I enjoy baking my own bread for myself and family but with the cost of living crisis is it a luxury that we can still afford?

How I started baking bread is lost in the past. It probably was when somebody in a newspaper praised bread made from a bread machine. Eventually we bought one and the taste and texture of the loaf was much better than anything bought. After a couple of years I started wondering if I could bake my own bread without a machine. I bought a few second hand books on the subject and turned out my first loaf which was well received by my family. After a while, I started reading books by famous bakers such as Richard Bertinet then milk loaves, seeded bread and brioche started to appear on the table. Feeling confident in my bread production I took a deep breath and had a go at the holy grail of baking bread - sourdough! Now I enjoy experimenting with my own recipes. But with increasing costs of flour, butter and electricity is it a luxury?

My challenge was simple - can I bake a popular loaf such as the farmhouse white for the same price, or less than, than a bought one?

It has been a few years since I bought any bread, therefore walking around the bread shelves of a supermarket I was surprised to see such a wide range of loaves which covered every combination imaginable from plain to seeded and in different sizes and shapes. The supermarkets have tapped into the sourdough market but there is an ongoing debate about whether it is genuine sourdough because they can use bakers yeast to accelerate the process. On most high streets there are family owned bakeries such as Taylors of Bruton in Somerset, or Oxford’s in Dorset. They offer a reduced range of bread that include farmhouse white, seeded and sourdough as well as very tempting cakes, tarts and biscuits. Finally there is the artisan baker who turns up at farmer’s markets and usually concentrate on french breads, sourdough, seeded and flavoured such as olive and cheese. The price of the breads reflects the production process. The supermarkets rely on the Chorleywood Bread Process that mass produces loaves in their thousands per hour which can get the cost down to as little as 39p for a loaf. Whereas a family bakery has higher higher labour costs and therefore are more expensive. With the spectrum of bought bread my challenge was to see where the cost of producing my own bread would lie.

The key ingredients for baking bread are: flour, water, yeast and salt. A few other ingredients can be added to affect the taste such as sugar and butter. Cost for the different ingredients can vary considerably. For example strong bread flour can range from £1.30 for a 1.5kg bag for a supermarket brand to £2.40 for 1.5kg bag for a top branded product. Personally I can’t tell the difference between the flours because most of the taste comes from the crust which depends on how the bread is baked.

The breakdown of the approximate costs for making a 800g farmhouse white is as follows:

Ingredients	Amount	Cost ( pence )
Flour	500g	50
Yeast	3g	5
Sugar	4g	1
Butter	25g	20
Salt	6g	1
Water	350g	3
Electricity	0.8kWh	30
TOTAL		110

The total cost for my farmhouse white bread is £1.10 which is less than a typical farmhouse white from a supermarket costing approximately £1.20 therefore the costs are still comparable. The majority of the cost is the flour with electricity coming a close second. With some careful shopping such as buying the ingredients when they are on offer then the cost of my farmhouse white could be reduced further. To save a bit on electricity a number of loaves could be baked in one go which would spread the cost and could be frozen for later consumption.

Of course buying bread from the high street is more convenient that than baking it by hand which for many people with busy lives may be the best way. However, there are many advantages of baking your own bread. First their is health. Industrialised bread is one of the most common ultra-procesed foods in the UK and research is beginning to show that there are increasing health risks. Another aspect is that the ingredients can be controlled when baking your own bread. The Chorleywood Process relies on chemical improvers and antifungal agents as well as hydrogenated or fractionated fats which is being blamed for a sharp increase in gluten intolerance and allergy as well as obesity. Home baked bread uses none of these ingredients.

Another aspect to home baked bread is to do with mental health. There is a lots of satisfaction in throwing a few ingredients into a bowl, mixing it and then kneading it into life. During baking there is the intoxicating smell of fresh baked bread that fills the house and lifts everybody’s mood. Then there is the mental stimulation from learning to bake bread and the sense of achievement when you see everybody tucking into fresh slices bread. Finally it is great way to introduce children to baking and understanding how their food is made.

As the cost of living crisis worsens baking bread at home can still be a viable option compared to buying bread. Although it takes time to bake bread at home there are many benefits for health and wellbeing. We will still be cranking up the oven and watching the bread rise with its golden dome.

Back-of-the-envelop calculations can be a springboard for interesting questions about a topic. It can be used to dissect government announcements or the opinions of experts. A calculation on one of the critical elements of life - food - unearthed a lack of government action.

As the name suggest a back-of-the-envelop calculation is just that: a calculation done on a piece of paper the size of an envelop. Taking some key numbers for a topic, a quick calculation can be done to to assess whether what is being claimed makes sense. If it doesn’t then more details can be sought or the assumptions made to do the calculation can be checked. Back-of-the-envelope calculations are used regularly by engineers and scientists to quickly check whether their ideas are doable. But they can be seen being used on TV. One prominent example where the use of the back-of-the-envelop calculations is Sir John Harvey-Jones in his series The TroubleShooter, where he visited businesses that were in financial trouble. As he went around the company talking to various people he would jot down numbers in a small book then using the resulting calculations he would give advice on the best way forward. Another example is on The Dragons Den where the dragons are seen scribbling down numbers during a pitch for investment then based on their calculations may offer a deal for a stake in the business.

Recently I was reading Yanis Varoufakis’ interesting book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy when I came across the term “surplus” in connection with agriculture. The book went onto describe it it as “… simply meant any produce of the land that was left over after we had fed ourselves and replaced the seeds used to grow it in the first place.” and goes on “ … the production of agricultural surplus gave birth to the following marvels that changed humanity for ever: writing, debt, money, states, bureaucracy, armies, clergy, technology and even the first form of biochemical war.” Quite a claim.

The idea of a surplus supporting life raised questions about how many people in agriculture support the rest of the country. Searching for a few numbers on the web I found that there are approximately 466,000 people working in the agriculture industry. The population in the UK is about 67.5 mn. The back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it take one person to feed approximately 140. Is that ratio good or bad? Checking other countries such as Germany where the ratio is approximately the same as the UK. In Spain it is approximately 1 person feeding 58. The difference between Spain and the UK is probably down to levels of mechanisation. The thought that struck me while doing this calculation is that we depend on very few people to produce our food. Compared to other industries such as Management Consultancy where there are roughly the same amount of people as in agriculture yet given the UKs lack of productivity questions have to be asked about its effectiveness.

The next question that comes to mind was about the level of agricultural productivity. The UK is about 60% self sufficient in the growing of its own food. Whereas Germany food self-sufficiency is 80%. The only European country to be self-sufficient is France. Given that the global supply chains are being disrupted by climate change and geopolitics it would be prudent for the UK to increase its self sufficiency in food to say 80% ( we would still need to import food that we can’t grow such as tea and coffee etc. ).

Therefore, this increase in self sufficiency would require a 33% increase in either mechanisation or automation or employing about 100,000 more people in agriculture. The UK Goverment’s Food Strategy recognises that there needs to be an increase in food self-sufficiency but there are no clear plans to achieve that aim. For example there is lots of discussion about the increased use of robotics but looking at the current developments from companies such the Small Robot Company’s, where they are developing the exciting concept of per plant farming, it is tens of years away from main stream agriculture. There is very little discussion about how more people could be attracted into agriculture. Food production is a critical activity in our lives and the UK government must be more proactive in securing its future rather than leaving it to market forces which is undermining its sustainability.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation bypass a lot of complexity but it is a quick way to start a series of questions that digs down into the difference between what is being claimed and what is being done. Anybody who can do simple arithmetic can carry them out and in the case of government policy back-of-the-envelop calculations can be used to ask questions that can hold them to account.

In a search to find something to watch on the TV we stumbled across an old programme about cooking. It was Floyd In France, where Keith Floyd cooked his way around various regions of France. Although first broadcast over 30 years ago there is one theme running through it that is very relevant today.

Keith Floyd was a restaurateur and television personality who hosted televison cooking shows and wrote many books that combined cooking and travel. His flambouyant presentation style opened up cooking to many millions. Aided by a glass of wine and catch phrases such as “camera on the food Clive not me!” he is still remembered by many people to this day. His breakthrough series was Floyd on France which brought him into mainstream televison. In the series he cooked regional dishes in family kitchens, restaurants and on boats! He made cooking fun. A major theme that came through the programme, and all of the others that the he presented over a 25 year period, was producing delicious meals using local produce bought at local markets and produced by local farmers. Spin the clock forward to today where the world is in the grip of a Climate Crisis then the word ‘local’ means very low carbon miles.

In the western world supermarkets have developed convenience to a fine art. Food from all corners of the country, and the world, are brought to local shelves. But behind this convenience is many hundreds if not thousands of carbon miles. Take a staple of most diets in the UK, the potato. The British Potato Council estimates that the UK imports about 350,000 tonnes of potatoes a year. These are mostly the “baby” or “salad” potatoes varieties and are imported from the Middle East. Potatoes from Israel will have travelled over 2000 miles before they land in a supermarket warehouse where they could stay for over six months with a corresponding loss of nutrients. Trying to buy local potatoes fresh from the field is nearly impossible. I’m sure that Keith Floyd would be turning in his grave when he saw where we are getting our food from.

The current crop of celebrity chiefs owe a large debt to Keith Floyd for putting cooking firmly on TV which has opened up their careers. However, when they appear on the screen waving around locally grown produce it is usually heading towards an expensive restaurant and not to our tables. When they demonstrate a recipe they throw in some ingredients that can only be bought from an expensive supermarket, usually only in London, where they have some sort of connection ( watch the ‘sponsored by’ at the beginning of most programmes ). The situation is not much better in the hot bed of revolution the ‘socials’. The top Tik-Tokers such as newt, cookingwithshereen or eitan are more about the process of following the recipe and furthering their careers rather than singing the praises of locally produced food.

Ah! I hear you saying that locally produced food is too expensive. It is expensive relative to the food bought at a supermarket but their prices don’t take into account the impact it has on the environment due to its carbon miles. If there was a tax on carbon miles that would be used so that it would pay for say larger reserervoirs to irrigate crops through dry periods or improve medical support for those at risk during a heat wave, then the prices would start to look equivelant.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon with initiatives such as Growing Communities inititaive which bring together farmers and growers to supply food to their community. Their group is based on Key Principles that include: trading for social purpose, not to maximise profit, promote ways of eating and cooking that are good for people and planet. They distribute food in a low-impact and low-carbon way. This is something I feel Keith Floyd would have been proud to support.

Supermarkets will always be with us. However, just like Oil and Gas companies, they are part of the solution. Although some have a few token shelves of local produce it needs to be part of their main offering. As for celebrity chefs whether on TV or socials, how about re-invoking the pioneering spirit of Keith Floyd and work with local producers to make nutritious food that we can all afford?

Maths is the last thing you would expect to find in the middle of a popular TV programme. But during an episode of a BBC show there it was hiding behind the jokes.

Would I lie To You is a comedy panel show that was first broadcast in 2007. It consists of two teams of three people that are captained by well known comedians. A team gains a point for correctly guessing whether a statement from the opposing team is true or not, but if they guess incorrectly the opposing team gets the point. In one particular episode Lee Mack, one of the captains, read out a statement about an object that he owned, his lucky dice: ”This is my lucky dice. I can always roll a six with it in three goes.” During the next five minutes he joked his way through three attempts to roll a 6. Behind the humour there was some maths at work which show some misconceptions about chance and how probability could answer a deeper question.

There are lots of events in life that can’t be predicted with total certainty. We often use a range of words such as certain, likely, evens and impossible, to describe the likelihood of an event happening. However, maths, in particular Probability, can be used to calculate the chance of an event happening but care must be take in interpreting its results.

Dice are used in many games, including gambling, as a way to generate a random number. It is a square object with numbers 1 to 6 on each of its six sides. After it has been rolled then the number shown on the top is taken as the number that is used to proceed to the next step in the game. Probability assumes a perfect world and in the case of a dice then there are only six possibilities. To calculate the probability of a particular number being shown there is one chance in six, in other words the dice will show one of its six sides. For example the probability that a number 6 is shown is 1 / 6 or 17% percent. But what does that mean? If we had asked Lee to roll the dice 10,000 times and then count the number of times that 6 came up the answer that he get would be approximately 1600 times or 17%. The more times he rolled the dice then the closer he would get to 17%. Probability can be used to calculate the opposite question which is: “what is the probability that a 6 is not rolled?” We know that there are five other sides that don’t show a 6 therefore the answer is 5 / 6 or 83%. Notice that both cases - rolling a 6 ( 17% ) and not rolling a 6 ( 83% ) - add up to 100%. When Lee rolled the dice for the first time there was a greater chance that it would not be a 6. He got a 5.

On the next roll the dice showed a 3. As Lee took the third and final roll of the dice it was apparent that the studio was getting tense - would it actually be a 6? After all we already had two numbers that were not 6 therefore the next roll must have a greater chance of producing a 6. But each new roll of the dice is independent of the previous one. A dice does not have a memory of the previous results and therefore is not affected by its history. The chances of getting a 6 on the third and final roll of the dice is still 1 / 6 or 17%. The expectation that ones luck is going to change because of previous results is called The Gambler’s Fallacy and has been, and remains, the ruin of many people. On the final roll the number 2 came up.

Behind the ‘lucky dice’ part of the show there is a much more interesting question and that is: “how many times do I need to roll the dice so that, on average, it would be a 6?”. The phrase ‘on average’ is an important part of the question. We come across averages in our daily life, for example the average spend of a cyclist at a tea shop is around £8 per visit. Some cyclists spend less maybe just buying a tea and cake, some spend more say tea, cake, bacon filled roll and maybe another piece of cake! However, if you take the total spend of all of the cyclists in say a day and divide by the number of cyclists it would give the average spend per cyclist. Averages are calculated for a wide range of subjects ranging from family diet to the spend on weekly shopping and is mainly used to look for trends. Therefore to calculate the average - yes you guessed it - we would ask Lee to roll the dice and keep count but this time count how many rolls it took to get a 6. He may roll a 6 on the first roll, he may roll a 6 after the tenth roll, and so on. Once he had carried it out for 10,000 attempts to get a 6 he would add up the total number of rolls to get a 6 and divide it by 10,000 to calculate the average. The answer is that it take six rolls, on average, to get a 6 ( see the video which describes three different ways to calculate the average number of rolls to get a 6 including the one discussed above ).

Lee’s lucky dice shows how maths can be used to clarify ideas such as chance as well as ask some interesting questions. Picking up ideas from popular TV programmes, and social media, is a good way to introduce maths concepts to a wider audience. Maybe the mathematics community could adopt this approach?

   

Recently I was asked to add my name to a campaign about reducing sewage pouring into our rivers during a storm. Rather than taking my usual approach of clicking a few buttons and sending a prepared email to my MP, I decided to read all of the material that I had been sent. What I unearthed was the complexity of the underlying problems and therefore the likelihood of the campaign’s success.

There is nothing better than walking along a river, whatever size, trying to spot the movement of a fish and once sighted, watching it feed. It can absorb many enjoyable hours. But it is becoming harder to see any fish movement because of the poor state of the rivers. After heavy rain I have seen sewage flowing through my favourite brooks and I hate to think of the pollution that can’t be seen from small particles of rubber being washed from the roads.

When I was contacted by The Angling Trust asking for my support with their campaign; I signed up. Their main concern was that the government’s proposals will take too long to clean the water in our rivers. The targets aim to reduce spills at “high priority sites” – by which they mean Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Special Areas of Conservation, eutrophic sensitive areas i.e. found to contain excessive levels of nutrient waste, chalk streams and waters currently failing our ecological standards due to storm overflows – and bathing water sites. Only after that will water companies be required to tackle the remaining storm overflows. But the target dates they have set are 2035 to achieve 75%+ of the high priority sites and achieve the targets for all remaining storm overflow sites by 2050. Therefore, it is going to take nearly 28 years before all of the rivers are free of the damage caused by storm overflows.

There were a range of issues that The Angling Trust wanted addressing: a broader scope of the plan that addresses the root causes of the problem, targets for government action with more detail on how different government departments will implement the plan in an integrated way and much greater ambition and urgency in the targets set for water companies, and a higher and more immediate action to reduce harm by 2030. In summary The Angling Trust’s view, and mine, was that the government’s plans were too little and too late!

The information that I had been sent was from The Angling Trusts’s perspective and is one that I agree with. However, I felt that it was important to get the government’s view. Digging further into the various links that I had been sent I came across the Consultation on the Government’s Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan which describes a number of issues including the age of the sewage system and how it operates during a heavy storm. For example, during a heavy storm the excess water is combined with the sewage system to manage the overload. With the increase in storms due to the Climate Crisis then the problem is going to get worse. In amongst the documentation were various estimates to completely separate the sewage from storm overflows which would cost between £350 billion to £600 billion and would cause significant disruption. Most of the combined system runs under our towns and cities and would have to be dug up. Reducing discharges to zero in an average year at all inland waters using other options, such as building storage tanks to capture excess water during heavy rainfall, would cost between £160bn and £240bn. Reading between the lines the government is trying to find a balance between reducing, and eventually stopping, storm overflows and the price that we as consumers pay for water and sewage.

However, there were a number of elements missing in the documents. First, it wasn’t clear how the storm overflow reduction would be integrated into an overall pollution programme such as the reduction of pollution from other sources such as agriculture and industry. Secondly, there were no initiatives being sponsored to look at innovative solutions to the problem. For example, developing ideas such as Connected Stormwater Management with Smart Water Butts which uses water butts installed at customer’s houses. They are monitored and controlled to manage the flow of storm water. Finally, there were no initiatives to promote local communities to both monitor and manage their own parts of the rivers such as at Chalgrove Brook in Oxfordshire which brings together local conservation groups, schools, landowners and artists to recover the ecology of their local brook.

I took the standard letter and modified it to add in my thoughts, which I have outlined above, and sent it to my MP. I am still waiting for a reply. I am not hopeful that the government’s targets will be met because of the approach that they are taking. If we are going to save our rivers from pollution and return them to a pre-industrial state then we need: local communities, water companies, landowners, local and national government, consumers, and environmentalists to work together within an ambitious framework.