Every Last Crumb by Brittany Angell

The main idea of this book is that you don’t have to give up bread in order to lose weight. All of the famous paleo diets, where you’re encouraged to eat like a Neanderthal, say to avoid starch. But bread isn’t inherently bad, despite that fact that it’s man made. The Sioux and Blackfoot didn’t have bread, and they had marvelous physiques, but so did the Bedouin of Arabia, for whom bread was a huge part of their diet. However, the bread that the Bedouin ate wasn’t the kind we have today; it was made from barley and oat flour, and with less yeast. It was probably dense and thick, not the refined white flour seen in supermarket bread. It also lacked the enzymes used to keep it fresh, so I bet it was often eaten stale. Rough bread must have given them strong stomachs.

Let’s begin with the recipe for basic sandwich bread. What’s unique here is that instead of flour, it uses potato and coconut starch with eggs, and baking soda for a leavening agent. Almost all of these leave out the flour and replace them with potato, coconut, or ground almonds. The spinach lavash pancakes use psyllium husks (found in Metamucil) as the starch ingredient, along with the usual coconut and potato staples. Though not mentioned in this book, cassava can also be used to make bread, though you might find it hard to buy in most supermarkets.

One of the great things about this book is the ease of the recipes. They don’t require expensive ingredients, and the prep time is minimal. For those with gluten intolerance, or if you just want to diversify your diet, the recipes involve a lot of egg whites, dairy, and different kinds of fats and shortening. They allow so many different ingredients that they can accommodate just about every condition and allergy.

A recent National Geographic article on hunter-gatherer people told me something I hadn’t realized; hunters often went hungry for long stretches. The wooden spears and stones were NOT ideal for hunting big game, and small game are fast. It wasn’t like there were herds of animals lying around the African savannahs, waiting for you to bop them on the head and take them home; early man had to work hard to hunt, and their “hunting” might have consisted of using rocks to chase predators away from animals they’d killed. So essentially early man’s “hunting” was really just stealing from wild animals.

Eating bread doesn’t make you fat. It can be eaten as part of a balanced diet, along with eggs, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, herbs, and spices. Go ahead and eat bread, the Greeks ate it for centuries and still managed to stay thin.