Our Daily Bread

Last year we built a bread oven. It took many months and involved many skilled and unskilled friends and relatives. It was an experiment, a deliberate adventure, since neither of us had baked bread before let alone used a wood-fired bread oven. Intellectually, it was a symbolic gesture -- bread, after all, is the staff of life and breaking bread with others a sign of political largess, of peace keeping. It also seemed to be a very 'green' thing to do -- a way of connecting more directly through a food-based activity with the surrounding community and the natural environment.

To be honest, I was good at developing the argument. I was not especially good at following through on it -- I had too many other important things to do. It was my friend, therefore, who sat for hours at the kitchen table and studied the bread books. He was the one who grew the starter for the sour dough, who checked the gelatinous mess daily and who ground the wheat berries by hand to feed this new life form. He was also the one to order organic flour from the coop and then drive into town to pick it up. He built the 3' x 4' bread board, prepared the dough and kneaded the requisite twenty loaves to fill the oven. He was also the one who chopped the wood, built the fire, and ad libbed the oven tools all the while watching his breath freeze in the 10 degree January air. Likewise, he, not I, made dozens of trips up and down the hill between the house and the oven tucking loaves into a gerry-rigged proofing box. He, not I, raked the coals out of the oven, swabbed the hearthstones clean, tested the temperature with corn meal and finally put the bread in to bake. Like the little red hen he managed it all. I was willing to help him eat the bread.

While this scenario was repeated many times throughout the winter, one occasion stands out in my mind. On this particular baking day, instead of retrieving loaves of bread, we retrieved twenty misshapen organic bricks. Disappointing? Certainly. But this is where the story gets interesting. I was for throwing the whole mess away and trying again some other time, preferably in July when the weather was more agreeable. But not my friend. He had an attachment to this bread. Yes, he conceded, it was a bit hard, but no, he was not going to get rid of it. He was going to keep it -- and he did. Softening it up in the microwave he sawed it into thin slices, dried the slices thoroughly and made melba toast. The toast was fine and eaten by everyone with much liquid and good humor, but that is beside the point.

The point, at least for me, was reflecting on just what had taken place, rethinking the relationship my friend maintained with his bread. While I could be indifferent to it, he could not. Having invested so much of himself, it was not possible for him to treat his bread casually. In an important way, he and the bread had became one. It had transformed, through all his efforts, into an extension of himself and because of the connection, he was compelled to be creative, to find some reasonable way to salvage his work. While it may not have been his best work, it still had value. And like any artisan, his identity was bound up within it. To discard it was a bit like discarding himself.

The 'melba toast solution,' then, was a way to make the best of a poor situation. But, it also offered a glimpse into some larger social realities. Here was a someone who was not willing to separate himself from an end product, who was not comfortable viewing it as a disembodied 'thing.' Here, too, was someone willing to investigate alternatives and to reuse resources because they held meaning. My impatience, on the other hand, which bordered on disrespect, was a function of my distance. It's quite easy to throw things away, to treat them like garbage when there's been no involvement or obvious personal connection. What we don't know much about will mean very little to us. And what we don't know much about seems to be increasing with every new market convenience. For a convenience, after all, is expressly designed to separate us -- indeed, insulate us -- from those time-consuming, physically-exhausting and internally-expanding direct relationships that afford us meaning. Meanwhile, the marketplace thrives as countless interventions keep us from knowing who we are and from identifying our own wholesome, place-bound solutions.

So, am I going to start making bread? I seriously doubt it. But I am going to support the bread maker whose relationship to his or her bread will keep us both in melba toast.