Sustainability Profile: Sandwich Bread
Lesbihonest, bread is the best. It’s delicious, it’s comforting and it can be supes healthy.
Whether you make your own sandwich bread or buy it, a bunch of sustainability issues can be associated with our go-to lunch buddy. In this post, I’ll tell you all about making and eating sustainable sandwich bread.
Making bread sustainably
Making sandwich bread is a really sustainable option because you can make sure all the ingredients you’re using are up to snuff. The bread ingredients with the biggest sustainability concerns are wheat and dairy products, but no worries: I’ll help you make them sus’ like a champ.
Flour
Wheat (in its flour form) is the star of sandwich bread recipes and also happens to be the most environmentally concerning ingredient. This is because farming wheat has a mega environmental impact.
Lots of wheat farmers use pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which take a lot of energy (read: GHGs) to produce and can run off into nearby water and pollute the land where the wheat is growing. To avoid this, you could try organically growing your own wheat and making your bread with it or you could just buy organic flour.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with King Arthur brand, but I love to buy its flours because King Arthur is a B Corp! This means that it’s held to certain environmental and social standards, so you don’t have to lose sleep over the sustainability of your flour.
Wheat is grown in lots of different regions in the U.S., so if you live in the states you can try to get your flour as local as possible. At the farmers markets near me, some farmers sell their own wheat flour. Wherever you live, make sure the wheat is at least regional if not from a neighborhood farmer.
Since whole wheat flour is processed less than white flour or bread flour, try to use as little white flour and as much whole wheat flour as possible. This will cut down on GHGs used during processing.
Bottom line: Buy organic flour that’s grown and milled close by. Go for mostly 100% whole wheat.
A Note on Dairy
Even though wheat is the MVP here, a lot of sandwich bread recipes call for dairy. Whether it’s butter, milk or something in between, dairy comes from cows, which are hugely bad for the environment.
I’ve made sandwich bread a million times and let me tell you: you don’t need cows milk to make bread yummy. I normally replace it with nut milk, which isn’t perfect for the environment but is more sustainable than cows’ milk.
If a sandwich recipe that you know and love uses butter, you could try replacing it with vegan butter. I know vegan butter isn’t supes widely available, so if you can’t find it or afford it, you could just find a recipe that doesn’t use butter.
Bottom line: Ditch the dairy in your bread.
Buying Bread sustainably
I mean, who actually has time to make bread every week? No sane person.
If you buy bread from a local bakery, you can ask the baker where they source their ingredients. If they use local ingredients, that’s amazing. Even if they aren’t organic, the reduced food miles might overshadow that.
If you buy pre-packaged bread from the grocery store, organic whole wheat is your best bet. Organic means that no super nasty chemicals were used during farming and whole wheat means that most of the grains aren’t super highly processed.
To make sure your bread is organic, look at the ingredient list on the back of the packaging. On this list there might be an asterisk by all organic ingredients, or it might simply say “organic” in front of the organic ingredients. Like I said before, it’s most important that the flour is organic since it’s the main ingredient.
You should also think about your bread’s packaging. Some bread brands wrap their bread in a trillion layers of plastic, while others just use one. Obvi, the less plastic, the better.