Just had a thought. Yay! Fodder for writing!

So, amid my semi-daily spurt of evening internet-spamming boredom I stumbled upon a recipe for bread. When I say I stumbled upon it, I do not actually mean that I used StumbleUpon to figuratively stumble upon it, nor do I mean that I literally tripped and stumbled over a recipe book; I mean that I was dazedly staring at my iGoogle homepage and noticed that one of the three daily "How-to[s] of the day" was "How to Bake Almost No Knead Bread." (By the way, anybody want to explain to me how if the little window is called "how to of the day," why there are three of them every day? You don't go to a restaurant and see more than one soup of the day! That goes against the very definition and premise of something being "of the day!" You can only have one!) Anyway...

I get to the recipe of the bread (which I don't really need to know anyway, because I love cooking and baking, and kneading is one of the fun parts...), and the main ingredient, of course, is flour. But just like any other recipe you ever read that calls for non-whole-wheat flour, it says "unbleached all-purpose flour." That made me wonder... has anyone ever heard of bleached flour? Has anyone even made it? We know flour is white. Why would you ruin it by adding color to it and why would it be of such great importance to mention that the flour be unbleached in every recipe that calls for it? Do you ever see in the baking aisle of the supermarket a bag that says "bleached flour!"? I don't understand. And if it did exist, wouldn't competitors quickly come out with alternatives? "Flour made with Tide!" or "Lysol flour!" People are stupid...

Now that I think about it, why is it even necessary that distributors mention that the flour is all-purpose? Technically everything and anything is as all-purpose as the bearer wants it to be. I can use flour to fill up my child's sandbox (if I had a child or a sandbox...). It may not be the most fun experience of the child's life, but hey! look on the bright side! Throw some water in there and ask the kid to make a castle and voila! You no longer "knead" to worry about the bread recipe issue because the kid will end up (unbeknownst to him) kneading it for you in the process! (Pun clearly intended). All-purpose flour, my ass! My Macbook is technically all-purpose. I can use it to semi-angrily, completely-seriously rant about the ins and outs of the stupidity of the flour production industry, or I can use it to wipe up spills off the kitchen counter. It won't be very good at the latter, but I can do what I want. The End.

*EDIT* special shout out to Lena Meany, who is in the midst of a long road trip from Coors country to the beautiful state of New York!