Bread Matter

One of my hobbies for the past few years has been baking bread and cakes. It's in this way I discovered a possible error in our civilisation's understanding of reality. So this is a public service announcement I've been meaning to get to for some time.

When I started making bread, sometimes I didn't do a very good job. The dough didn't get cooked all the way, the temperature was too high, I left it in the oven too long or not long enough, etc. So it wasn't really a surprise that sometimes I'd get a peculiar stomachache from eating it but it was a sort of ache I'd never experienced before. Finally, when I thought I had all the timing and temperature right, and I was confident in all the ingredients, I still occasionally found I got this ache. I couldn't figure out what was causing it and it would last for days and seriously affect my mood. It was like having a rock in my stomach and it made me glum that I'd done something stupid and possibly seriously impacted my health. But I couldn't figure out what I did wrong, which was also depressing in itself. I googled and googled, I went back over each step and I never could figure it out.

Then, on Saint Patrick's Day last year, I watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People. And something about this scene struck me as it never had before:

"Did no-one tell you about the hazards of hot bread?" No, Katie! No-one ever had! Neither had google!

If you google "The dangers of hot bread" now, you generally find articles and forums in which people say it's a myth, that it's not dangerous at all, it just might not taste as good. However, there are things like this 1858 issue of Scientific American that say it is indeed very dangerous.

Hot bread never digests. After a long season of tumbling and working about in the stomach, it will begin to ferment, and will eventually be passed out of the stomach as an unwelcome tenant of that delicate organ, but never digests

Maybe for a lot of people, it has no ill effect. Maybe it's psychosomatic for some people but I can't say it is for me because I didn't even know about it. It's been over a year since that Saint Patrick's Day, I've made a lot of bread and I've always waited for it to cool completely before eating it, usually for 24 hours. And I've never had that stomachache again.

So, thank you Darby O'Gill and the Little People.