Friday, August 13, 2010

Holding the Grain

For the beginning of this week, I was feeling overwhelmed with the huge problems of the world-- food security, feeding the increasing population of the world and making quality affordable food accessible to everyone. I was also grappling with my own qualms with food industrialization and food commodization. Commodity markets are basically computer games, speculators profit off the labor of others. This abstraction of real food, that real people need to eat, makes my head spin and my spirit drop.

However, beginning Wednesday afternoon and extending through Thursday, my heart lifted as people who touch the physical grain taught us. People who grow the grain, evaluate the grain and create beauty and mouthwatering splendor out of the grain.

The first of these people was the man who began the Real Bread Campaign. Around 2:15 Andrew Whitley showed up bearing seven loaves of bread. He asked us to be his companions for the afternoon while we delved into the world of bread. We passed around slices of deliciousness, while he told us that one of the loaves had a mystery ingredient and the person to guess it would win a portion of his sourdough, which originally came from a peasant woman in the Soviet Union. Andrew has maintained the sourdough for many years and is now spreading the fungal network. He went on to teach us about the lactic acid bacteria within the sourdough culture that breaks down some of the proteins in wheat – leaving it much more digestible for us. We have decided to spread the sourdough network further by splitting it up between us in Germany.

The next morning, Hannah Jones, blew us away with her lecture/lab on cereal grain quality. We learned the nutritional aspects of wheat and examined diseased grains. We learned about protein strength and how the two proteins that make up gluten – glutenin (elasticity) and gliadine (extensibility) affect the dough quality. It is hard to understand this without experiencing the rheology – how the dough actually feels and looks, so we got our hands messy.

Thursday afternoon we went to the Collins Hanger farm where John Letts leases a plot to grow his landrace varieties. To say that this farm is overflowing with history would be an understatement. The straw from John’s wheat is used to thatch roofs in the old English style. We practiced the old method of harvesting called scything and visited a barn full of ancient equipment. We drank tea and ate biscuits in the Collins Hanger small museum where Roman coins, Victorian buttons, and dinosaur bones that were dug up in nearby fields now reside.

We finished the day at an Indian restaurant in Newbury. All of my fellow travelers on this path of grain, smiling, laughing and eating good food.

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