OUR DAILY BREAD

My mother, Akua Dufie of Jamasi is an expert in pastries. She never went through any formal pastry training but she could do cakes,’pooloo’,atwimo,meat pie and most notably bread. She is now retired.

Growing up on bread as you can imagine, I developed a very sophisticated taste for bread primarily because I grew up on my mother’s bread, the best bread you could ask for. I used to accompany her when she went to the flour mill to make the dough for bread so I could get some left over dough to mold my own bread. We called the molded left over dough ‘kaakyire’(last born) .My siblings and I fought ‘civil wars’ over them.

The two varieties that were common growing up in the 90’s were the ‘tea’ and ‘sugar’ bread and to some extent the brown bread. You could get some cases of coloured bread, yes, and coloured bread!, where the dough was adorned with an array of ‘edible’ dyes. The simple ingredients I remember my mother use were Fluor, salt, margarine, yeast, nutmeg and water. Yet her bread was excellent.

Recently, there have been a huge surge in bread making and I am sure you have noticed bread sellers all over our streets and neighbourhoods.This surge has necessitated producers to become innovative to appeal to consumers. This has led to a host of new bread varieties emerging including cake bread, mushroom bread, coconut bread, honey bread, milk bread, chocolate bread and a host of others I cannot immediately recollect.

Last week, I bought bread at a traffic intersection and that experience provoked this piece. The bread was of the cake variety and upon taking the bread which I must admit met my sophisticated bread taste, it left a bitter taste in my mouth by opening my rear valve for almost three continuous days.

What was in the bread to have caused me such misery?  Bromate? A banned chemical which is used in bread making to make the bread firm and elastic (twaeeen in TWI). Could it have been an ingredient that makes the bread taste sweeter than it should, but unhealthy? Could the ‘too sweet’ taste be the use of artificial sweeteners such as saccharin and/or aspartame?  

These are questions I have struggled to find answers to but it tells me one thing, we may be consuming dangerous ingredients put in by these bread producers all in the name of making the bread taste sweet and feel firm.

 I am yet to see an FDA approval and the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) approval seal on any bread packaging.

The pertinent question that logically arises is, are these bread sellers being checked by the relevant authority, Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) to ensure that we are not being poisoned or as a friend will put it, are we being slowly poisoned by these bread producers? There cannot be any excuse for the FDA not to act, because, I can say with a high degree of confidence that every household in Ghana consumes bread including that of the president, the FDA and GSA authority bosses.

I will therefore appeal to the FDA to start sampling these myriad of bread varieties on our streets to ascertain their wholesomeness or otherwise because our daily bread must be safe.

By: Kofi Konadu Boateng.

Twitter - @KKBoateng1

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