Never a day goes by without a bread story hitting the world’s headlines. This time we’ve curated some flavoursome slices of the good, the bad and the ugly to entertain you, from ancient Egyptian bread-eating crocodiles to bread-carrying French kite surfing heroes. Here goes.

Shania Twain’s escape from mouldy bread and mustard poverty

Some stories make us appreciate how lucky we are. This is one of them, and we respect Shania Twain for telling it.

It’s hard to believe that the polished, perfect-looking country music superstar had such a difficult childhood but her family was so poor she that was often left hungry as a child in Ontario. Shania’s mum suffered from depression, her stepdad found it hard to get a job because of racial discrimination, and a ‘grocery day’ in their house was a rare event. Sometimes they went without for as long as three weeks.

As she said, “We’d be down to mouldy bread, whatever the absolute bare minimum would be. If there was only mustard in the fridge, we would just put mustard on the bread and take that to school.”

Brave kite surfing French brewers carry sourdough over the Channel

We’re also extending respect to the two young French kitesurfers who have broken a couple of world records in one go, having kite-surfed over the English Channel carrying massive barrels of bread. Luckily it all went swimmingly 😉

Martin Marescaux from Pain de Minuit brewery in Lille and his friend Theo Vanmarcke crossed the Channel from Portland in Dorset to Cherbourg, carrying 36 loaves of bread donated by a Dorset baker. They’ll be using the bread to brew 3000 bottles of tasty blonde ale.

The men are the first to kitesurf the route and also the first to make a delivery over the planet’s busiest shipping route. Their record breaking time was an impressive four and a half hours and the beer will take eight weeks to brew.

Pain de Minuit usually recycles bread from bakeries across France into beer. When the owner of the Dorset-based bakery chain Oxford’s said they could have his unsold bread, the brewers needed to overcome the environmental issues first. Instead of building up a load of food-miles they decided to collect the loaves themselves, and sought permission before setting off.

It took two years but they’ve done it, and Mr Oxford was delighted to meet them on Chesil Beach with a load of unsold sourdough bread.

Revered crocodiles fed bread, meat and wine

Here’s another take on ‘respect’. Ancient Egyptians used to worship the crocodile, feeding them luxury foods and occasionally sacrificing them. The news has broken following an analysis of a mummified animal from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Crocodiles were treated as an embodiment of the god Sobek, the Lord of the Nile, and also signified the primeval swamp they believed our planet originally surfaced from. One particular crocodile, called Suchus, was treated like a living god, given his own pond inside a glittering temple, draped in precious metals and jewels, and fed a luxurious diet of bread, meat and wine by dedicated priests.

It’s alright for some. We never imagined we’d suffer from crocodile envy!

In-store waste takes a hit at Marks and Spencer

Food waste is an ongoing issue that’s being solved in all sorts of exciting ways. M&S, for instance, has created a garlic bread initiative to slash food waste in their shops, and the idea is taking flight.

At the end of every day unsold bakery loaves are filled with garlic butter by bakery staff then frozen to give then an impressive 40 day shelf life. In Castlepoint and Blandford, for example, customers can buy a garlic baguette or boule, San Francisco sourdough garlic bread, or a tasty West Country cheddar and red Leicester garlic cob. The price is just one of our fine British pounds, a mere quid, which sounds like an amazing bargain.

It’s such a simple but effective idea, especially important since bread is the second most wasted food in the UK with more than a million loaves binned every day.

A 100% crust loaf proves hard to resist

When one bread lover discovered an 800g loaf made up entirely of the crusty slabs from the ends of ordinary loaves, she was thrilled. It’s great news when the North London Waste Authority says 36% of households throw crusts away. Crust-lovers were even more impressed by the 30p price tag of the ‘Crustworthy’ loaf.

The woman uploaded the video of her discovery to TikTok, where it attracted almost 50,000 views as people flocked to find out where she bought the loaf. The answer was the Company Shop, the UK’s first social supermarket chain dedicated to giving ‘affordable, dignified, and sustainable food aid for individuals and families living on the cusp of food poverty’, with 14 branches across the country. We like their style.

Imagine weather so hot you can bake without an oven

Arizona summers are hot. Very hot. So hot it’s possible to bake banana bread in your car, as proved by Rangers at Saguaro National Park.

The Rangers put a couple of unbaked loaves of banana bread on their car’s dashboard at eleven in the morning, when the temperature was a scary 97 degrees outside and an even scarier 163 degrees inside the vehicle. The loaves rose perfectly as the temperature steadily climbed to 105 degrees outside and 211 degrees inside.

An hour later the bread was almost perfectly baked, just a bit squishy in the middle, inspiring the rangers to recommend baking biccies as the ideal choice, something they’d experimented with a couple of years previously.

Beautiful frozen artisan breads for you to bake to perfection

Our super-tasty frozen artisan breads are the perfect complement to every meal, popular with foodservice providers across the nation.  Ask us for a free sample box and we’ll be delighted to oblige. Just pop them in the oven for instant mega-fresh deliciousness.