A plea for more diversity in French bakeries

This nutrition is as wide spread as nothing else. Mankind invented it 10 000 years ago and its recipes have barely changed. Everyone knows it though it has different names: Brot, pangotta, bröd, mendrugo, bread. In French it is called le pain and this is where my journey starts: As an exchange student from Germany in France. Honestly: I really like France, the country, the people, the language and the food, of course. But after months of baguettes and croissants I really long, I actually crave for German bread.

It is around the year 8 000 BC when mankind first started to cultivate crops. It provided a dense source of carbohydrates and therefore soon became the main energy source for so many human cultures around the globe. Furthermore bread became a religious symbol! Religious sources call bread the „body“. In the German language the body („Leib“) and the loaf of bread („Laib“) are barely different in writing and even equal in pronunciation.

Making bread is really easy. There are two main types of bread: Leavened and unleavened bread. Flatbread for instance is unleavened and therefore made only of flour, water and, but not necessarily, a bit of salt. Those ingredients are kneaded to a dough and beaked on a flat stone, or today more common: In an oven.

The other type of bread is leavened bread. It is easy: Make a dough of water and flour. Put it in a warm place, say 26 °C and, yes, wait. Add some flour each day and after a week you have a sour dough which along with the same portion of flour, salt and, if necessary, water form a nice dough. Let it rise half an hour and put it in an oven. Voilà! Your first sour dough bread: Aromatic, healthy and durable for at least three days.

Leaven revolutionised the making of bread. Bacteria ferment the dough either to beer or to a sour dough which adds zest to the bread (or the beer, of course). Today there are thousands of sorts of bread, most of them traditionally made in Germany. Bread made of sour dough (Sauerteig), made of wheat (Weizen), rye (Roggen), barley (Gerste) or spelt (Dinkel): Usually German bakeries offer more than 10 types of bread. According to findings of a German association for food research (GMF) Germans consume 85 kg of bread apiece (pro Person) per year while the European average is 65 kg.
So this is, where I come from: Breadorado! And now, after some months in France it is becoming a pain with le pain. The only grain used is wheat, the only form is la baguette. 72% of the bread sold in France is white bread.

White? Does it always have to be white bread? Frankly: For my share I prefer French bread to American toast. It's more a culture here in France than perhaps in the US. But couldn't it be different? Rye or brown bread also in France? I have a dream that on day France will rise up and live out the true flavour of bread! So please, Mister Sarkozy, do something!