And, although disappointed that the demise of such a historic local company is the root cause, one Jersey business owner believes that there is a silver lining to the cloud.
And that, according to Andrew Hosegood, owner of Mangetout and El Tico, is the opportunity to develop the local bread market so that one day Islanders will be eating more freshly baked, artisan bread and far fewer processed loaves imported from overseas.
‘We need to get back to proper artisan bread,’ said Andrew, who set up Mangetout with his wife Abbie in 1996. ‘Ninety-five per cent of bread sold in France is craft baked, 95 per cent of bread sold in the UK is factory baked. The French have that culture of fresh bread, they are always walking around with their baguettes – it is part of their culture. The Spanish, French and Italians have bread with virtually every meal and people perceive the healthiest diets to be Mediterranean and one of their staples is bread.
‘But it frustrates me where we are going. In fact, it fills me with dread. Processed bread is junk. It is full of flavouring and enzymes and additives and preservatives, even bleach. If you were to line up those elements individually you wouldn’t eat them. If someone gave you a teaspoon of bleach would you drink it? No. What is in real bread is flour, water, a little bit of yeast and salt and that is about it.’
Andrew’s views on the matter are simple: avoid processed sliced white bread and eat only well-crafted, ‘proper’ bread – the kind that you need to buy fresh more or less every day and won’t survive long sat in the bread bin without becoming stale and mouldy.
It is an approach that Mangetout uses in all four of its stores for all of its sandwiches. Freshly baked artisan bread arrives each morning from Vienna Bakery, where staff will typically have been baking since 2 am, and is immediately turned into sandwiches. Any of the 4,000 or so products made on site that go unused that day are donated to the Island’s homeless shelter and the following day the whole process starts all over again.
But, today in Jersey there are very few such artisan bakeries for Islanders to ‘pop’ out to if they don’t have the luxury of a daily delivery. Instead, it is often easier to head to the corner shop for a sliced white loaf, which following the closure of the CI Bakery will increasingly be imported from overseas and contain goodness knows what kind of preservatives, colouring and flavourings to give it as long a shelf life as possible.
However, Andrew hopes that there could soon be more choice for Islanders providing locals embrace the opportunity to fill the bread market void. He is also hopeful that the recent horse meat scandal will have encouraged people to think more about the ingredients in their food, particularly anything processed.
‘I really hope it is an opportunity,’ he said. ‘I hope there are young people out there thinking “I’m going to make some bread” because we have got to change our food culture otherwise we are just going to eat more and more processed junk and the health costs of that are going to be massive.
‘We have also got to consider the food miles involved in processing and producing all this food, it has got to stop. We have got to get back to regionality. If you think again of France and Italy, two of the most highly respected food cultures in the world, it is all about regionality.’
He added: ‘Let’s get back to local breads, get people eating real bread, real food, not just eating processed junk, because it is killing us.’
Andrew is, he admits, no expert when it comes to health matters. However, he points to rising obesity levels, heart problems and other weight-related diseases such as diabetes as evidence that Islanders really need to start thinking more about what they eat.
He also gets increasingly frustrated when he hears people say that they are going ‘gluten free’ to be ‘healthier’.
‘If you are a coeliac clearly you have to avoid wheat and it is good that there is now much more of an acknowledgement and there are products out there for people to eat,’ he said. ‘But if you are not a coeliac do not avoid wheat – it is part of a balanced diet and it is a natural source of fibre which we all need. It is a complex carbohydrate that we all need for a slow release of energy, why do you need to avoid it? Bread is fundamental, we have lived on it for centuries.’
