Let Them Eat Cake
In a month's time the extraction rate of flour for the national loaf will be reduced to 80 per cent. This means that bread will be whiter, keep better, cut better, and be appreciated by the cows, pigs and chickens who get the by-products—and the British public, we are told, will like it. It is a suspicion of something almost threaten• ing in the last assertion which may cause some ungrateful hackles to rise. For one of the things that the British public got into is head during the war was that the whitest bread was not necessarily the most nutritious ; and as to the old prejudice in favour of bread which should look like and, if possible, taste like, the driven snow, it seems to have died some years ago. Americans who crossed the Atlantic in bread's darkest hour and actually said they preferred the then coffee-coloured British product to the stuff they got at home may have helped to kill the good old beliefs—as may those English- men who crossed the Atlantic in the other direction and found, somewhat to their own surprise, that they agreed. But all this is no doubt the basest ingratitude on the part of certain cranks towards the millers, the bakers and the Ministry of Food, who, after all, have no other object than to do good Whiter bread will be " more generally acceptable." Mr. Maurice Webb and the bakers say so, and that should be enough. But they had-better leave the finding of reasons, and the killing of suspicions that the change has some- thing to do with the relative prices of animal feeding stuffs and bread, to the millers. For when Mr. Webb says that it is not so important to preserve the nutritional value of the lbaf now tbat her foods are available, he may incur the displeasure of those pporters of the Labour Government who cannot afford, or do want, to forgo the benefit of good bread. Not for him the part Marie Antoinette. He can leave that to the bakers, who actually ye pointed out that, anyway, the cakes will be nicer.
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