UNTIL food technologists invent burger-flavoured broccoli, we shall have to make do with the crustless loaf to entice our young to feed.

Factory bread used to be a brick of pap with brown chewy bits on the outside. Now Hovis, the industrial baker, has invented a homogenous block of raised and baked flour which displays the same white pallor from edge to anaemic edge.

There is no crust.

You could be forgiven for thinking that, after pushing a loaf in the wicker basket of your bike up the precipitous hill of that Dorset village to the accompaniment of Dvorak, your molars might not have the energy left to tackle the skin of the bread.

The truth is, however, that the marketing men at RHM Foods conducted one of those dubious consumer surveys which produced the required answer: people in general, and children in particular, do not like crusts. Along with fruit, crusts are the most regularly uneaten item in lunchboxes when they come back from school.

Two thirds of British children, it is claimed, do not like crusts. One third of British parents cut crusts off sandwiches before they despatch them and their children to school.

The obvious answer is to bake a loaf without a crust, and persuade consumers that they are getting better value for money. Well, up to a point; Hovis Invisible Crust, launched in Tesco stores this week, will be up to 19p more expensive than a standard crusty packaged white loaf.

Within the EU, Britain is far behind Germany in its consumption of bread, but more parents seem to be packing their children off to school with lunchboxes after progammes such as Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners exposed the poor nutritional quality of some school-cooked meals.

It has taken RHM two years of intensive research to produce the all-pap loaf, which has all the flavour of a damp loofah without the redeeming feature of the backscrubber’s high roughage. Paul Molyneux, a technical director of RHM, explained that the secret was to cook the loaf slowly but thoroughly in a cool oven, removing it before it had a chance to go brown on the outside.

Fiona Hunter, a nutritionist, said: “If you throw away the crust you are getting less carbohydrate, which is the good part of bread, and a higher proportion of fat, the not-so-good bit.”

Of deeper concern is the possible psychological effect on a child raised on crustless bread. Dr Pat Spungin, a child psychologist and parenting expert, said: “If you allow your children to discard the crust, they spot many other opportunities to reject food they don’t like.”

Maia Harby-Guincho, aged three, ate crustless Hovis all morning on the promise of an ice-cream later. What did she think of factory bread produced to the order of men in suits? “I want to go to the toilet,” Maia said, with rather more firmness than a crustless loaf.

SLICES OF LIFE

There is as yet no word of the French developing a crustless baguette

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