Shoppers with more dough buy less bread: from the archive, 19 July 1958

There was evidence of an unexpected fall in demand for bread in 1958. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Master bakers bake bread, and naturally they are concerned when people eat less of it. This is what has been happening for several decades, and the official journal of the Association of Master Bakers has some gloomy things to say about the trend.

In its most recent issue its gloom has turned inwards, to introspection about bread and its public. It is an excellent thing when manufacturers begin to ask themselves whether customers are really satisfied with what is offered to them; from such self-searching emerge the products people really want to buy.

But does it need a national inquiry (as has been suggested) to explain statistics such as the fact that professional families spend less on bread (1s 31/2d a head each week) than manual workers' families (where the average is nearly 2s a head). Marie Antoinette's simple view of the virtues of cake as a food would not have been recorded as remarkable if her contemporaries had not grasped that a great deal of bread must be eaten by people who would really prefer to be eating something else.

Some economists hold that bread may be one of those products (there are not many of them) which one sold in smaller quantities if the price is reduced. The argument, which is a theoretical one, is that if the price of a loaf comes down people will buy fewer loaves and squander the money they save on some luxurious substitute - cream buns or salami sausage, perhaps.

In these terms bread seems destined to be a victim of prosperity. Acute bakers will, no doubt, recognise this and turn to the manufacture of more cake if Britain continues to prosper.

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