The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?
And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.
PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.
Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.
Also, store bought bread today lasts a lot longer than store bought bread from when I was growing up. I can't imagine the chemical concoction that allows for this...
> Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?
Because the commercial bakery wants the flour in a 100 lb bag, but the retail store needs 100 1 lb bags. And the commercial packaging lines can't easily swap to packing their product into 1 lb bags.
Restaurants and factories use much bigger (and plainer-looking) bags of flour than end-consumers, so retooling probably requires changes to the "paper bag" supply chain...
There’s no “bread” in bread, so the commercial bakeries are always going bankrupt, consolidating and squeezing every penny possible out of the business.
The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available.
> The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available
Huh? It’s very common for larger supermarkets to have their own bakeries (even in small cities) in the US. I get fresh bread at the Safeway in my city...
Bakeries in The Netherlands do quite well actually. Although they also sell patisserie and sometimes (too expensive) baking stuff, the main part is bread.
If it works, it's delicious and you end up eating heaps more than usual.
If your first two or three attempts a baking bread fail, then you end up becoming one of those people with 85% of a 20lb bag of flour in the cupboard waiting for the weevils to move in...
(The temp calibration on my oven is way out. Doesn't matter too much for roasting chickens or cooking lasagne, but baking is more temperamental than that, and way too easy to fuck up. Luckily I only bought a 1kg bag of flour to fail hard with...)
Wheat flour's talents tend towards baking because of its high gluten content, so in a sense it's "wasted" on porridge. But if your oven isn't working it's less of a waste than literally throwing it away!
This only helps much if the calibration is off linearly - in my case not only is the calibration off but the temperature flux up/down is more pronounced than it should be. I still make do, but it's definitely very easy for stuff to come out burnt or undercooked as a result.
Other have suggested ways to check your oven temp control, but one way to mitigate the problem slightly is to add some thermal mass to your oven. Unglazed quarry tile makes a nice baking surface and a double layer of that will prevent big temp oscillations in your oven.
When the temperature sensor in caked with something that provides thermal insulation the resulting lag in temperature feedback would mess with the oven's temperature control.
