I am a bread-lover. Yes I do really love to eat bread, can’t get enough of it, every day. But you have to know here in Switzerland there are many bread-lovers because it is just so good. If you ask somebody coming home from a long vacation or being abroad what they missed the most, you usually get the answer: bread. So one could call us a nation of bread-lovers.

Now, if you don’t bake your bread at home (what I do quite often) you go to a grocery and buy some as you do it all around the world. We have some very well groceries which you can find all around the country. And one of them had a great idea a few years ago.

Bread is usually sold in open paper bags to keep it fresh and crusty (yes, our bread is crusty and we love it). The question is now: how do you find the bread you like in the rack? There are white, dark, half-white, half-dark, wholemeal, corn, spelt and different grains bread – just to start with. All wrapped up in open paper bags, stuffed into a wooden reck.

Colors; the answer is colors. They started to use three different colored bags: yellow for whitish breads, green for wholemeal breads and red for darkish breads. Of course they didn’t choose Ferrari-red nor sunflower-yellow nor grass-green. The colors aren’t shiny at all and this is the root of all evil.

I mean you can’t ask the employees, it would look strange because, you know it, the breads are packed into colored paper bags now. And you don’t want to walk around with a sign “I am colorblind, please help me choosing my bread.”

The problem is that now the different breads are not as well sorted anymore as they were before. Why should they be there is no reason anymore. And therefore everybody suffering from color blindness, and there are many, has to watch closely, hold the bread, turn them around, read the ingredients just to find out it is the wrong sort of bread.

For me this is very funny. This nice colored paper bags brought more a burden than a relief to my shopping experience. And why is it funny? Because I hold a bread in my hands, try to figure out if it is the right one just to hear my wife’s voice ten meters away: “Didn’t you want to buy this and this bread? You hold on to the wrong one.”