the bread machine of wonders

Last year my mom cut gluten (part of the wheat germ) out of her life, because her doctor thought it may have been causing the debilitating migraines she had been suffering several times a week for decades. Well, it ended up being attributable not to gluten, but to a hormone called progesterone, but I still got a bread maker out of the deal.

My mom has had this machine since I was a kid, but she got a new one because this one was gluten-contaminated. So I told her (asked politely) to hand that sucker down.


I don't know many other people who have bread machines, but everyone should, because these things are quite nifty. They combine the best of both worlds: the ease of minimal effort and the wholesome satisfaction of eating something you yourself made. I mean it when I say these things require no baking skills. Or mixing skills. You just measure ingredients and pour them in the pre-formed bread pan. The machine does the kneading and rising and baking for you.

And, of course, there's health benefits from baking your own bread, but if you already buy your bread from a baker or minimally-processed whole-wheat loaves from companies like Brownberry, it is primarily a feel-good look-what-I-can-do thing (like when you give quarters to the Salvation Army Santa... you walk away smiling because you are such a good person but how much change is a few quarters gonna bring?) But, if you're eating squishy white bread, you'll definitely be doing your body a preservative-free favor.

I make it with a ratio of 5 parts whole wheat flour to 1 part bread flour (because it doesn't rise as well with all whole wheat... but once I drag my ass to a health food store and buy gluten, I'll make it 100% WW.)

But when I was a kid, my mom used to bake white loaves for the PB & J's she packed in my lunch. I can't remember if I voiced my distress at the time, but I hated it. Not because it tasted bad (it didn't) but because it looked different. And all the prying judgment-filled eyes of my peers noticed, and everyone asked why it looked so funny, and while I still ate it, I would hold my sandwiches under the lunch table, embarrassed, wishing I could just be like all the other kids with their pristine, blindingly white Wonder Bread.

Because even kids know this is weird (although this is wheat... so imagine it a few shades lighter):

And this is normal:

Which, now that the years have stacked up, strikes me as quite an odd dilemma in the life of a kid. Who cares what your bread looks like? I also got teased for having (and eating) apples in my lunch. Is this food-related ridicule universal? I went to elementary school in an area where a larger-than-average percentage of adults were poor and pretty uneducated, and for whom the struggle to be able to tame hungry little bellies overrode the need to make sure that sustenance was healthy. (Or, perhaps in some situations, the culprit was more ignorance and contentment with ignorance than lack of money. That's worth arguing.) So most of my friends ate a lot of Little Debbie or her generic counterparts. Was it different in more affluent areas?

This is dipping heavily into a topic I'd like to discuss more in depth at a later time--how to feed kids healthy things they'll like, and what factors other than taste affect their detestation of certain foods. Because, whenever the day comes, you can bet my kids will be carrying the same funny-looking sandwiches in their futuristic lunch pails that I carried way, way back in the prehistoric 1990s.