The Kneading Conference - Human Ecology - Breaking and Building - Complex Experience

Our Daily Bread began this second year with a selection of talks and workshops at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, ME—a two day program where farmers, millers, and bakers from Maine, New England, the United States, and the world gather to make connections with each other as well as connections between concepts—from nutrition to business finances, from brick oven building to ox-powered soil cultivation in the Congo. The eight American students who attended had little trouble dividing up the varied sessions so everything was covered—there was some discussion of who would go to “Soil Fertility” if three of us wanted to attend “The Philosophy of Baking,” but our varied interests and love of new information made it easy to spread out over the broad subjects covered during this small, slightly esoteric conference.

The first day’s keynote speaker, Fred Kirschenmann, appropriately kicked off the conference with an overview of the challenges of modern agriculture, and some solutions. One of them: eat what the ecosystem can produce, not what industry and consumers demand.

Three of us did end up going to “The Philosophy of Baking,” where we were given the best of all the good breads we tried at the conference. While we chewed, we were treated to an etymological history of bread: the word means “that which is broken off the loaf.” Bread is something that has to be broken to be made—it is broken before it is consumed, and it is broken when it’s kneaded and punched down. The speaker, Stephen Lanzalotta—broad-chested and fit in his mid-fifties—likened this process to the building of muscle. Muscle is torn during exercise, and get thicker as it is rebuilt.

Wheat seeds also are broken—cracked in the mill and turned into varying grades of flour, some more hearty than others. The speaker talked about the importance of complex carbohydrates in a balanced diet. We know how simple carbohydrates—high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice, white bread—are so easily digested by the body that they go directly from the stomach into the bloodstream, and, consumed consistently over a long period of time, they can throw off the balance of a properly functioning digestive and circulatory system. What some nutritionists have begun to discover is that complex carbohydrates, like whole grains, are so difficult to digest that they pass through the stomach intact and come to rest in the intestines, where they become food for the communities of bacteria living in our gut who are essential to the regulation of proper bodily function (including our emotions).

I was feeling pretty happy after the hearty dark rye I had been fed as a midmorning snack, but I was reconsidering my academic focus. I wanted to be a nutritionist.

The trip had already begun and we would be flying to London (my first international flight) on Saturday. I was studying bread because I was studying agriculture, and food business, and local economies, and Human Ecology. I could learn nutrition later.

My next favorite talk: “Finding, Restoring, and Using Grain Seeding and Harvesting Equipment on Small Farms”, with Dave Mostue. He said “I grow wheat, because that’s what the land I have is good for.” Dave Mostue takes 70 year old machines apart and puts them back together before he even tries to fix them up, so he knows what he’s talking about. At his talk, I learned how a combine worked. I forgot all about nutrition. I wanted to be a mechanic.

One theme that stood out to me at the Kneading Conference was an acceptance, almost a positive emphasis, on the power of a challenge, and the importance of doing what we can with what we have, and of breaking and building. I think that theme is going to develop a little more fully during my first trip abroad—I’ll see if I can continue these thoughts and connections, and doubts, in future posts.

At Heathrow Airport on Sunday morning, the young woman at the border asked me, “What do you read at university?”

“Human Ecology.”

“Human Ecology?”

I would have felt defensive if it hadn’t been 7AM my time and if I hadn’t been terrified that this woman my age would have me shipped back to the States if I didn’t give her a confident answer.

So I gave her a confident answer.

“Human Ecology.”