Bread of Heaven

Right now I am working with fellow editors on the next issue of Dark Mountain. It's a non-fiction and visual exploration of technology and tools, juxtaposing an increasingly machine-dominated world and a de-industrialised way of life that is hand-made, reskilled, in tempo with the planet. This is a piece originally written in 2009 for a book about East Anglian food crops, co-produced with Josiah Meldrum (now of Hodmedod's beans, peas and quinoa) called Roots, Shoots and Seeds. This chapter centres on wheat, the dominant crop of Western civilisation, and the makers and bakers of real bread.

There are seventeen of us in a room at the Baptist church on Boltolph Steet – a farmer, a miller, several bakers, wholefood shopkeepers, members of Transition Norwich, Professor Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Institute and Andrew Whitley of the Village Bakery and author of Bread Matters. We are meeting to discuss Resilient Bread, the project that aims to create a sustainable supply of bread for Norwich, using locally milled flour from English wheat, grown on Norfolk farms.

There is a plate being passed around and on it are not wafers but slices of real wholemeal bread, baked by a neighbourhood community store. Everyone is looking at each other as if we can’t quite believe we are all in the same room together, eating those slices and listening to these lectures about peak oil and agriculture, about the natural selection of wheat genotypes that can thrive in eco-systems undergoing climate change. It’s hard somehow to get all those graphs and words about the future to relate to the rough brown food in our mouths.

Andrew Whitley, master baker, has worked with organic flour milled in a local water mill for many years. He is a neat and compact man with a keen intensity and a round face. Whereas the other speakers stood in front of us as they spoke, he remains seated within our circle and leans forward to reveal the secrets and horrors of the industrialised bread trade. Maybe it’s because he was once in the BBC Russian service that he emanates such a conspiratorial air (he is famous in bread circles for bringing a Russian sourdough culture into Britain 19 years ago that has since spawned thousands of loaves throughout the land). It was his rediscovery of the sour dough process that eventually led to the Real Bread Campaign which he launched last year (2008).

It is half-way through his speech about the infamous Chorleywood baking process that I find myself suddenly looking at a universal truth. It’s one of those moments that opens like a door sometimes when you pay attention, notebook in hand. One minute the speaker is talking about their subject and the next they are talking about Life. Whitley was talking about time. Bread is all about time: time to mix, time to prove, time to bake. The key to real bread is in allowing enough kneading time so the gluten in the flour is activated, and enough proving time for the yeast to expand the dough to twice its size.

Gluten is a protein that when kneaded makes an elasticated web, “like a series of tiny balloons” that become filled with gas from the fermentation. Yeast is a tiny mushroom, arguably the most successful symbiont with man. It is born to ferment. It ferments our food and drink and transforms them - wine, asses milk, bread and beer. Wild yeasts appear naturally in sour dough starters (made from fermented water and flour) as well as lactic acid bacteria. Sour dough was how all bread was made until the manufacture of commercial yeast. The longer you leave these agents to do their work, the greater the nutritional quality of the bread.

Industrial baking, invented in Chorleywood in the 1960’s, has not got time to spend on the niceties of natural alchemy, on these subtle relationships between gluten and yeast and lactobacilli, and has invented deviant ways to by-pass them. Whitley is listing them: high-speed mixers, addition of hydrogenated fats and water, increased use of commercial yeast, bleach, preservatives, a cocktail of artificially-mixed enzymes, as well as countless additives and emulsifiers (the so-called flour improvers). All these deny bread its natural fermentation time. And it is this cheating of time, he argues, that leads to the malfunctions within the Western diet: all its disorders of stomach and guts, its huge ballooning of bodies.

Robbed of time industrialised bread brings disorder into the digestive system. Robbed of its rough coat of wheatgerm, the grain gives no nutrition. We keep eating but nothing satisfies our deep hunger. We pay 19p for something that should cost us £2.50. The staff of life has become an industrialised commodity without any connection with our physical beings or our intelligence. Our minds are no longer paying attention to what is on the plate but are elsewhere fixed on the cheap fast dreams of cities. On escapes and fantasies. Caught in a treadmill of hard labour, we are grabbing breakfast toast and lunchtime sandwiches, pizza, hotdog rolls, burger buns to go. We are so busy we don’t even know what we are eating.

To reverse this 50 year old habit would require a restructuring of our outside and inside lives. It’s where the grassroots movement of Transition and master bakers like Andrew Whitley meet. We meet in unlikely venues and discuss ways of bringing real food back into the hands of people and places: community baking in local hubs “where good transactions happen between people,” reskilling of home bakers and the creation of the Local Loaf (paralleling the National Loaf of the 1940’s) using local millers, bakers and shops and locally distinctive varieties of wheat.

The ingredients for real bread are simple - flour, water, salt, yeast. Bringing a resilient local loaf into Norwich is more complex. The mega-distribution system of the big three industrial bakeries have trucks perpetually on the road travelling 200 miles transporting ready-sliced to the city’s 122,000 inhabitants daily. They are roaring across East Anglia from Stevenage, London and Enfield. To feed Norwich sustainably would require 30 tonnes of wheat and several local mills. On the agenda that day in January were questions about the supply chain: quantity of flour, storage and transportation of grain, the price of a loaf, the feasibility of setting up and maintaining an electric mill in the city, the packaging and marketing of the loaves. Should the flour be stone-ground or roller-ground? Tin or round? Could Canadian wheat be used as a last straw (sic) in times of bad harvest, or grain kept back? Was the Norwich Loaf initially an everyday item or a speciality one-off?

East Anglia has arable land for growing the wheat but few working mills. The first challenge for the project is to find a mill in the city to grind the corn. The nearest wind or water mills are 25-30 miles away. The other is the quality of the wheat. The gluten content of bread is a key consideration in baking. Wheat has a very high gluten content (between 12-15 per cent) which gives the dough its extraordinary elasticity and ability to be moulded into the hundreds of shapes in which we have historically consumed it – from the heaviest of wholemeals to the airiest of croissants. Artisan bakers in England have been using commercial Canadian flour for decades because its exceptionally high gluten levels makes the light and fluffy white loaf we have got used to. The lower gluten content of our native wheat is compensated for by the Chorleywood method. The Norwich bakers’ main concern with using local flour was one of consistency (“No one is going to buy a bad bloomer”, one said rather gloomily; “You could call it ciabatta,” another quipped to much laughter) and there was a long discussion as to how we were going to get over the fact that life was unpredictable and that white and fluffy was not the future. It felt like it was going to take some time for all of us to get used to the idea.

You could tell the bakers. They had a physical presence in the room that was quite distinct from those whose business was in words and figures. They seemed familiar though I had never really considered bakers before, or even talked to one. They existed in my imagination as mythical figures with white hats and aprons. Suddenly I realised they were men who worked with their hands and worked at night. And this was why the meeting that day had begun at 2.15pm.

The Field

One of the lesser known facts about Charles Darwin is that when he bought Down House (where The Origin of Species was written) it was not for the house but for the chalk grassland that surrounded it. The species-rich habitat provided the man who was about to shake the paradigm of the Western world with the perfect opportunity to observe bio-diversity and see how its elements worked together. It was here he saw that everything in the natural world is connected and that the greater diversity that exists in a place the greater its abundance.

At the same time as the naturalist was looking at biological complexity in the field, chemists were singling out individual components in their laboratories and developing the first nitrate fertilisers that would lead to the appearance of a very different kind of grassland. And a plant that once grew wild around the Fertile Crescent began to be bred as the basis of the global diet: modern wheat.

Professor Martin Wolfe is a plant pathologist who has spent the last decade working at his organic research station outside Metfield developing what are known as Composite Cross Populations of wheat. The evolution of wheat is a complicated business and requires your absolute concentration. Where once we ate thousands of different plants, the human species mostly lives off half a dozen crops of which wheat is now the top one.

Outside the window of the Institute’s meeting room small green spikes are everywhere on trial: in a conventional agricultural field and in organic strips bordered by timber and fruit trees (a layout known as agroforestry). The Composite Cross Populations have a complex origin: three populations that come from 20 varieties and 200 intercrosses and a random male sterile genotype who acts like the joker in the pack. As a result the plants contain thousands of variations. It’s these variations that give the wheat the ability to produce consistent yield and quality of grain under a wide variety of conditions.

“Natural eco-systems are complex because they evolve that way for a damn good reason. The whole way of developing agriculture around the world depends on functional diversity. What evolutionary breeding showed was that if you dissemble the elements (in an eco-system) you find that yield increases with the positive interactions occurring. The more complex the connections, the better everything responds.”

We sit in the Institute meeting room, Mark, Josiah and I facing Martin. The biological history of cereal crops, he explains, goes in two directions: one that concentrated on a simple system using synthetic fertilisers to boost yields that led to the separation of agriculture and the natural world around 1850, and another known as evolutionary breeding that began in California in 1929 which introduced variation and worked within complexity.

His story veers from wild barley in Israel to the development of maize in Africa and traces a familiar shape: the taking of heritage seeds out of farmer’s hands and putting them into the fists of seed merchants, the manufacturers of pesticides and herbicides and finally the corporations who patent rights for certain genes and focus on their monoculture (as well as produce the agrochemicals that support the varieties that contain them).

“Oh, I’ve got a story about Monsanto,” says Mark breezily who was taking notes. I shoot him a fast look. We haven’t got time for asides, even good ones. We have another meeting to go to. Martin is an ex-professor and has that smooth ease of delivery honed from years of lecturing to Cambridge students for exactly one hour. Although there is something bristly and creaturelike about his manner I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s a creature I know, a tusky fellow, one not to be crossed.

Wolfe has no time for simplificaton and bristles academically about evolution being side-stepped by global corporations. The memory of how to thrive in different conditions – light and shade, temperatures, with plant pathogens and insects - persists in the genetic structure of naturally evolved seed. It has an inbuilt multifunctionality. But in the millions and millions of hectares of monocultural wheat these shared memories are not available.

“What happens if the weather is different from the weather it experienced during its ten years of selection? Modern wheat is bred to react maximally to input from pesticides and herbicides. But in the future the environment will be much more variable. How do we deal with that?”

Amongst the Composite Cross Populations there are answers to these questions, as well as an ability to function without agrochemicals based on fossil fuels. Because of their diversity and ability to complement and compensate for one other “there are huge amounts of variable phenomena emerging.”

As Wolfe points out: “There are lots of things breeders can’t see which are being affected by the environment.” Scientific plant breeding depends on things that can be easily measured such as height and leaf shape and so on. But the strength of living systems depends on things that cannot be seen in this way. “Inevitably the natural world is a much better selector than the trained human breeder. We have to be humble in these things.”

For 150 years however, sanctioned by the “Darwinian” assertion that nature is red in tooth and claw and inherently competitive, we have gone in the opposite direction. From Darwin we have taken the image of animals fighting for survival and justified all our aggressive acts against nature and each other. We consider evolution in terms of exotic birds far away in South America and conveniently forget his ecological analysis of the native grasslands of England that tell quite a different story. The plant world shows that nature is essentially co-operative and the success of eco-systems depends on a complex weave of relationships, as well as a long genetic memory. The simple system science behind modern agriculture, most explicitly expressed in “the crude plant technology” of GM, is one of control and domination. But this control has now, according to Wolfe, reached its ultimate, and is about to face the music in the form of climate change and peak oil.

“The question we are posing (or that is being posed for us) is how has evolution coped with a huge variety of conditions? It’s coped by lots of variation, lots of diversity, lots of different answers to potential problems.“

Maybe it’s the word population but every time Martin starts talking about the CCP that door begins to swing open again: he’s not just talking about wheat diversity, he’s talking about human diversity! We are, after all, what we eat. In a Westernised industrial world where human populations are forced to become increasingly monocultural and dependent for their survival on artificial conditions, our own evolutionary moves are now being called into play. What is happening to wheat is happening to ourselves. What would it mean for us to become composite cross?

The Bakery

We are on our way to talk with a baker in Stanton, where Josiah went to school. If Wolfe represents the biological thought at the beginning of the supply chain, the bakers represent the working craft at the end. It’s mid March, after a long and relentless winter, and there is not one cherry plum tree in blossom. The land still wears last season’s coat and the hedgerows are twiggy except for sudden bursts of golden-tasselled hazel. A low grey sky hems us in as we hurtle down the small roads that wind along the border country between Norfolk and Suffolk. It’s already bleaker here. The clay fields are giant-sized and empty, punctuated by the occasional spinney or solitary oak. Apart from the rooks, we are the only thing moving amongst the swathes of blunted green barley and darker rosettes of rape.

On the wooden shelves at the back of the Hillcrest Farm Shop in Stanton we find a quote from Felicity Lawrence’s Not On The Label on Radio 4: “Only a small number (of Britain’s independent bakers) genuinely bake from scratch, many depend instead on factory ‘premixes’. Today there are only 3,500 individual craft bakers in the UK, compared to about 35,000 in France . . .” In between crusty white and crunchy granary loaves, a round face is beaming at me from the kitchen.

The smile belongs to Mick the Baker who has been baking from scratch for 37 years. “You can talk to me as I’m working,” he says. It’s probably the only time we can talk to Mick as he is definitely a man on the go. As he works ten pans of dough into hundreds of hot cross buns, he gives us a run down on his working schedule, baking, singing with a band at the weekends and driving long-distance trucks. Most of his days start at 4.30am, Saturday begins at 1.30am. Do you ever get time to sleep? I ask. “I don’t get a lot,” he says, “I used to survive on three hours. The only way is to keep going and not sit down. The trouble is I’m fifty now. The mind says you can but the body says maybe not.”

We’ve come to talk with Mick because he has just started baking with locally grown and milled flour. He bakes “the old-fashioned way” entirely by hand (except for the mixing), uses natural ingredients and is one of only nine traditional British bakers left in the Waveney Valley. “I’ve always done it natural. Slow mix, slow dough. Throw it in and hope for the best. I’ve got it right for the bread, I’m not sure for the rest of the life!”

Mick is “an old East End boy” who began his apprenticeship at 15 and came to East Anglia in 1991 to run the Swan Bakery in the neighbouring village of Garboldisham. He chose baking because he was waiting until he was 21 to follow his dream of being a long-distance lorry driver.

“I’m more into quality than money. I’m not motivated by money, I’m motivated by music.”

Mick is a motivated man. As he whirls his two hands around 360 buns he talks non-stop about bread, about bread making machines, about his old-style baking equipment and the necessity of hot ovens, the time John Peel almost came to interview him but then he died, how sweeping up is the most important part of the job, how he likes to barter, swapping bread for customer’s eggs, surprising children with a box of cakes when they hand him a picture, how he holds the peace between the scrapping artistes in his band (“I’m in the middle of it,” he laughs) and sings almost everything – jazz, blues, funk, soul - just not country (even though he is a trucker), how he hasn’t got time to teach, has never read a book in his life and the reason he likes baking is because it’s creative: he creates everything from start to finish.

“I use Canadian flour which isn’t very patriotic but it makes the best bread. The organic English one comes up quite small and heavy but that suits some customers. I don’t mess around with fancy stuff. Mine’s the proper old English bread. People like a bit of crust.”

Like most hands-on craftsmen he learned everything by watching people. “If anyone asks me anything technical, I can’t tell them. I know what happens if you leave yeast out but I couldn’t tell you why. I know when the salt is left out because the dough moves quicker. In the summer it’s a nightmare in here because the bread keeps moving and you can’t stop.”

We stand in the tiny back kitchen, peering at Mick busily not stopping with the currant-spotted dough, occasionally swerving out of the way as he whisks a tray into the fridge or freezer. I want to ask him when do you have time for life? And then as I listen to him, hands spinning, talking about gigs and whacking everything in the bowl, knocking it on the table, whacking it back in the prover, I realise this is Life, this whirl of activity, creating, producing, bartering, sweeping up. On the wall there is a photograph of Mick singing with a hat on (“I always wear a hat”), a smiley T- shirt and rainbow trousers. He’s carrying a giant sunflower in one hand.

Mick tells us a story about working through the night. At the Swan Bakery he had a chill-out room and at night people used to drop by: policemen came for a quick kip, firemen on call, young boys without anything much to do. One night a couple came on their way from the Glastonbury Festival lured by the lights of the chill-out room. “They said they could not believe it.” You could imagine it then, stoned out of your head in the small hours, finding a light burning on a dark road, and a man working in the kitchen mixing yeast, flour, water and salt, cooking up the kind of bread you might like to eat. What did they see when the door swung open?

“It’s time to decompress,” said Josiah as we reeled out of the shop. We chewed our buns as we walked about the garden centre. Everything after the intensity of the kitchen didn’t seem quite real: the stiff and clipped box trees, the flashy petunias in their pots, silently waiting under a grey and cold sky. “What’s the story?” he asked, as we climbed back into the small car. We had come out on an adventure the three of us for the day. I don’t know what we had expected from either the scientist or the baker. We all felt rather dazed.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. I was thinking about what I had first seen, as I glimpsed Mick’s round face between the shelves of bread. It was like the sun was smiling at me.

When I came to the story I realised that we live in a culture that keeps everything separate and that when you start to assemble the components back together again, it requires a way of thinking about life and engaging in it that is not just a matter of graphs and statistics. The bakers and millers and shopkeepers once appeared in our imaginations as part of life. These people operated in the fabric of our daily lives: they lived in songs and in fairy tales, as characters in children’s picture books and playing cards. They were apparent and lived in the brightness of day.

The processes of industry and science and agriculture are hidden. They recognise no people, only machines and numbers. They operate secretly in the dark and rely on our not joining up the dots and connecting the facts. Even when investigated by determined journalists like Lawrence, knowing facts about the global food industry does not actually shift our ways of thinking about them.

What shifts our awareness are the door-opening moments, when those connections start cross-referencing and self-organising inside you - those revelations about time, about Life. Suddenly you get the whole picture. You know that when the time is out of whack, everything else goes out of whack. How when you side-step evolution there is a price to pay. And that’s the moment you start asking yourself who exactly is paying.

At this point, I don’t know which way the story is going. It’s still fermenting: the faces of the three men appear before me and need time to reassemble themselves into a coherent shape. What I do know is that when you look at wheat, you find yourself looking at civilisation. The ability to domesticate wild grasses and feed thousands of people happened at the same time in different continents – rice in Asia, millet in Africa, maize in the Americas. Wheat, with barley and rye, was the main cereal crop of the Middle East and clearly marks the shift from the nomadic and hunter-gatherer world, to the city-ruled agricultural world of conquered and indentured populations. When you look at wheat you look at bread, and when you look at bread you’re looking at people. You’re looking at a certain kind of people eating for a certain kind of reason.

It’s not sacred anymore in the way we understand sacred - our daily bread - but it serves the same function. Modern factory bread is cheap and in a world that prizes convenience and availability and money most of all, the cheapness of bread means it is highly prized. For one section of the population of course. For cheap food is and always has been, since the city-states established themselves 5000 years ago, the fuel of the workforce. Though civilisations prize themselves on their architecture and technology and their high-flown ideals, all of them depend on a huge and expendable underclass. The daily bread that was apportioned to the city slaves in Rome is as vital to them as the ready-sliced bought by the urban poor of the global metropolis. And the contempt the modern ruling classes have towards the masses who eat junk bread is in proportion to their great and ancient fear that they will one day rise up and demand not wholemeal loaves, nor even croissants, but equity.

Sometimes I think that my intolerance to wheat, to gluten and yeast, is a symptom of my own revolt against the prevailing order. I used to think it was an expression of the imbalance between settled agriculture and the wild places of this earth – a shout of solidarity for all those medicine flowers and prairie grasses, sometimes as tall as a man, mown down and replaced by the millions and millions of hectares of identical corn. Our minds may acquiesce to industrialisation, to the maltreatment of nature, but our archaic hunter-gatherer bodies do not. They close down, blow up and start minor revolutions. But now I realise the body doesn’t just revolt in sympathy with the earth, but also with its own kind.

There are millions of people who are allergic to wheat. Some so allergic (the so-called coeliacs) they cannot consume one tiny speck of flour. It’s a phenomen that came with the industrialisation of cereals, particularly in the last 20 years. There is no medical cure for what happens to the intolerant body. Gluten is seen as a foreign invader by the immune system and it attacks the delicate lining of the intestine that normally takes in the goodness of food. As a result the micronutrients - the essential minerals and vitamins - are not absorbed by the blood. Without these vital ingredients we grow weak and tired and depressed, rashes appear on our knees and ulcers in our mouths. We sweat, feel poisoned and our bowels collapse. White bread, the symbol of oppression of the dominant Western world in many cultures, is often blamed as a cause of malnutrition amongst the poor and indigenous. But gluten intolerance is widespread amongst everyone in a wheat-consuming world. Between 1 in one hundred or 1 in 600 of people in the UK, depending which report you read. Allergies don’t just happen to the masses.

It’s difficult to look at food allergies like this. We want there to be scientific solutions, fixes and formulas. We want to be separate and blameless and live our lives in discrete units, as if our physical reactions bear no relation to the way we treat the earth or the culture we uphold. We want to cheat time and cheat each other and think we can get away with things forever.

But we can’t.

The Bowl

It’s a bowl my sister gave me years ago and has, for as long as I can remember, sat quietly in the corner or in front of fireplaces in houses I have lived in. It sat on the long table in my London flat for years. When I went travelling it was one of the only things I kept during a decade of perpetual moving and shifting. I just liked it for its great and useful form - a large deep pottery bowl, terracotta on the outside, creamy yellow on the inside with a hand-drawn ox-blood-coloured rim. I cooked up a lot of dishes in that London flat with its long table, and in all the places where I went travelling. Except bread. Bread was not my style: it felt way too domestic and slow.

But last Sunday I made my first loaf in the pottery bowl, and found out what it was really called: a panchion. My fellow first-time breadmaker took a snap of me holding it at my hip to send to her mother. “She used to use one,” she said.

It wasn’t a grand production, just a regular soda bread made with local spelt and rye. We were a small group of people in a neighbourhood restaurant, taking part in a bread making club that meets the last Sunday of every month. What was surprising was that when my hands went deep into the sides of the panchion, they knew what to do without any instruction. Push, pull, knead.

It was not like making pastry or anything else I’ve mixed in a bowl because the soda had activated the dough. You could feel the stuff living in your hands. Recorded somewhere deep in the bone-memory of those hands, in that bowl, in the spelt and rye, was the knowledge of people working with the staff of life for thousands of years. Knead, push, pull.

After kneading we waited. We had some tea and talked to each other. Then we put the round shapes into the oven. When we pulled our tins out forty minutes later, my two loaves were perfect. How did that happen? They were cracked in a cross shape - the distinguishing mark of soda bread - dusted with flour, chunky, sweet smelling. When I got home I went round and gave the spare loaf to my neighbour and the other I put in the centre of the table. I looked at that bread for a long time. And then I cut a thick slice and ate it the way I remember we used to in Ireland, with butter and hot tea. I did not get sick.


It’s something about craftsmen, about creators, that I’ve noticed. It’s not money that motivates them, or a machine that makes demands on their time. It’s something else. Wolfe remembers the strains of wild barley he saw once either side of a rock in a Middle Eastern field: short on the shadowy side of the rock and tall on the sunny side: beautiful! he declares and his face lights up (finally I recognise the creature, it’s a wild boar). Now I’m looking at those tough spikes of green outside his window in a different way, imagining how they can in a matter of months turn into pale golden fields of edible wheat on stalks of differing heights.

Mick is telling us he makes real English bread, that people like a bit of crust. Now I’m looking at his shiny loaves stacked on the shelf. How come I never noticed that English bread was crusty before, that it is square? I ate bread for years. I’ve gazed out across arable fields for years. How come I never examined those hairy ears of wheat closely, the stiffness of their forms? I could have missed everything, skimming on the top of what I saw or thought, and never delving deep into the place where time lives, where the cross currents of our lives make sense of everything, where what happens behind the scenes before dawn is everything that happens after sunrise.

What did these three men have in common that made me look at life with another eye? I realised it was a relationship with the material: the desire to shape the stuff of life with your own hands. If you talk to a man about his passion for making hats or chairs, or turning a bowl from a piece of old railway track or a cherry tree that has blown over, or to a man who knows how to turn the earth so that beans or roses will spring from it, or how to make a necklace of out of seaglass that reflects light all about your throat you will find a man with a deep satisfaction inside him. I’ve spent some of my life talking to such men, without knowing why there is a strong curent that flows between us. And now I see it’s because we have something in common: their eye is on matter in the same way my eye is on the blank page. The possibility is that what manifests could go one way or another and your interaction in the matter is everything. It’s the kind of relationship you never tire of.

To be in life requires your utter engagement. Industrialisation switches us off. It’s only interested in people working like machines To put yourself in the centre of things is the position in which time starts making sense, whether you are a biologist, a baker, a writer or a musician. You are working with the substance of life. In those spaces created by the synthesis of gluten and yeast and bacteria, nourishment is forged from the seeds of the wheat grass. In the spaces created within the matter, the craftsmen glimpse a possibility of eternity. It’s a mysterious process that even deeply practical bakers like Whitley acknowledge. It’s being fully engaged in this daily alchemy that gives us the real rewards of life, that mere possession of things, or endless hours of leisure never can.

The industrial machine produces from life what can be bought and sold, demanding endless energy and life-force. It makes slaves of people and gives us money and entertainment and cheap goods in return. But you never get to engage with the fabric of life that way - with plants or bread or words - or find any kind of satisfaction. The craftsman is using his hands to making life beautiful, useful, delicious: he is putting his attention and his skill into those loaves and those loaves are coming up good. No one gets sick afterwards.

To find satisfaction you have to have an encounter with the real world and absorb its great subtleties. It’s difficult to make the deep connections about food without meeting the people that grow the plants or bake the bread, or doing those things yourself. You have to stand in the intensity of the kitchen and in the emptiness of the land. And then you have to go home and let those ingredients shift and move and expand together. Real bread takes time. Real stories take time. How many stories can you make with 26 letters? How many songs can you sing with 12 notes? How many solutions can you come up with with 17 people in a room? How many things can you make out of flour and water that are not the monocultural white sliced loaf?

The loaves of the old world are stored inside me: cottage white, granary brown, bap, bagel, pitta, naan, focaccia, ciabatta, pumpernickel, brioche. A man with a black face is gulping water from a bucket like a horse, his warm bread stacked on a rough shelf set in the side of a Greek mountain. I am standing by the door, a dish of Easter kid at my hip, about to put the dish inside his oven stoked with thornbushes. An old man takes my hand in a French patisserie in Queensway and puts a sweet roll in it. His name is Monsieur Pechon. He is eighty years old and blind. I am four years old and wearing a coat the colour of the sun. Each morning he waits by the door for us, les petits, to come and hold his bread baking hands. It’s a long time ago. It’s a long long way away from where we are now.

I am wondering as I write this story about wheat, whether we will make it back in time.

Images: Organic loaves baked at the squatted farmhouse co-operative, Can Piella, in Spain (Philip Evans); Brockwell Baker Vincent Talleu, gathers Blue Cone Rivet heritage wheat at Perry Court Farm, Kent; baker from the community owned Handmade Bakery, Slaithwaite, Yorkshire; Ann-Marie Culhane and Corn Mask 1; CDC with the panchion and soda bread, Yoxford, Suffolk; Mark's first sourdough loaf made with local spelt and wheat, 2009, Suffolk.

ROOTS, SHOOTS AND SEEDS: The Spear Carriers

Roots, Shoots and Seeds is a book about the local community food movement, set around the wide arable fields of East Anglia, following the tracks of the crops that grow in these clay and sandy soils, from barley to flax, from rapeseed to potatoes. I began to write this book with my friend and fellow Transitioner, Josiah Meldrum in 2009, and although we were unable to complete and publish the work, our attention set the scene for other food projects, such as the Low Carbon Cookbook and Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen. Now May has arrived in full force, so has one of Suffolk's most cherished vegetables. In celebration here is a section in praise of the great green spears . . .
 
"There she is," said my father, "Boudicca! Look at her! Formidable!" Craning our necks we looked upwards toward the statue in the darkening sky. A woman on a chariot flew into the night sky above the arch. Boudicca was sacking London, trampling invaders under her spiky wheels. We were travelling back along the red road that runs between the Palace and the Park.

For years the statue at Hyde Park Corner signalled the return to the city, after days and sometimes weeks spent in the countryside. We had, alas, come back, but Boudicca was holding the fort and pointing us in the right direction. Just in case we forgot our way.

In spite of his admiration for barbarians my father was not one of Boudicca’s men. He worked for another woman entirely, a Roman matron who stood blindfold on top of the dome of the Old Bailey. She was a hard taskmistress: the folds of her gown unyielding, her sword exacting, and for all the advocacy he performed in her service there was none of the jubilation he expressed for the warrior Queen of East Anglia. But then my father’s heart was not in the work he did for Justice, it belonged to the country we had just left behind. To a large ragged garden that lay by a marsh, a plot of earth with a wheelbarrow and a spade beside it, apple trees all around and a bare mound that signalled the presence of the greatest of British vegetables, white crowns that lay hidden in the earth: asparagus.

Asparagus is a lily and like all lilies, otherworldly, and keeps its strength in reserves underground. From these rich stores, it bolts through the earth in straight green shoots with purplish heads known as spears in Spring, when it is harvested until midsummer before it branches into its stiff and feathery form and flowers. Like all lilies it is ruled by the moon, the planet of memory, and, in spite of its overtly masculine form, unequivocally the queen of the field. The crowns take years to mature and the spears are time-consuming to pick both in the wild and domesticated state and consequently, though eaten with barbarian fingers, they are always treated with a certain reverence.

When the asparagus arrived my father would appear triumphant in the door and stride towards the kitchen, carrying the spears. The Moment had arrived. At supper we would watch for the signal that meant everyone was allowed to begin eating. He took up position at the end of the table. The napkin flicked. The glass was filled. The asparagus lay steaming on our plates. A spear was lifted dripping with creamy butter, held aloft for dramatic effect, and then, in it went.

Dear God, dear God! exclaimed our father, rolling his eyes upward. Dear god, dear god! we chorused, laughing between our own slippery green mouthfuls.

We did not question why our father always called upon the Almighty when he ate something he loved since he was a devout atheist, however it was how all great foods were addressed. Ordinary foods were quietly and effortlessly dispensed at the other end of the table by my mother, all manner of stews and pies and puddings, but the roast meats of Sunday, game fish, smoked fish, French cheese and most assuredly his own garden vegetables belonged to my father’s end. The ritual and mythology of food belonged to him, all foods that required ceremony, a careful handling of carving knife and fork, a judicious serving, came under his dispensation.

I spent a life-time excusing myself from this dining table, liberating myself from the constraints of its form and hierarchy, forgoing manners, dramatic gesture, napkins and claret, and yet when it comes to asparagus, I still exult.

To gain a true relationship with food, we have to regain a relationship with place, remember the part of ourselves that knows about seeds and earth and rain. Sometimes this memory is secreted in a place we don’t want to go, in the deep earth, down an ancestral path that leads back through time towards a battalion of asparagus marching over the East Anglia fields in the month of May. Our buried treasure.

Ru Litherland, Hackney-born, might have run along Boudicca’s chariot. He is a radical man who grows all manner of vegetables in renovated land in Walthamstow. He says that many who come to enlist in his volunteer army of seed sowers and leaf pickers, fall in with its movements and requirements easily because their old man once had an allotment and grew his own veg. When they come to the land they just know what to do. They have listened to a rhythm and it has somehow got into their bones. I have listened to that rhythm: the chink of spade as it scraped the eastern flint, the shake of grass, the rattle of bean poles in the wind. I once climbed an apple tree and watched the East wind as it ran through the blond marsh grasses of Kent, my eyes scanning the horizon for the distant sea. And below me I listened to the sounds of the garden: tack tack tack.

You could get nostalgic remembering those sounds, but I have learned not to trust nostalgia especially when it comes to fathers and gardens and going back in time. I want to go forwards, taking this sound in my ears, this feeling in my bones, this pungent taste in my mouth, a taste of blood and iron.

* * * *

I stand at the chopping board in the kitchen in the spring evening. Outside the window the apple tree is heavy with blossom. My hands hold a knife, my attention focussed on cutting the woody ends from the asparagus. My left index finger feels for the place to cut and then the right hand slices the spears sharply: tack tack tack. The hands know things the mind does not. You pick up an axe and know without knowing how to chop wood, bake bread, wrap the dead, hoist a sail. When I was 29 a gardener put an egg in my hand. It was warm and smooth. Listen! he said. Tap tap tap: a chick was pecking its way out of its shell into the unimagined vastness of the world. I had been wrapped up in myself, far away from earth and suddenly I was looking into his eyes. “I wanted to get through to you,” he said.

Something stifled in us needs to come alive, break out, remember. We need an encounter with life to do this. My old friend Carol went into the desert when she was 40 years old. Everyone had left her and she had to start again. She sat down in the middle of nowhere and cried for a long time. Then she put her hands into the earth and her hands formed bricks out of the red mud. She built a house with those adobe bricks and then she lived there. Some people put their hands back into the earth and they find themselves weeping or laughing, flooded with feelings they have no names for. Then their hands start searching out roots, pushing seeds, pulling weeds, throwing out flints. Something happens in this moment when your hands take charge of your life: something quiet, unsusceptible to the eye, that thunders inside you and breaks. You think it is your heart. But it’s not. It’s your isolation.

The root to the real world is cut quickly. The forgetting of how to be in nature happens quickly.The diseases that come with the Western diet come quickly. They come to indigenous people and to girls who live too long in cities. Everyone blows up like a balloon, gets diabetes, their hearts fail and their stomach knots. The world of factory food goes too fast for the natural systems of human beings. To survive on this food you have to eat too much and not think about what you are eating. You have to forgo your common sense and the knowledge of your ancestors and fit the requirements of industry in the same unnatural ways that food is processed and homogenised. Somewhere deep inside you shut down. You find yourself gazing up at the actors, the kings and queens at their high tables, and forgetting you are among spear carriers without whom the play is not the play.

I stand at the chopping board, green spears in my hand. Outside the blackbird begin his evening carol. I do not make Victoria sponge or marmalade like my mother. I don’t give dinner parties and sit bejewelled amongst guests, or lay down claret, or cross the Channel to eat raie au beurre noire and Camembert. I don’t dine like a king, like my father, on smoked eel and partridge, I eat like a spear carrier. I know things about food and history my parents’ generation never knew. I know that Boudicca is not Boudicca, but a boy in a war chariot overwhelmed by the angel crowned with olive leaves. A statue to peace erected in 1912 just before the bloodiest battle ever fought began. I know that what we need is not peace but life in our hands, a year filled with great moments. Dear god, dear god! holy food for unbelievers, who don’t worship or go down on their knees but declare their happiness out loud for the fruit of the season: for greengage and rhubarb, for samphire and blackberry, for purple sprouting broccoli and leek.

I don’t take out a cookery book to cook this bundle of asparagus, picked this day in Jack’s fields in Middleton. I will not cover them in hollandaise or adorn them with shavings of truffle or Parmesan. I will not hide my spears inside risottos or a quirky nest of noodles, nor in any manner of grandiloquent dish I once learned to make in my working city kitchen, surrounded by pans and knives and cookery books, my apron hanging on a hook behind the door. Tonight the spears shall take their place on the plate as they emerged from the earth. Naked and green, beside a cut lemon, a small pool of olive oil, sea salt, black pepper. I will serve them in the glasshouse on the blue table. It’s the Moment of the first summer vegetables: new potatoes, broad beans, spinach. A humble dish of vegetables on a great day in May.

Can you sing praises to broad beans and spinach? To a blue kitchen table?

The Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai sings praises to cucumber and scallions:

Times are bad. I take an oath of loyalty to the table

coated with white Formica.

His fellow countryman, the Palestinian poet, Mourid Bougati, instructs us in these times to speak of real things, to hold everything dear. In a world dominated by abstract theorems, by the high-flown rhetoric of empire, by eternal war, to cherish the concrete and the real with words is the radical act of writers and chroniclers. To acknowledge time and place, to engage in the physicial breathing and growing world is radical. Cooking is radical. Tasting the fruit of the earth, knowing where it comes from and whose hands grew it, the name of the grocer and the flower. Holding the spear and walking away from the play, in the opposite direction to Rome.

* * * *

Eventually the stern taskmistress demanded my father work harder and harder, the piles of paper in the study grew higher and higher, and the vegetables in the garden slipped away; my mother got tired and started to buy readymade food. The pies and the stews slipped away. And then they both slipped away. I was alone in a world without the ritual of carving knife and fork. The garden was paved over, earmarked for development. The kitchen fell silent. The wooden spoons lay unused in the drawer. Reluctantly I came down from my apple tree hideout, where I had been observing the wild world for twenty years, keeping a log.

Now what do we do? I said.

Frankenstein has loosed his monster on the world, an industrial chain of hubs and tankers, factories and refineries that devours every living thing in its path, spews out poisons and bad air. He stands in the laboratory mixing cocktails of enzymes and chemicals, cheating time, killing the soil, outside his juggernauts ceaselessly thunder up and down the roads of everywhere, perpetually, silently, the shelves and freezers are filled with food so cheap, so convenient, that the people forget that it is the stuff of life and comes from the earth, emerges in Spring, like the asparagus with the bluebells and the nightingale.

How can anything we do make a difference? How can knowing these facts about food serve us, knowing that Frankenstein has every base covered, is busily stripping the living systems bare, stalking the countryside, spraying the barley field beyond the hedge even now so I have to close the kitchen window not to inhale its noxious drift?

Because when the tractor with its long arms has left the field there is the blackbird singing as dusk falls, because you are still standing by the chopping board and the asparagus is still in your hands. Because you remember the feel of the land in May. The greening of everything. Something went in deep those years ago in the garden and though you are living in a different time you haven’t forgotten the lily crowns that lie for years underneath the soil. Frankenstein tries to make the world forget the deep and slow things, the plants that move according to sun and moon and alchemise life in their root and stem and leaf. He runs on clock time, 24/7 time, on high-drive, in the fast lane, where one day is the same as another and everyone is interchangeable, replaceable, only worthwhile for their ability to feed his monster’s maw.

Under his tutelage whole legions of us fall asleep, lose our minds, forget our names, who we are, what we are doing. But some of us are remembering, singing hymns in praise of radishes and olive trees, not moving from where we live, on deliberate go-slow. Growing lettuces in windowboxes and barrels, on rooftops, reclaiming land, regenerating soil, in the hinterlands and back country, in the cracks of the streets of cities, behind railway stations. Meeting up in halls and backrooms, baking our own bread, stirring the pot. Speaking to each other across tables.

Some of us are returning, carrying our spears. Coming home.

Images: Organic Lea community veg bed; asparagus from local farmer's market (Creative Commons); Jack's Suffolk asparagus with Maple Farm radishes, 2013 (CDC)

Sea Beet, Sugar Beet

We are swimming out to sea, out towards the sandbanks where the waves are breaking. We are strangers to one another on the beach but kin in the sea. There is an edge in these waters we feel as we near the bank, a nervousness we hide with our occasional shouts to one another and laughter. Something in us knows, that even though the sea is shallow at low tide, the currents are fickle here.

Standing on the island I can feel the presence of the wild shore behind us. It ia the last day of summer. Tomorrow the holidaymakers will go home and the beach will empty. Already you can feel the turn in the air. Soon the barnacle geese will arrive from Siberia, the sand martins depart to Africa and an East wind will come and erase all our footsteps.

The children who swam alongside me have become bored with the phenomena of sandbanks and are now chasing each other back to shore, the lovers drift shyly sideways into a watery embrace. I am left looking out towards the empty horizon, the cross currents shifting urgently about my feet, sun pouring down on my head. I am looking where millions have gazed before me, across the wrinkled North Sea, into the vastness of space and air. Everyone wants to come here to the land's edge and gaze outwards into this space. I spent years of my life wanting to come here. What were we looking for in all that blue?

I wanted to know the texture of the wild land that lies behind me, the tastes of it, smoky and salt, the bitterness of the centaury flower that shines on the cliff, the sound of the lone cry of the curlew wheeling downriver, the rough feel of alder bark, the way the light shines on the reed beds. I can look now down the coast with all its estuaries, across mud flat and fen, and map all my stopping places – Southwold, Aldeburgh, Felixstowe, Sandwich Bay – I can chart my life as I came slowly northwards, slow as a red-sailed barge that once made its way up the eastern rivers, stacked with salt and barley.

In the sandy dunes and shingle banks there is a front line of wild plants, our first food plants, the ancestors of allotment and field - wild carrot, wild cabbage, sea beet, sea pea, sea kale, sea rocket, oraches and sorrel – and many traditional medicines - wormwood and eyebright, sea buckthorn berries, sea holly root, scurvy grasses. Of all these ancient companions, the sea beet is still highly prized by modern foragers for its rich leaves. It’s a handsome plant, large and sturdy, with long green spiky flowers and tough stems that turn streaky red as autumn comes. The kind of plant that can weather a storm.

Last winter the sea rose up as far as the plant-line of this shore. The wind ran against the tide and the estuaries flooded their banks. Along the coast people began speaking about how to protect the land. Small bands collected together, stacked sandbags against the river wall, spoke out for the birds and the spirit of the place.

Just a few cows, we were told by the greysuited men in the village hall, refusing to mend the broken banks of the rivers and the harbours in the sea beet’s territory – the Blyth, the Ore, the Alde, the Deben, as the government announced its retreat back to the metropolis. What about the fishermen? I asked. It’s not economic, one replied. What about the tourism? They will go elsewhere, said another. The cows in the watermeadows didn’t count. The birds didn’t count. The land didn’t count. The people in the coastal seatowns didn’t count. Only the populations in the industrial towns would be secured. The oil prices began to rise. Suddenly I realised I was living in a different time. A time I did not know.

I want to keep this last day of summer, to stand on this sandbank forever. But already the water is growing chilly. I know, like everyone else, that something wasn’t quite real about this life by the seaside, this endless gazing towards the horizon: it was a holiday. A holiday that lasted for a hundred years, a get-what-you-want, go-where-you-please, eat-cake-every-day holiday. Like parties and love affairs, it wasn’t all fun. It rained, you got bored and read too many books. The family quarrelled. The show on the pier was a shabby affair. And sometimes as you stood as I do now on the most beautiful afternoon of the year, with the tang of wild beet in my mouth, the light playing on the sea, you felt something vital was missing.

Beyond the beach and this line of wild duneland plants, this golden edge of reeds, the swimmers in the sea, the elegant lines of silver birch and sanderling oak, lies the hinterland of East Anglia. In these heavy clay spaces lives the wild beet’s domesticated cousin, Beta vulgaris, sugar beet, that dwells in its millions in hundreds and hundreds of identical acres of agricultural land. The sea beet is distinguished by its leaves, thick shiny leaves that cook up well as a salty wild chard or spinach. Its relation, the sugar beet, is distinguished by its root, which when it is harvested in the bitterness of January you can find piled in great pale yellow mounds, left by grinding machines that churn the soil and slash its leaves, or storming down the dark lanes in trucks en route to the refinery at Cantley. You don’t want to look there, beyond this wild and sandy edge of light at all that mud and mangel-wurzel. At all that desolation and winter. But at some point you have to look at this land. Because you know, whether you like it or not, that the holiday is over.

* * * *

Of all the addictive substances that we seek out on the food shelves, fat, salt and sugar, sugar is perhaps the most pernicious. Natural sweetness is stored sunlight in plants, most deliciously manifested in fruit. In search of natural sweetness men will, as they have for thousands of years, climb cliffs and trees and brave swarms of angry honey bees. In the manufacture of artificial sweetness they will destroy the world and each other.

Many plants are grown commercially for their sugar content - rice, maize, sugar cane - but in England sugar is made from beet, principally in East Anglia. It is commonly sold as white table sugar, the stuff we spoon into tea and coffee, our home-made cakes and jam. Not that we think about this sugar very much, or the thousands of processed foods we eat that contain it. We like to taste sugar, but we don’t like to look at it. Sugar beet fields are ugly, the factories at Cantley and outside Bury St Edmunds are ugly. The facts of sugar slavery are ugly.

We don’t look at our dependence on sugar because its presence makes our working existence bearable. Sugar rewards every action performed in the name of progress and industry. It fuels its teatimes and lunch breaks, its endless cups of tea. In Ronald Blyth’s peerless documentary of Suffolk rural life, Akenfield, everyone lives for cake. In a labourer’s diet of bread and turnips, the sweetness of cake appeared like a fairy godmother. Still now in the bakeries and tea-rooms and church halls of Southwold, people’s eyes flash as they view stacks of iced cakes, fruit slices, chocolate eclairs, scones, biscuits and buns. Oh, the treats that are in store!

Sugar seeps into everything, into our dreams, fuelling our cravings and desires, eating the enamel on our teeth, adulterating our blood, diverting us from looking at the hardship and difficulty before us.

For years when he came home, Josiah would smell the sweet smell of the sugar refinery mixed with the malt of the brewers. Sugar beet was in his blood. When Josiah was seventeen he and his friend Stuart secured the contract to weed four hundred acres of sugar beet. The farmer was offering £1000 and gave a month to complete the job. It sounded like the easiest money they’d earn that summer.

Normally the farmer would have given the contract to a local woman. She would then put together a team of 5 or 6 who’d take the full month to do the job. This year she was on holiday. Josiah and Stuart talked it over: they were young, they could do it on our own, we could do it in two weeks.

The farm manager took them out to the fields on the first day, he gave us a map of the farm showing where the sugar beet was being grown and then he told us what was expected. The weeds in question were, in fact, sugar beet plants.

Sugar beet is a biennial plant, putting on leafy growth in the first summer and storing sugars in its large tap root. In the second year it uses this stored energy to grow a three or four foot flower spike and produce thousands of seeds. The beet plant’s growth is controlled by hormones, the release of these is stimulated by environmental conditions - temperature variations and day length are particularly important, and for the plant to flower it must be photo-thermally induced. The winter and spring that year had been warm, the soil in that part of Suffolk is light and doesn’t hold water well and the beet were panicking: the boys were confronted by a huge field bristling with thick woody stems capped with green flowers.

It was explained that these stems would blunt the blades of the harvester that cut the top off the beet before it was lifted from the soil, that the roots of these plants would have a lower sugar content and that if the seed set it would be scattered by the harvester and so-called volunteer plants would grow in next years crop acting as a reservoir for yellowing virus which causes Rhizomania, a wonderfully named but devastating disease of the beet family.

Josiah hadn’t really considered what 400 acres would look like, or how long it might really take to walk up and down a field thick with beet plants or even how hard it might be to pull up a sugar beet plant cleanly. The field the farm manager had taken them to was huge, it had a small wood in the middle of it making it hard to judge its full extent. It was bounded on three sides by scrappy hedges and on the third by a high barbed-wire topped chain-link fence. Over the fence we could see the hangars and runways of the local R.A.F base. The fiekd turned out to be about 50 acres, there were six others to weed.

We began the work in high spirits spreading out to cover ten rows each we could sweep across the field quite quickly. We had thick gardening gloves to protect our hands and, along with bottled water and a packed lunch, planned a trip to the village pub at lunch time. By the end of the first few sweeps across the field my gloves had given up, torn by the beet stems. Their hands were green with chlorophyl my back was stiffening and it became clear that conversation across the rows was difficult if they were to maintain a reasonable pace.

He thought about the pub.

Josiah started to calcualte, began to get drawn into complicated mental arithmetic. How much sugar in a sugar beet? How much in a field? The first real science experiment he’d done at school, that is to say one that involved bunsen burners, had been the extraction of sugar from sugar beet roots. He remembered that farmers aimed for between 15 and 20 percent sugar. Each sugar beet they walked past must have weighed more than half a kilo so every 8 or 9 plants represented a half kilo bag of sugar. The farm manager had told us that they might expect 8000 tonnes of beet from the 400 acres. Combining this information with my vague memories of that school experiment I worked out that the the sugar yield from just this farm could be well over 1300 tonnes - that would be 2,600,000 half kilo bags of Silver Spoon sugar.

He needed a pint.