I'm not big on schadenfreude, but it was hard not to feel a bit of malicious Teutonic satisfaction on hearing recent reports that anti-carb diet revolutionary Dr. Robert Atkins was clinically obese at the time of his death last spring.

As someone who's been known to eat mashed potatoes on toast and must have bread with the pasta course, I've always found the concept of the Atkins diet somehow perverse. To disdain bread, to shun the staff of life, you might as well just raise your arms skyward and ask the gods to smite you.

With apologies to Paul Williams: Carbohydrates, man, that's what life is all about. Or, as my four-year-old son has been known to gleefully announce midchew, "I'm a bread-aholic!"

This is not to imply we're not discerning. Essentials must weekly be foraged for around town. Sourdough ficelle, a quartet of potato-and-chive buns, and grape focaccia from Terra Breads (2380 West 4th Avenue and Granville Island). Portuguese buns (with those little nipples on each end), a large sourdough rye, and a couple of cheese Danishes from the sublime Hungarian bakery Strawberry's (1641 Commercial Drive). Fratelli's cornbread. Solly's bagels. Uprising's Folk Bread. The Salloum Bakery's organic pitas.

Add to these carbo-tourist meccas the VCC Bakeshop, on the third floor of Vancouver Community College. I discovered this bakery two years ago when my husband, who worked nearby, brought home a carrot cake. It was perfectly moist without being oily, had generous chunks of walnuts, was splendidly carroty and topped with real cream-cheese icing that housed a hint of lemon.

I began obsessing on this carrot cake. And it was only four dollars! What kind of crazy people sell perfect, albeit smallish, carrot cakes for four dollars?

The answer is, the kind of people who don't have to pay salaries and street-front rents. The VCC Bakeshop sells the goods--and I do mean goods--created weekdays in the five labs where the 100 or so students of the college's Baking and Pastry Arts Program (hospitality.vcc.ca/baking/) learn their trade, from Level 1 students in their initial two months of a 10-month program trying out various pies and quick breads all the way to advanced students crafting artisan breads and French pastries.

Unlike in most retail bakeries, where almost everything is behind the counter, customers can poke and prod at the bagged and boxed goods in open display cases all around the 1,000-square-foot VCC Bakeshop, not-so-surreptitiously checking for favoured crustiness or pillowyness or the telltale warmth of oven-fresh breads. Another delightful thing about this bakery is the occasional lack of homogeneity. Consistency may be the ultimate goal of the program, but how often do you get to look over an array of braided egg breads and choose the one you'd like to take home much like you'd choose a kitten from a litter? Looking over the skinny, tightly braided one, the fat one with gaps between the braids, the Scarlett Johanssoní‚ ­pale one, the generously browned one, the supposedly perfect one reminds you just how difficult this baking business is.

Then there's the element of serendipity. As the students work through the various levels of their program, the bakeshop remains in flux. "It's like a treasure hunt," says one customer, who checks out what's available at least once a week. A recent trek downtown in search of that ever-elusive carrot cake netted me six banana muffins, some Viennese-style strudel, four scones, and a very yummy potato-and-herb artisan loaf, all for only $8.25.

The prices would no doubt thrill even the hearts of big-box shoppers. But the people in the long lineup that forms outside the shop daily around noon--when most of the baking rolls in from the labs on racks (while the doors are closed and a security guard stands by, a measure instituted four years ago after near riots between senior citizens over loaves of bread)--cite the freshness, quality, and the use of pure ingredients as what draws them back. "Fresh butter," one middle-aged woman sighs dreamily, "just like we used on the farm."

Maybe I'm naive, but when baking program head George Rudolph explains they do only "scratch baking", I think "That's news?" Evidently yes. In many small bakeries today, he estimates that 50 percent of the products are bought frozen from wholesalers or are made from mixes, both with the attendant additives to preserve shelf life.

Everything at the bakeshop sells out daily, so there's no need for preservatives in the labs at VCC. My kind of "better living through chemistry".

VCC BAKESHOP third floor, Vancouver Community College, 250 West Pender Street, 604-443-8970. Open Monday to Friday 10:15 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.