The Evening Star FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 1946. DARKER BREAD.

Evening Star, Issue 25776, 26 April 1946, Page 6

The Evening Star FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 1946. DARKER BREAD.

So far as wheat is concerned, the Government can be congratulated on having introduced compulsory saving in the most practical way. From May next, flour mills throughout the Dominion are to manufacture flour of 80 per cent., instead of 75 per cent., extraction. The public will get something which the food experts have always recommended, which will be more in the nature of wholemeal bread. Unfortunately, all plans must have some disadvantage. The extra bran and pollard which will be left in this darker bread will not be available for poultry; less poultry will mean fewer eggs; and that will be a deprivation and to some a hardship. Again, whatever may be better for the public health, the public taste prefers white and not darker bread. AH these, however, cannot be accounted more than small considerations if the raised extraction will save 500,000 bushels of wheat a year, which will go to starving Europe or starving China instead of coming here from Australia. To keep souls and bodies alive in those two places, Mr Hoover has said, will require eleven million tons of cereals' in the next four months, and when all suggestions have.been carried out it baffles him to see where the last million tons are to come from. Britain is cutting down again on her exiguous food provision; her extraction rate, which was 85 per cent, in the war years and 80 per cent, since then, has been restored to tho former level. America is doing her part. No fanciful objections to economies, or disadvantages that can bo borne or overcome, must prevent our full part from being done here. Eighty per cent, extraction for bread was to begin last mouth in America. "The new darker bread,"' the ' Christian Science Monitor' then reported, " will not be as dark as originally painted, it now develops." It would be " what is more accurately described as a cream-col-oured loaf. Tasters who have sampled tbe new bread report that it tastes much liluJ the white bread to which Americans are accustomed, with suggestions of a ' nutty ' flavour, as some described it. It will have a higher food content than the present unenriched flour." Again, " bread baked with the new flour here in the millers' experimental and research kitchens is a pale brownish colour, officially described as ' eeru.' Other changes which will be noticed by consumers will be a tendency for bread baked with the flour to dry more rapidly, nor will the flour keep quite as well as a high-grade white flour. The tjour also admits of less tolerance in baking: that is, culinarv mistakes will show more boldly when the 80 ner cent, flour is used, and failures will be morn likelv." Those faults of the new bread will bo small if it means saving "f lives. Meanwhile tho Government, should be working to secure the crowing of more wheat in New Zealand. That would not affect the immediate crisis of humanitv, but it would be more effective than flour altering if more bad harvests overseas should bo experienced, and the crisis be prolonged. The farmers, we are told, can--1 not produce wheat here in sufficient

quantity "because of stabilisation mill because the Government Ims allowed other prices to soar. No unsolvablo problem, therefore, has to be met. Also, the voluntary rationing of foods that is involved in coupon saving will be as necessary whether bread is wliito or " darker."