Most people understand that, and don’t object to water, they object to obscure chemicals that aren’t part of normal, natural food.
Bread is made of yeast, flour, water and salt. Anything else isn’t bread. And this isn’t pining for some mythical past: there are still countries where you can buy real bread on practically every street, and it’s better.
People know Subway bread doesn’t taste like food, even if they might have misidentified the specific ingredient that’s at fault.
> Bread is made of yeast, flour, water and salt. Anything else isn’t bread.
This is simply wrong and excludes quite a lot of traditional and uncontroversial breads. Your ingredient list (you don't technically need the salt, by the way) describes the minimalist -- and best, in my opinion -- yeasted bread. I consider unleavened and alternatively leavened breads to be breads as well, but that's neither here nor there.
But potato bread is also bread. Bread doesn't stop being bread because you've added seeds, or egg, etc.
I think Subway's bread is certainly bread. Really terrible bread, but bread nonetheless.
Subway's "obscure ingredients" aren't uniquely terrible. They're common ingredients that exist in a whole lot of your diet unless you're taking great pains to avoid them. I would prefer they weren't there at all, but that they are is neither surprising nor particularly outrageous. They're part of industrial food production, and fast food is absolutely industrial food production.
> there are still countries where you can buy real bread on practically every street, and it’s better.
You can do this in most of the US. Maybe not on every street, but it's readily available.
I was ready to go along with that but uh, it converts down to urethane. Let's maybe let people take the hit on their bread not being so fluffy (and probably more profitable) to avoid extra urethane in our food.
Similarly with a sibling comment about how we use condom lubricant in cooking oils, maybe we just shouldn't?
And metabolic pathways are very complicated, you can't really judge whether something is a problem by looking at intermediates that exist in tiny quantities.
Bread is made of yeast, flour, water and salt. Anything else isn’t bread. And this isn’t pining for some mythical past: there are still countries where you can buy real bread on practically every street, and it’s better.
People know Subway bread doesn’t taste like food, even if they might have misidentified the specific ingredient that’s at fault.