It’s December. We’ve settled into our beautiful new bakery premises, announed in our last news item. And we’re baking up a storm. Things are looking bright in our little corner of the world. Here’s what’s going on in the wonderful – and often weird – wider bread landscape.

Bread lady mystifies denizens of the interweb

Instagram is your destination if you fancy watching a lady repeatedly rubbing chunks of bread all over her face. What? You heard right. It’s the latest bread-led online phenomenon, and thousands of people have watched her antics so far.

The woman set up an anonymous account on Instagram a few months ago and she’s gathered more than 13,000 followers. The images show her, “rubbing her face against different bread products without using her hands.” Why? It isn’t clear, although the account description says: “Giving the people something they didn’t ask for.” Whatever the reason, Instagram users are loving it. Some are even becoming slightly obsessed with it. If you’d like to see it for yourself, follow this link to the Huffington Post report.

Monkey bread? Crikey

The Americans have just celebrated Thanksgiving, and Khloe Ksardashian stepped up to the mark with a recipe for ‘Monkey Bread’.
Monkey what? Apparently the ‘bread’ is made from shop-bought American biscuit dough cut into chunks and covered in a mix of margarine and cinammon sugar. Then you bake it for ten minutes and that’s that.

Call us old fashioned if you like, but compared to our beautiful, carefully-made artisan breads, rich in top class ingredients and 100% British, it sounds goddam awful… pardon our US-influenced French!

Eating together drives better work performance

As a foodservice wholesaler, you know the score – plenty of companies invest big money to give employees top quality workplace eateries. But is it worth the investment? According to a brand new study by Cornell University, USA, it’s a resounding ‘yes’.

It looks like a works cafetieria is an excellent investment in performance, with firefighters who eat meals together displaying much better group job performance compared to firemen who eat solo. The thing is, eating is one of the most intimate human activities there is, and the intimacy it delivers is carried through to the workplace. As the research’s author Kevin Kniffin says, “From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today’s workplaces.”

Unmentionable bread – no thank you!

Apparently one British woman is taking bread making to the next stage, a stage very few of us want to even think about, let alone examine in any kind of detail or actually eat. She has decided to make bread using her own vaginal yeast.

Feminist blogger Zoe Stavri encountered a backlash after the Daily Star reported the news, with several people saying she’d ‘put them off bread for life’. Her response? Zoe pointed out that it wasn’t a feminist protect, merely a ‘kitchen experiment’. If that has turned your stomach, not to worry. You can relax in the certain knowledge that we would never, ever, ever…!

That’s it for now. Come back next time for more oddments of news from the bakery sector.