Bread Riot

There used to be bread riots around the world. The rioters were poor people, often housewives, who were angered by the high price for bread. This is understandable as bread was, and remains, a main stay on the kitchen table. I think a new bread riot is called for now. Just look at how bread is priced. The simplest of breads, a ‘Tuscan loaf’ for example, usually cost four, five dollars a loaf, with hardly fifty cents of material cost. That is more expansive than most cuts of meat and almost all vegetables. They are nothing but flour, water and yeast, some of the cheapest material available to us. The mark-up then is clearly outrages. Some may say these are boutique bread made for the pretentious, so who cares, really. That is true to an extent, but isn’t it the price that make it so? Factory breads are cheaper but use more expansive ingredients like milk. But then these breads can be rolled into little pill size balls, and so, in reality, there is very little food in them. In both cases, then, the price of bread is extraordinarily inflated. Is it not time for a correction?