The Rise of Real Bread Conference - by Tom Herbert (Hobbs House Bakery-UK)

If even one, tiny, undeclared enzyme in your body is interested in the future of bread and baking, then your internal buzzer will be going off. This alarm trills louder and louder until answers are found, and it’s my acute aim NOW, to share with you what I’ve gleaned from the Gandalfs and Aslans of all baking things, philosophic and prophetic.

Before I start, some health and safety notices… there is a bucket of sand by each of the exits in which to bury your head if you choose to ignore what is happening. And thank you to the sponsors of the buckets; you know who you are. Last Saturday, I had the mixed blessing to report from the first Rise of Real Bread Conference for British Baker Magazine. As I traveled from the steep sided valley of my home to Oxford, I considered the potential benefits of a Press Pass, and surmised that at best the hay bales for sitting on would have had the thistles removed. Turns out that St Anne’s college, where the conference was held, was one of those striking locations where the Historic gravitas and beauty of an intellectual institution married harmoniously with the confident and ergonomic new wing of the building. The location itself was a poetic paradigm of the day to come. A veritable fermenta levain of well cultured interested parties assembled, a throng of approximately 150 souls, each having parted with £38, or at the very least a whole Saturday, to consider the future of bread.

Sheila Dillon, presenter of The Food Program, chaired the proceedings and kicked things off by rhetorically asking “Why does bread matter”? I’ll now paraphrase the rest of the day and Sheilas answer… It is the staff of life and essential to health. The Chorleywood process was a scientific triumph and belongs to the chapter of dubious processed food that also includes MRM (mechanically reclaimed meat), Water Injected Meat and GM food. If we can start by getting our bread right, we stand a chance with the rest.

This assertion was followed by much enthusiastic hand clapping, and the baton was handed to Bee Wilson – food writer and historian. Bee told us that from a historical perspective, the 40p loaf she held up was very odd. It was a sad example of a loaf, made without fermentation or kneading and with no baker behind it. Why is no one punished for this ‘bread’? Not so long ago bakers were dragged through the town with less offensive loaves strung around their neck. Bee asserted that good bread is dependent on the people who make it and traditionally bakers would have cut a signature mark into their loaves, not only for traceability but as a badge of honour.

Over to Andrew Whitley – the Blighted Boil on the Bum of Big Boy Bakeries opened with a vision that everyone should be within walking distance of real bread. Andrew answered his own question, “What’s so good about real bread?” by exclaiming that it is a question met with gross indifference. The notion of real bread is a difficult one, but one that is FUNDAMENTAL to gaining a better food culture. Nay, the state of bread is a matter of Social Justice and Public Health. Furthermore, real bread has risen to meet the need of increasing numbers unable to eat commercial bread, those looking for an alternative to bread that has been made with modern wheat that is significantly nutritionally deplete, or that has been depleted so much by high extraction milling that by law, fortification is needed, those loaves robbed of benefit by massively shortened fermentation. Coeliacs are amongst those who pay the high price of cheap bread, and this is only the tip of a gross food mountain. As an industry we have a propensity to pander to the absurd gratification of a misguided eye. As a society we should be focusing on improving bread for its natural health giving qualities and taste rather than using it as we do for mass medication… or words to that effect. Belly laugh of the day went to AW’s anecdote of a three month old ‘good as new’ crustless loaf, and infamous star of a previous seminar, that was eventually spoiled by a mouse that mostly ate the plastic wrapper.

There was much talk of stalks, ancient grains, medieval thatches and soil. If you were to provoke me into putting it into a wet walnut shell, I would lean out of my Agro-forestry tree and exclaim… there is strength in diversity! To feed all the people that are ever to live in the world, to the highest nutritious and gastronomic standard, we need to sever the strings that bind us to the economic dogma of the AgroChemical industry and their graph sucking numptys who perpetuate this destructive, centralising, monoculturesque unsustainable bleak reality. We must STOP dancing to their prattler rave and claim back the land to husbandry and the kind of farming that is truly sustainable. As impressive as the charts and statistics, was the salient claim that ten times the number of farmers will be needed in this country to fulfill the visionary prophesy.

‘I beseech ye, in the bowels of Christ to reconsider’ Oliver Cromwell.

Good job it wasn’t a cob nut shell (too small). Inspiration of the day went to the real bread bakers who are the cavalry of the battle to bake better bread for Britain. Ground is being won in communities, as quiet as a dough rise but equally determined and enchanting and ultimately fulfilling. We witnessed the testimony of Dan and Johanna McTiernan of The Handmade Bakery who proved how the community bakery model can work with Great Bread, little capital and NO waste! Allowing the community to have control of how its bread is produced is empowering and gives people ownership of the bread baked for them.

Sooo, what to do? Colin Tudge gave us 6 points. Take food very seriously, be a good consumer, invest ethically, promote community and supported agriculture, have trust for real farming, and become a farmer. The clarion call is for action. Petition to government to lift punitive laws and promote the things that support the rise of real bread; fund research into the differences in real and commercial bread; the good and real food movements, initiatives, and groups need to be brought together to make an attractive cake, whilst also maintaing diversity. We must catch up with Europe. We must find real breads’ part in addressing this country’s annual £6 Billion obesity problem, and finally a Jamie Oliver baker with street cred and real bread is needed to champion the cause. Ahem!

The Conference was a moment in time that marked the coming together of great ideas, encouraging anecdotes, and learning from our shared and magnificent heritage, and whilst the incessant examples of the hurdles any movement must overcome was often like a punch in the stomach. In the end, bread always has and will remain center of the stage.

http://hobbshousebakery.co.uk