Invariably it makes good sense when you're accustomed to purchasing food items in bulk, to tag them. You bag the bulk items in the bulk-food store, and when you get home you generally empty the bag contents into clean jars, plastic containers or whatever else manner of sturdy containers you've collected for that purpose.

Without taking the trouble to tag and identify what you're placing in handy jars it can get pretty irritating when you don't recall what's in them. Sesame seeds cannot be mistaken for poppy seeds. Anise has such a distinctive odour and its size and shape identifies it as not being caraway seed or fennel. But you can mistake fennel for caraway seed if you're just grabbing the jar to use it in a hurry and not bothering to ensure you know what you're handling.

Sweet basil and oregano look very similar. Without the sniff test you can discover you've used the wrong one, but without catastrophic results. On the other hand, when you buy bulk flour, there's always the possibility that without tagging the flours for identification you can mistake whole wheat flour for light rye flour. And that's where things can get a little iffy.

My husband bakes bread, quite often, at least twice a week, occasionally more. And they're always different kinds of bread; he becomes bored quite readily with too much of the same thing, and he enjoys experimenting. But he's still a novice baker, and unlike me, he uses technological gadgetry to make his bread. Not that I'm complaining, since I'm a major beneficiary. But I still like to prepare my bread dough by hand, and I know by the feel of the product when it's been sufficiently kneaded, and if the ingredients are in the right proportion.

He scrupulously reads recipes, while I rarely do, relying on my long familiarity with the chemistry of food preparation to guide me. But his enthusiasm is genuine and commendable, and the products he turns out are generally more than acceptable, some of them quite exceptional. The last bread he baked, a light rye, didn't seem to be a rye. And it wasn't; it was a variation of a whole-wheat bread.

Good, but no cigar.