You wrote: "By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good" Demonstrably not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.o

You wrote: "By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good" Demonstrably not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum : > In the Victorian era, alum was used along with other substances like plaster of Paris to adulterate certain food products, particularly bread. It was used to make lower-grade flour appear whiter, allowing the producers to spend less on whiter flour. Because it retains water, it would make the bread heavier, meaning that merchants could charge more for it in their shops. The amount of alum present in each loaf of bread could reach levels that would be toxic to humans and cause chronic diarrhea, which could lead to death in young children.[26] Or https://www.geriwalton.com/food-and-drink-adulteration-in-1700-and/ https://www.geriwalton.com/food-and-drink-adulteration-in-17... > ... by the early 1800s, the practice of adulteration had become so common, nineteenth century people developed a taste for fraudulent substances in their food and drink and often did not realize anything was wrong with what they were ingesting until it was too late. quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread : > [Bread adulteration] gradually came to an end with government action, such as the 1860 and 1899 Food Adulteration Acts in Britain.[29] America had a more difficult time ending these processes of adulteration, however, as various states had varying policies regarding bread making. The free market could not resolve the problem.