Convenience is a Waste of Time

Fresh bread can mean so many things, and yet it has taken on a whole new meaning for me. Fresh loaf of bread from market – I agree it is amazingly consistent, nicely sliced, reasonable shelf life, and relatively inexpensive. Fresh bread from a bakery – still consistent, sometimes artisanal, less shelf life, more expensive. Fresh bread at home – always artisanal (code for inconsistent), even less shelf life, usually known and natural ingredients, more expensive. But what about the flour? It is the main ingredient, accounting for about 75% of most bread recipes.

Out of convenience, most flour you can buy has many nutrients removed, then artificially added back in with the superior sounding enriched label, not to mention whether it is bleached. That processing allows flour to have a shelf life of months, even years. Does that qualify as fresh bread? On the other hand, natural flour milled from whole wheat berries have a shelf life of weeks, maybe a month. But this is old news, and convenience does triumph here – the world has been consuming enriched bread for decades. So how does it waste time?

My main form of exercise is running, er, jogging. Over the past few years, I have jogged hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometers. I jog enough to know how my body responds. After three rest days, my body already begins losing conditioning, so I try to exercise at least three times per week. Recently, after five rest days, I went for a short jog expecting my body to feel sluggish. To my surprise, I felt significantly more energetic than I normally would have. The next day, I jogged the same distance and felt about how I normally feel after five rest days but even worse than the day before. Now, when I exercise on consecutive days, I normally feel better on each succeeding day as my body adapts a little more. But this time, feeling worse made me really take notice about what was going on with my body.

The one difference in my body was eating freshly milled bread the day before. Probably for the first time in my life, I ate literal, natural bread. Now I am still fairly ignorant about bread, nutrition, and digestion, but I wonder about the difference between natural and artificial carbohydrates. My serendipitious experiment was one data point, and I hope to repeat it, but wow, I can hardly ignore such a significant data point. So now I am very interested in the topic and would appreciate any info on it. But imagine how much more energy our bodies might have with natural foods, that did not take any more time to prepare. The cost is probably more, but I believe it is due to eonomies of scale. How is that for convenient?