{"id":3813,"date":"2024-07-10T06:34:22","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T10:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3813"},"modified":"2024-07-10T06:34:54","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T10:34:54","slug":"daily-bread-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/daily-bread-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Bread"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>

People have been baking bread for thousands of years.

But it sure hasn\u2019t looked, felt, or tasted like Wonder Bread, the loaf that so many Americans grew up eating.

About 500 years ago, European bread-making began to reflect class distinctions. Peasants and laborers ate dark, coarse bread. High class people (that is, \u201cthe upper crust\u201d) typically ate loaves made with finely textured, highly refined wheat flour. 

Such processed flour produced a lighter-colored loaf. 

\u201cWhite bread\u201d therefore became known as \u201crich people\u2019s bread.\u201d Only wealthy people could afford to buy it.

All that changed in 1921. 

The Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis introduced a loaf made with batter, not dough. It was spongy, inexpensive, and light in color. Best of all, since it was factory-baked, it was untouched by human hands \u2013 a big selling point at the time. 

One of the company execs named it Wonder Bread. 

The package featured multi-colored balloons, since he had recently felt a sense of wonder when watching a balloon race staged at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

According to Libby O\u2019Connell\u2019s book The American Plate<\/em>, people from all classes and ethnicities could now feel as if they were privileged. Everyone could afford to buy the lightest-colored bread anyone had ever seen.

Not only that, Wonder Bread was one of the first national brands to be pre-sliced. 

As homemakers gradually entered the American workforce at mid-century, few had time to bake their own bread, let alone slice it. Wonder Bread seemed like a wonderful idea.

Gradually, however, it became clear that this new invention and its light-colored cousins that were also on the market were missing something important \u2013 like virtually all the nutrients that make bread such a crucial staple of the human diet. 

\u201cMen and women shall not live by bread alone,\u201d Scripture says. Or at least Wonder Bread. If you tried to do so, you would place yourself in danger of significant vitamin deficiencies. 

Factories \u2013 which were bleaching their flour in order to make it super-white \u2013 were unwittingly removing critical nutrients. 

By the 1960s, Wonder Bread began adding 12 of those back into the factory formula. Thus was born the marketing slogan that so many of us experienced as kids: \u201cWonder Bread builds strong bodies 12 ways.\u201d

Of course, you could always just eat delicious, dark, whole grain bread with all the natural ingredients intact \u2013 which is exactly what American consumers began doing once again a few decades ago. That\u2019s also why Wonder Bread\u2019s share of the market has pretty much become toast.  

Or maybe you\u2019ll just skip eating bread altogether: \u201cNo, thanks, I\u2019m trying to cut down on carbs.\u201d

That option would have been unthinkable in the ancient world. 

Bread was the central component of every meal.  It was literally the staff and the stuff of life. 

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, \u201cGive us today our daily bread,\u201d he was talking to people who were sometimes only one day away from starvation. Bread made all the difference.

All of that provides the background to Jesus\u2019 outrageous claim in John 6:35: \u201cI am the Bread of Life.\u201d 

He was essentially saying, \u201cI\u2019m the one thing you need to get through the next 24 hours; don\u2019t try to do life without me.\u201d

Which, if true, would definitely be a whole lot better than sliced bread.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here People have been baking bread for thousands of years. But it sure hasn\u2019t looked, felt, or tasted like Wonder Bread, the loaf that so many Americans grew up eating. About 500 years ago, European bread-making began to reflect class distinctions. Peasants and laborers ate dark, coarse bread. High class people (that is, \u201cthe… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3814,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[766],"class_list":["post-3813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bread-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3816,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3813\/revisions\/3816"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}