SMOG WATCH : Lighten Up

Now we know what the cutting edge of the nation’s fight for clean air looks like. It is serrated, like a bread knife.

That, of course, is just one way to look at the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s most recent anti-smog rule. Starting in 1993, Southern California’s 24 biggest bakeries must start putting pollution control equipment on their ovens.

People who know of nothing quite as sublime as a whiff of bread rising in the oven see it differently. For them, the cutting edge is what air quality officials are using to carve up life as we know it in order to get clean air. They, after all, are the ones who banned charcoal-lighter fluid.

Being serious about a thing like this, of course, takes some of the fun out of it, but there is one more way to look at it.

These are not neighborhood boulangeries-- which are not covered by the rule--but factories whose 72 ovens operate day and night. The ethyl alcohol that is created by the combination of heat and yeast accounts both for the aroma and--counting all the big bakeries--for as much smog as a medium-sized oil refinery.

The air quality district did, after all, give fair warning that it had run out of smog that could be controlled in big chunks and that future rules would get closer to home.

Gasoline leaf-blowers are on their way out, for example. Electric cars are on their way in. Bread is not the end of it.

Still all is not lost. The controls will not trap all of the bakery vapors. We’ll have to see if Southern California can get by on just the 17% of the sublime aroma of baking bread that will get through the smog controls.