Without aiming to give away any spoilers, in the film ‘Don’t Look Up’, a satirical metaphor for the response to the climate emergency, one of the last scenes involves the main protagonists sitting around the dinner table breaking bread together. The action-adventure is all very watchable but from the entire 138 minutes, this is the one scene that resonates with me the most.
Maybe I’m a bit of a feeder but the communal celebration of food is one aspect of life that brings me real joy (if you hadn’t noticed already!). The sequential stages of selecting the raw ingredients, bringing them together to form a spread and then sharing the feast with companions is fundamental to the foundations of civilisation. Yet, in the 21st Century, most of the pupils in my classroom state they eat dinner on their own in front of the TV or a computer game. Even worse, the ‘food’ they eat is often ultra-processed, high on additives and low on nutritional quality. Getting back to basics somehow seems more important than ever. Let’s talk about the bedrock of many diets, bread!
Daily bread
The history of the loaf dates back over 30,000 years but cereals and bread became a staple food around 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic, when wheat and barley were some of the first plants to be domesticated in the “Fertile Crescent” region of the Tigris-Euphrates catchments and along the Nile. Around 3000 BCE the ancient Egyptians were the first to develop leavened bread using wild yeast and transformed the previously dense and flat loaves into lighter bread with a distinct, aerated texture.
Cereal crops allowed agricultural societies to sustain much larger populations than possible, leading to the rise of civilised states. In mediaeval Europe, bread was even used as part of the table service. A ‘trencher,’ a piece of stale bread, was served as an absorbent plate beneath the meal then, at the end of a dinner, it was eaten, given to the poor, or fed to the dogs. More recently, mills that made wheat flour using renewable energy from wind, and water with millstones were replaced by those working on energy from fossil fuels with metal or ceramic grinder to produce the flour. Manufacturing processes and additives shortened the time to produce a loaf but at the expense of taste and nutrition.
It is estimated that 60% of the world’s population eats bread daily and around 11 million loaves are sold each day in the UK. Approximately 60-70% of the bread we eat is white, mass produced and often sold in single-use plastic wraps.
Baking forecast
Hubster has been experimenting with sourdough recently. He’s a scientist through training so carefully nurtures his homemade starter at a balmy 23 to 27oC to promote natural yeast growth, measures out the wet and dry ingredients to the nearest ml or g. He mixes attentively, times the rises, then bakes the loaf and records the temperature. He makes observations throughout on the dough, on the colour and crunch of the crust and on the way the crumb bounces back after the thumb test. I’m a little more haphazard in my approach to baking but at least I do my own washing up!
There is a website called ‘shouldibake.com’ which monitors the energy inputs from renewables and recommends turning the oven on when more than a third of Britain’s electricity is coming from wind, solar and hydro power. Daughter is currently making an apple streusel cake with the windblown fruit from the orchard and eggs from the chickens. The sun is shining, and our solar panels are generating electrical energy. The smell is heavenly.
Dough
The kneading of dough is one of the ways I relax. I simply love to bake bread. We have eight different types of flour in the pantry; plain white, 00, self-raising, strong white then the fibre-packing strong wholemeal, seeded, oaten and multigrain. This doesn’t even include the non-wheat varieties such as spelt, rye, gram, and cornmeal. Hubster thinks I have a hoarding problem when it comes to ground grains.
On the smallholding we are changing the way we work which means we have less income coming in, but we also have more time to grow our own and to live a little more frugally. Cash is often called ‘bread’ as to earn one’s living was to earn one’s bread, therefore bread or dough became synonymous with money.
Cost effective
Flour is usually inexpensive but the days of dipping fresh ciabatta in olive oil may be numbered on the smallholding. The exorbitant price of the oil, now that the climate crisis is biting, means we are only using it sparingly. Unfortunately, Marie Antoinette’s advice to the revolting peasants ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ just demonstrated her frivolous disregard for them or her poor understanding of their plight. Brioche is enriched with butter and eggs making it even a treat for us, we might have eggs aplenty but butter in its shrinkflation 200g blocks is also becoming rationed.
Something that is very cost effective is our own delicious broad bean hummus on our own fresh sourdough. We grow the beans from last year’s crop, then plant the beans, care for the beans, pick the beans, pod the beans, blanch the beans and de-skin the beans. It’s a monumental effort but Jack in the beanstalk would be proud of the 26 meals worth of broad beans that are now stacked in the chest freezer. However, our offspring always say ‘Ugh!’, not broad bean smush for lunch’, sometimes it’s tempting to feed them cheap sausages and mutter ‘lips, ears, and anuses’ under my breath just as they take a bite.
Cereal Killers
I’m starting to lose a little sleep about the global health of arable crops. Climate change (in the UK it’s too wet, elsewhere it’s too hot), new diseases, and declining water resources pose significant challenges for farmers, and future increases in production must be achieved without equivalent growth in pesticides or fertiliser use, which is a significant source of greenhouse gases and water pollution.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), estimates that UK production of wheat, barley, oats, and oilseed rape may be down by 4m tonnes compared to 2023, a reduction of 17.5%. Compared to the 2015-2023 average, the decline would be over 5m tonnes, or 21.2%. I’m always slightly surprised that many folk really don’t seem to be paying attention. It really is as if they don’t want to look up from their screens to see all that’s happening in the world.
Crop diversity
We are also losing crop diversity for monocultures and might increasingly have to rely on genetic modification which has its own risks to nature and biodiversity. What a lot of people are unaware of is that glyphosate weedkiller is often sprayed on wheat crops to dry grain and suppress weeds shortly before harvest. Not sure about you but eating toxic herbicides doesn’t sound great. Reducing our butter and olive oil intake so that we can afford to buy organic flour is probably the best we can do as our own smallholding is far too small to grow our own arable crops. It’s worth the investment both in time and money as the smell and taste of a loaf shortly out of the oven is priceless.
Note to self: Next term, in the KS3 lessons on healthy diet (national curriculum) for a healthy planet (my sustainable addition), squeeze in a comparison of the nutritional content and environmental impact of different types of bread. We could do a taste test but that darn soft, white bread would win every time. All too often, manufacturers just make it too easy for consumers to make the wrong choices.
