Bread is transformative. That’s the word that keeps recurring in the literature, “transformative”. It’s true. There is, on the face of it, no way it could not be. Bread does not occur in nature. It is artificial. It is an artifact. It is ancient, and therefore in a sense an ancient artifact, one from which we still have a huge amount to learn about the past. About our past, as humans.
Bread bears no resemblance to the grass seed, water and salt that it is made from. If you had no idea at all what substances went into it, there are no clues as to its origins available to your senses, no way to tell. If the end product is somehow encountered before any exposure to the process, which is the way it happens in the modern world (if we are EVER exposed to to the process), it’s just magic.
Bread is a highly-processed food that is at least eight thousand years old, maybe much older, at least partly depending on your exact definition of “bread”. That’s long enough for bread, as a goal of the farmer, to have had effects on the evolution of wheat that are long lost in prehistory, and long enough for bread to have had effects on our evolution. Bread, our creation, may have literally transformed us in some ways. Maybe those ways are trivial. I’m guessing not.
Bread is also a curious and mysterious form of alchemy. The truth is, certain grass seeds and water and salt are not enough to make bread, at least if your definition of bread is raised bread, the strange, solidified, crusty foam that has been our staple food and companion since at least ancient Egypt. Such bread must also contain the spark of life, very literally. We do not make it alone. If we are skillful enough we can coax microscopic life to breathe its essence into the product. As is the case with wine being transformed from mere juice by the microscopic life that lives naturally on the grape skins that the juice comes contained in from nature, the life necessary to turn wheat paste into bread is supplied by nature with the wheat itself. We don’t really control this life. Despite our arrogant fantasies we don’t really understand many of the mechanisms behind any life. Self-replication in the physical world is the essential trick of life, and for all our supposed knowledge it still completely eludes us. We only control the environment in which this life exists, and we hope that it continues do do what we want, what we need. We have learned that this life in particular is one or more types of yeast, fungus, combined with one or more types of bacteria, in this case lactobacilli. In that sense, the bread is made by yeast, lactobacilli and homo sapiens working together, and that may be as much a symbiosis, or more so, than the relationship of the yeast and lactobacilli considered alone.
In the past couple of centuries there has been a huge drive to simplify the process, reducing the three main components of grass seeds to one, changing the strain of fungus used, eliminating the lactobacilli altogether, and finally breeding new types of wheat that are tailored to the needs of machines, not those of life. We are just now coming to understand how disastrous for our health these changes may have been. There are sporadic and spotty grass-roots (sorry) efforts erupting all over the Western world to retreat from this mistake, but the machines are resisting. We recently have acquired the technology to make new types of machines capable of making old types of bread, but the old machines, the inflexible purely-mechanical type with no spark of primitive intelligence at all are still hugely dominant, and still producing unhealthy bread for the masses in incredible quantities. It has now come to the point where all bread, all types this faithful companion that has been a staple for our species and sustained our lives over millennia, all of it, regardless of type, is becoming increasingly regarded as evil.
That is a terrible loss.
It may be that the all the spontaneously-appearing efforts to manually create non-evil bread will fade away, and coming generations won’t really understand what it was, or why it was considered important, much less our ancient near-symbiotic relationship with it. Or, more hopefully, it may be that they will succeed in carrying isolated sources of good bread into a different future, when better, more intelligent machines can actually bring something closer to the old, healthful bread in great quantities to millions of people at very low cost. That’s essentially an engineering problem. As a species we’re very, very good at engineering problems, once we understand the problem itself… and it’s that understanding that is largely missing, that understanding that must be preserved and spread in order to transition to a future that preserves our ancient partnership with bread for our own benefit.
We can help make that future happen. We can turn our back on the industrial product that we’ve been brought up to call “bread” and start making real bread. It’s not hard or expensive to make better bread than you can buy in a supermarket. Moreover, it is fun- enough fun that you’ll just naturally end up with bread to share, which will wake others to the fact that real bread can be made one loaf at a time. Some of them will share the loaves in turn, some will learn to make their own, and each act of sharing spreads not just the product and the magic but the information, and reduces the demand for the unhealthful product masquerading as bread.
We also live in an age of growing DIY and Maker movements. There was nothing inherently wrong with the idea of home breadmaking machines, the problem was that they were engineered from the ground up to emulate the supermarket product as closely as possible, a huge exercise in missing the point. The technology is available enough and inexpensive enough to correct that at the grass-roots level, and we can open-source the entire thing, so that anyone can share plans for the hardware or recipes/programs for making the bread itself. We don’t have to wait for corporations to come around and make it all proprietary and expensive.
Everyone you teach, every loaf you share is a subversive act in a way, rejecting the status quo and sending a clear message to the market in the only language that a market understands. If you want the kind of bread in the future that for thousands of years everyone knew would sustain life indefinitely, now would be a good time to take the first steps.
Bread is transformative. Thousands of years of farming transformed grass seed into wheat, the miller transforms wheat into flour, the baker transforms the flour into something the natural world never knew, and finally the bread transforms us in turn. Ask someone who bakes it. There are reasons that people do that, it is deeply satisfying in a way that is difficult to convey in language, but surprisingly easy to experience.
What it transformed us into in the past century or so as passive consumers was not healthy… but bread can transform us again, and sustain us as “the staff of life” again as it did for so long, if we give up the role of passive consumers and take control of the process ourselves.
— Robert the Wombat