think about one of the truths underlying the current power of our large food conglomerates. Simply put, on average they provide tastier food for lower prices than single proprietors. Am I saying that your local bakery isn't as good as Wonder Bread? No, of course not. Many local bakeries are much better, and some transcendent. But what people sometimes forget is that for a long time, local meant unpredictable, unhygienic, and just plain old bad. Ben & Jerry's isn't better than Grom, but it is better than the bad "artisan gelato" we had in Montauk. IHOP, sad to say, beats up on many local diners. McDonald's, yes McDonald's, does what it does better than some local burger joints. The alternative, in other words, to industrial food from some heartless factory is often terrible food from a local scoundrel.

Of course, here in New York we're insulated from that to a large extent by what has become an extraordinarily ruthless food market. But that wasn't always the case, and one need not think back too far to remember a New York where Starbucks was a dramatic, world changing improvement to the coffee scene. Yes, yes, local, local local. But let's remember what our industrial friends have bought us.