Sorry, it’s true: The US really does have crappy bread

The difference between a baguette here and in France is a matter of law.

Have you ever gone on a trip to another country and thought, “Why does the food here taste so much better than the food in America?”

That’s the question Kate called in recently to Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “When I was in Japan recently, the produce and the meat were amazing,” she told Vox. “Same thing about food in Europe: The bread, the yogurt just tastes better. Is food actually higher quality elsewhere, or do we just think it is? And if it is, what would it take for the US to have food that tastes and feels that good?”

Yes, the fact that you’re in a new and exciting environment is a factor. But you also aren’t imagining things: other countries have different ways of preparing and producing food that factor into what you’re tasting as well. Take the French baguette: that iconic bread that brings to mind berets and bicycling along the famous Champs-Élysées avenue as accordion music plays in the background. According to Eric Pallant, the author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers, that image is no accident; France is so invested in its bread that the country made a law protecting it from the encroaching mass-produced bread market. “By the 1980s, premade breads, breads that have a dozen or more ingredients in them, were starting to take over the market, and that’s un-French,” Pallant said. And so they said, “If you’re going to sell it in a boulangerie — and there are thousands of them in France — it has to meet criteria.”

So what is that criteria? And why are America’s standards so different? Pallant tells us on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Pallant, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. We love to hear from you.

Does the bread in France actually taste better? Or does being on vacation make us think it does?

It really is better bread. But there’s a caveat. If you go to a supermarket, you can buy industrial bread in France just as easily as here. But go to a boulangerie and that bread will be fresh and taste of wheat and leavening and love and time and patience. Nothing you can buy in a colorful plastic bag will ever match.

A law passed in France in 1993 dictated that the bread you’re buying in a boulangerie must be made that day with four ingredients: flour, water, a leavening agent, yeast or sourdough, and some salt.

Meanwhile, in the US, I can walk into the grocery store right now, and I will find so many bagged loaves. What’s the story behind the type of bread that’s more common here in American grocery stores?

For 6,000 years, nobody knew what made bread rise. It was just magic. You put this glop called sourdough starter into a dough, and like magic, it rises. By the 1870s, 1880s, Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast are living things. They reproduce, they grow, they consume the starches, exhale carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide makes the bread rise. Once we know that yeast is a thing, we can make bread much faster than we do with sourdough. Sourdough takes two days. From a capitalist’s perspective, it makes sense if you’re a baker to bake a lot of bread very, very quickly.