One of my pet ‘hates’ is when you buy something that appears to be “more than”, (to utilise one of the advertising catch-phrases that I like so much), only to discover that it’s “no better than” a cheaper – "less-than" – product!
Like the words “less fat”, “only natural ingredients”, “organic”, “farm produced”, “natural goodness”, and all the other marketing phrases, the word “Stoneground”, (as in bread), seems to conjure up all the natural goodness of a country loaf, but it’s no more than a marketeer’s bait to catch the “Au natural” brigade!
Last week, on our customary Friday afternoon foray to one of the grocery supermarkets here in Milton Keynes, I found I was too late to get my usual sliced, wholemeal loaf as they'd sold out of the one I usually buy. So, after spending far too long debating whether to buy a different variety, one I hadn't tried before, I saw a bargain! It was the supermarket’s own-brand 'Stoneground Wholemeal' sliced loaf at a 'special' price, and the same price as I normally pay for their ‘ordinary’ wholemeal sliced! So, no contest!
“Stoneground” equals “more than”, doesn't it? Well, the health-food adverts are always playing up the ‘goodness’ of stoneground flour over ‘normal’ flour… so into my trolley went that loaf!
Now, I've eaten home-made sandwiches, (henceforth called “sarnies”, because that’s the colloquialism I always use), for the past 40+ years for my work-a-day pack-up. They're always hand-made by yours truly, and fresh-made every evening, 5 days a week – bar holidays – and for the past several years using wholemeal bread. So I rather think I know sliced bread - especially wholemeal.
As I took this loaf out of the fridge on Sunday evening to make my sarnies, I was really looking forward to a delicious new taste at the start of the new working week. Having been “forced” into the purchase of this stoneground loaf, I was anticipating all the goodness from the wheatfield, milled by hand in a little country windmill... oh how the adverts can suspend reality, eh?!
But, like a wine connoisseur, I opened the plastic bag and smelled the aroma of this “more than” loaf! “Wow, this is going to be good”, I thought as I took out four slices. But as they lay on the kitchen worktop, those slices didn't look any different at all to my usual 'ordinary' wholemeal loaf!
What? I looked at the bag again to satisfy myself that it definitely said “Stoneground” – and it did! What's more, equally 'as usual', as I spread my cholesterol-busting, (and grotty tasting), margarine ever so thinly onto the slices, they also tore just as easily as the butter knife slid across the slice and the margarine snagged the soft bread slice. Just as my usual brand of ordinary wholemeal does! “I've been had!” I said aloud. "It ain't no better at all!"
When Ann and I visited an ancient, but working, watermill, one holiday in Devon, and saw the differences between the types of flour, one of things which stood out was the ‘grit’ in stoneground flour. I understand that ‘normal’ flour is milled with steel rollers, not with huge, stone, millstones, as our forefathers did. Therefore, your ‘ordinary’ bakers loaf, (whether a local baker, supermarket baked, or produced by the million by Kingsmill or Warburtons, etc.), won’t have that grit in it that naturally comes off the stone millstones when they turn against each other. So I was expecting ‘grit’, as well as more of the chaff from the wheat, in this supermarket own-brand ‘stoneground’ loaf… not a bit of it! No grit, no chaff, nothing at all which said "stoneground", and it was as tasteless as the cheapo brands sold as "value" loaves. What a con! It was just as well I only paid the same money as for my usual bread. Stoneground… Ha! So be warned, “more than” might not be anything “more than” a fancy wrapper!
As it says on many advertising boards “Buyer Beware!”
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