I eat a lot of bread!
Last Friday, Arduous wrote a hilarious piece in response to Michael Pollan’s request for readers’ “food rules”. Instead of healthy rules for eating, her post, “Things That I Call Dinner,” confesses menu items such as candy, s’mores, and plain spinach with apples.
My own rule for Michael Pollan, which I left in a comment to his article, is “Real food doesn’t come packaged in plastic.”
That’s all very well and good. What I didn’t say was that sometimes days go by during which I’m too busy or lazy to eat anything but plastic-free bread. That can’t be healthy, can it?
Granted, we do have the best bakery in town. La Farine on College Ave bakes fresh, whole grain, organic bread every day. And I bring my organic cotton ecobag to carry it home… avoiding all packaging, paper or plastic.
Keeping it fresh is another story. Once home, I store the bread inside the cloth bag with a plastic grocery bag wrapped around the outside. I just keep reusing the same plastic grocery bag. In the refrigerator, the bread can last for weeks.
But usually it doesn’t need to last that long. Because it’s, you know, dinner!
Okay, in the interest of getting my act back together in the health department, I’m going to go eat an orange. Are there any supposedly healthy foods that you consume to excess? Once again, I’m looking for some company in the confessional.
P.S. Michael’s birthday is today. He’s getting so freaking old! I may take a day off from blogging. We’ll see.
Crunch — Probably putting bread into anything airtight will work. I don’t want plastic touching my bread. So the cloth bag inside the reused plastic grocery bag works fine for me — both in the frig and freezer. It uses less room, too. But I’ll bet I could store it the way I store pretzels… cloth bag inside airtight tin (which originally housed flavored popcorn.) I’ve had some organic pretzels stored that way (so no preservatives) for months, and they are still crisp.
One thing I know is that a cloth bag by itself will not do it. The bread gets hard as a rock. It has to be inside an airtight bag or container.