Like many in my generation, I grew up believing that Pepperidge Farm was the crown jewel of bread. I knew nothing about its history — that the name derived from a grand farm in Fairfield, Connecticut, a town I’ve passed by many times unawares.

Nor did I know that Pepperidge is the name of a tree, called black tupelo or black gum in the South.

Or that the brand famous for bread and cookies came about because a woman by the name of Margaret Rudkin decided to start baking bread at home because her youngest son had severe allergies and couldn’t eat most bread that was sold at the time so she wanted a natural alternative.

It’s ironic, then, that I have come to eschew store bread for much the same reason that the Pepperidge Farm brand was born.  

This time last year, I was mostly buying Dave’s Killer Bread – the choice of my vegan son, and one that seemed the healthiest of brands in my local supermarket. Then someone on social media wrote a post arguing that we shouldn’t eat Dave’s or any other commercially made bread because of the long ingredient list.

At the time, having read “Ultra-Processed People” by Chris van Tulleken, I was trying to cut out processed foods. I’m not much of a baker so I did an online search for local sourdough bread, and lo! The heavens opened and the angels sang, and St. Google directed me to a local baker just five minutes from the donkeys’ farm that I’d never noticed, tucked as it is in a small strip of shops.

It’s not an overstatement to say that The Bread Guy of Grafton, Massachusetts, changed my life last year.

The first day I went in, I purchased a loaf of whole-wheat sourdough for $4 — half price because it was a day old — and so less than Dave’s Killer Bread costs at my local grocery store.

I tried an end piece sitting in the car, and my eyes glazed over with pleasure. I haven’t bought bread from a supermarket since then, except for two loaves of Pepperidge Farm I made Thanksgiving stuffing with, because that’s what my grandmother used, and some traditions you just don’t mess with, preservatives be damned.

But it isn’t the taste of sourdough bread that has turned me into a sourdough evangelist, but the effect it has had on my eating habits overall. Within a couple of weeks of going on sourdough therapy, the bread had pretty much turned off a lifetime of sugar craving. There’s no science behind this, at least none that I can find, only that processed foods have been shown to be addictive, and when you eat slightly acidic foods, you tend not to want junk immediately afterwards, at least not in my experience. Not once have I had a glass of wine, a bit of cheese and a few olives and then wanted something sweet.

Ice cream is not a sacrament, just sayin’. But fresh sourdough bread comes close.

This is not to say that I ate “clean” in all of 2024 — far from it, and I fell off the wagon hard over the holidays, as I am wont. 

It didn’t help that my bread supplier — who is starting to seem like a bread dealer, given my urgent need for his product — took a long break over the holidays and won’t reopen until next week.

 Even the stash I put in the freezer to tide us over during the holidays is gone, which means I’ve been skulking around the bread aisle at Whole Foods in recent days, reading the labels and sniffing in derision.

Tuesday can’t get here soon enough. And while I still believe that starting to run, even slowly, is the most beneficial New Year resolution a person can make, getting off the store bread and going full-on homemade sourdough is the second-best. Take it from a sourdough evangelist.