I don't like to be in the same room as white flour, and very white pastries and breads creep me out.

They look too white.

And it's just weird, and it's not natural, and it's odd.

And it's odd if you think you're basically making paste that we made as second graders, right, out of white flour is starch and gluten.

It makes a very good paste.

I don't get it.

Okay, me personally, I can't be in the same room as a delicious, freshly baked white baguette and not eat it.

But to be fair, I have the same problem

with a good whole wheat loaf too. I actually do try to stay away from purely white flour bread

because I feel like there's something missing in it. I, of course, am Cynthia Graber, and you're

listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

This episode, it's white versus wheat in the

bread smackdown of the century. And I'm Nicola Twilly, lover of bread in all its glorious

shades. Have we always had both whole wheat and white bread? Or is white flour some kind of

newfangled technological fancy thing? And is industrial white bread like wonder bread? Is that even

bread? Because how does it get

so squidgy and bouncy? And does it really matter which one we eat or is choosing one kind of

bread over the other just a kind of snobbery? Or worse, eugenics. This is the ultimate food

fight, one that has gone on for thousands of years. White versus weep, let the showdown begin

in this encore episode of Gastropod. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network

in partnership with Eater. Burnout at work is a tale as old as time. Tale as old as time.

But a new generation may have found the fix.

...