Say it naturally: TAWK STOH-ree - two separate words said with a relaxed, conversational tone.

“Talk story” is Hawaiian Pidgin for “to chat”, “have a conversation”, or “catch up” with someone. It’s more than just small talk - “talk story” implies a relaxed, genuine exchange where you share experiences, reconnect, and build relationships. It embodies the Hawaiian spirit of connection and community through meaningful conversation.*

I met chef Dan Wetter at the Las Vegas Convention Center last year. A place which, ironically, hosts the world’s largest baking conference every three years.

On The Strip he heard me strip down commodity wheat farming. After my brief lecture on whole grains, on food systems, on how flour is an ingredient with flavor, not a tasteless product, he asked, “Want to come to Hawaii to teach this stuff?” After nine months of planning, I arrived at his classroom perched above Pearl Harbor to teach two workshops, two days each—sixteen students in both classes.

I’ve never had such a diverse group of students: veterans from all branches of our armed services; expats working in Hawaii (Brazilian, German, Filipino, Puerto Rican); native Hawaiians; spread across an age-group between teenagers and AARP members.

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Designing the workshop with chef Dan and Hayley Matson-Mathes of the Hawaii Culinary Education Foundation was a challenge—how to teach sourdough, whole grain bread in a culture where wheat isn’t grown, where bread’s consumption isn’t ubiquitous? I spent months researching the Islands—their climate, culinary history, agriculture, ecology. I found out that 90% of the food now consumed in Hawaii is imported. Read that again.

Pre-contact Hawaiian farms supported a population of 1,000,000 people. But these days? If shipping were disrupted, Hawaii only has enough to feed itself for seven days. Seven days.

So what happens when there’s another Covid, a tsunami, a war? Not just that, but how does the importation of that much food affect the economy of a state with 1.43 million residents, who host about 10 million tourists a year? It depletes it in the same way that commodity grains deplete the soil of the Mainland.

The climate in Hawaii cannot support the farming of grains like wheat or barley. So with Chef Dan’s help, I scoured for locally-grown starches, reasoning that we could use gluten-strong wheat flour to scaffold the flavor of non-gluten flours grown on the Islands. The three locals flours we came up with were: ‘ulu (breadfruit), kiawe (mesquite), and poi (taro).

By pairing these with freshly milled whole grain flours from the Mainland, we could make bread that reflects the traditions and soil of the Islands. We could, as I try in all my classes, to empower students to make bread in their own image, to use baking as a form of self-expression by celebrating the ingredients which surround them. Tropical climates aren’t a problem for bread-baking—they’re an opportunity for beautiful new recipes.

Here was the menu we came up with:

Kiawe, Poi, and ‘Ulu Flour Baguettes & Epis

Sourdough Focaccia with Red Alaea Salt, Niupepela, Garlic, & Tomatoes

Northshore Dried Ginger, Big Island Vanilla, Lilikoi Syrup, & Roasted Macadamia Nut Couronne

Whole Grain Country Sourdough Bread with ‘Ulu & Poi Flours

Whole Grain Country Sourdough Bread with Northshore Honey, Big Island Cacao Nibs, & Big Island Mac Nut Butter

All the students were bubbly as a healthy sourdough starter—effervescent, kind, acidic. But it was the college kids who got me most. One of their first jokes was: “Hey chef, most of us are FOB (fresh off the boat), so take it slow.” For the next 48 hours I tried to keep a straight face—but they melted my heart from the first, these kids in pressed chef coats and tall toques who broke every kitchen motion with grins, laughter, and all the pidgin they taught me:

This bread is cherreh, chef.

Your name is white hammah, uncle Graison.

Rajah dat, chef.

That poke broke da mouth, yeah?

That’s a choke of loaves, chef.

Hana hou, uncle, this class was fun.

We brought you a lei, calabash.

The bread we made was magical—from the ingredients, yes. But from the students, really. As we did our tasting, we talked story about the hundred loaves we made. I asked what kind of flavor, aroma, and texture they noticed—smokey, spicy, nutty, sour, grassy, tender, dense, light, chewy, sweet, bitter, moist. Delicious.

“Well, is it good? Do you like the bread you made with local ingredients?”

“Yes, chef.”

“Remember, bread is a mirror—it should reflect who you are, where you come from; most importantly, where you want to go.”

I’m always reminded, at the end of the two hundred odd classes I’ve taught at this point, that teaching is never about telling or showing someone how to do something. It’s about showing them how to look at the same thing differently. Bread, sure. But really, themselves.

So I asked each student what their dreams were—to open a bakery, to work at a restaurant, to … ? As we went around the room, listening to the answers of a question few of them had ever been asked, I knew I couldn’t cry in front of them. It’s not that any of the answers were sad—I choked up witnessing the transformative power of food, of bread. To hear young people say what flavor meant to their families, to their identities…most beautifully, to their futures.

*Definitions used from Chokepidgin.com

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The brother of Lincoln’s assassin saves the life of the President’s son, a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg, which ended one day before the 4th of July. There’s a metaphor for our country in all this that I cannot find.

To the leaven’d soil they trod calling I sing for the last…
And responding they answer all, (but not in words,)
The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely,
The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.

Drum Taps

Walt Whitman

Sowing

It’s a few months after Gettysburg and despite being the President’s son, I am still waiting my turn in this midnight. Across the Hudson the gaslamps of New York are glowing like candles low on wax. Even in this darkness the station smells of pipesmoke and horseshit.

That was my last thought before my body was terribly pressed against other passenger’s flesh, against the steel of the train, the leather of their boots, all of which began to clamor towards the incoming carriage. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally, helpless. I had fallen on the track like a seed dropped into a dark wet hole and I saw the train coming at me like a huge slow plow and my Harvard mind did arithmetic about which part of me would be crushed first—shoulder, if I angled my torso; pelvis if I protruded like a dancer; arm if I bade it to stop like a priest. It was then, in the middle of my equationing, that I was pulled by the collar and shoulder, quite simply as if I were a stalk of wheat, from the root up and out of the soil. As quickly as I had fallen, I was now back on the platform and looking into the breathless face of Hamlet.

So I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name. But this man was not Hamlet. Tonight Edwin Booth was himself, brother to the man that you know will kill my father. And with him that evening was John Ford, owner of Ford’s Theatre. If only I could have asked for a ticket that night at the train station, if only I knew what bullet and what dialogue was on the playbill eighteen months hence. But I failed to address Mr. Ford. The affair was all over in three seconds.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

Reaping, part one

In a field eighty six miles from Gettysburg, Abraham—no, not my father—but Abraham Fultz, is reaping wheat with his good shoulder. It’s 88° on July 1, 1863 and Abraham wipes sweat from his brow, a clean lyrical gesture, as if brushing away a candid thought in church. Then with his free hand he rummages in his cotton pocket for a whetstone, the size of the dorsal on that four pound bass he pulled from the river last summer, the one the missus dredged in buttermilk and fried in cornmeal. With the flavor of that memory in his mouth, he uses saliva to lubricate the granite, to then trace the heavy iron across its body, soon testing the sharp dullness against the thick leather of his thumb.

The wheatstraw this year is thin, brittle, easy to fell. He knows that ready roots betray a pliable straw. But the wheat berries are plump and ripe enough. He is happy with this new variety of his, like its heading and tillering and is proud of its tallness, taller than his president. Rainfall was decent this year, irrigation sufficient.

As he begins to reap, cannons boom south of his farm announcing the first day of the largest and deadliest battle to ever take place on America soil. For the next two days, sixty thousand more cannon will drill explosive metal seeds into the moist earth of men’s bodies.

Abraham will hear their evidence, like notes from a hymn he does not recognize. Along with birdsong and his wife’s call for supper, he will hear them forever.

Threshing

My Abraham swore he’d never work wheat by hand again. He hated it—especially the threshing. On the family’s farm in Indiana, father did all the chores. But the beating of the wheat with a wooden club, separating the stalks and straw from the husks, was too hard on his shoulders, aching them as much as they muscled him. With muffled groans out beyond his father’s ears, he thought it erroneously stupid—cutting a plant to make food, hitting little seeds lifeless so they would release their energy to give us bread.

Most people commented on his broad shoulders while in office. Even when they began to droop, I knew that this threshing wheat built the architecture of his body.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Reaping, part two

In a field zero miles from Gettysburg, George Rose is preparing to harvest wheat with his good shoulder. It’s 88° on July 1, 1863 and Rose wipes sweat from his brow, a clean lyrical gesture, as if brushing away a candid thought in church. Troops have been coming in and out of Gettysburg for days with gossip of battle—but he must harvest while the weather is ripe and the war is still in the South. So he prepares his steel for reaping.

Charles Teague, a Ranger who fought at Gettysburg, compiled a booklet called

“Gettysburg by the Numbers”. He put the average height of a soldier there at 5’8”.

Soldiers at Gettysburg described the wheat in Rose’s field as “breast high and ready to be cut.” As high as the heart of the average man sent to die there. No taller.

During the battle in Rose’s wheatfield, advancing Confederates trampled the ripe grain. Their boots and shoeless toes plowed through the field towards Union troops, with only their heads being seen. Better for aim, “breast high and ready to be cut.” One soldier remembered, after Pickett’s charge, “not a stalk could be found, for it was all trodden out of sight”.

6,000 soldiers died amongst nineteen acres in Rose’s ripe wheatfield. If the men were cutting this grain, instead of killing each other in it, the harvest would have yielded 18,000 pounds. Applying simple arithmetic, each dead man took with him three seeds to his death.

Teague put the average height of a soldier there at 5’8”. No taller.

Binding

One soldier from the 77th New York Infantry wrote, “As we passed the scene of conflict on the left was a scene more than unusually hideous. Blackened remains marked the spot where, on the morning of the 3rd, stood a large barn. It had been used as a hospital. It had taken fire from the shells of the hostile batteries, and had quickly burned to the ground. Those of the wounded not able to help themselves were destroyed by the flames, which in a moment spread through the [wheat] straw...The crisped and blackened limbs, heads and other portions of bodies lying half consumed among the heaps of ruins and ashes made up one of the most ghastly pictures ever witnessed, even on the field of war.”

After ripe wheat is cut, it’s bound into sheaves. Most often used was twine, or

another stalk of wheat to fasten them. Sheaves were then taken to a barn to be dried and be winnowed.

Had it not been for the battle, Rose would have filled that same barn with those 18,000 pounds of sheaved wheat.

“This is the last of earth,” an Alabaman casualty wrote from Gettysburg.

“Write to me. I may get the letter.”

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

Winnowing

After reaping and threshing and binding, the grain and chaff are now separated. The entire mixture is tossed into the air—gravity pulls the heavier grains, wind carries the lighter ones. With these fallen seeds, bread is made.

Or more seed is grown.

Sowing, part one

How to prepare a field for wheat?

“After winnowing, sow seeds in moist ground no later than Thanksgiving. Plant them a few fingers apart, patting firmly into firm soil.”

A farmer’s rule of thumb is to plant seeds at a depth about three times their width. Otherwise, they won’t have enough room for displacement, won’t get enough energy for germination.

During The Battle, the dead were buried in mass graves, thrown like so many seeds into fresh earth irrigated with new blood. The average depth of these graves was twelve to eighteen inches. The average width of a soldier was about eighteen inches. These don’t match.

List of soldiers of the 1st Massachusetts Infantry, killed at Gettysburg, compiled with identifiable traits by their staff sergeant:

F. Henry Hartley 1st Lt. Killed (In head).

Y. Henry Parkinson Capt Breast (serious)?

H. Hall Col. Sergt. d-d good soldier

Samuel B. Bassett Segt. Face & Neck (serious)

George Allen Mers. straggler.

A. Farnham Corp died in prison after deserted.

H. L. D. Phillips Sergt. Coward.

List of wheats most likely grown by George Rose at Gettysburg, with notes from their seeds catalogs about identifiable traits:

Fultz:

“Plant winter habit, midseason, midtall; stem purple, midstrong, spike, awnless, oblong-fusiform, inclined to nodding; glumes glabrous, white, midlong, midwide; shoulders midwide; beaks yarrow to midwide, obtuse, long; apical awns few, 3 to 15 mm long, kernels pale red, ovate; germ midsized; crease usually midwide, shallow to middeep; cheeks rounded to angular.”

Fulcaster:

“Plant winter habit, midseason, midtall; stem purple, strong; spike awned, fusiform, middense, Inclined; glumes glabrous, white, midlong, midwide to wide; shoulders midwide, oblique to square; beaks 2 to 8 mm. long; awns 3 to 6 cm. long; kernels red, midlong, soft, ovate, humped; germ midsized; crease midwide, middeep, sometimes pitted; cheeks usually angular; brush midsized, midlong.”

Lost Nation:

“Lost Nation is an old awnless spring wheat of the northeastern United States, which has now gone out of cultivation.”

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow this ground.

Acoustic Shadows

“Yes, roots can make noise underground, though not all of it is audible to humans. Plant roots emit subtle clicks and pops as they grow, and they also produce higher-frequency ultrasonic sounds when stressed by drought or physical damage.”

Gettysburg was heard hundreds of miles away: the 12-pounder Napoleon and 3-inch Ordnance Rifles, the 12 pound Howitzers and Whitworth Rifles were cacophonous and amplified for dozens of miles in every direction. 150 miles away, in Pittsburg, their explosions were audible. And their cannon could be heard as far away as Philadelphia. Perhaps that’s why the Liberty Bell stayed cracked.

During The Battle, the Union army fired 32,781 artillery rounds and the Confederates about 25,290. Yet, some soldiers just ten miles from the battle couldn’t hear a thing. This is because of acoustic shadows, regions of sound in which immediate listeners cannot hear because something is blocking the sound’s path, or bending, or refracting its waves in other directions.

If a plant is stressed, it makes rapid and loud ultrasonic clicks. Animals can hear them—mice and insects, for example. And while these might be audible to us humans if we were listening closely, they are often very faint.

Sowing, part two

Before the war, my father wore no beard at all.

A year before The Battle, in May 1862, Abraham (not my father) was walking through a field of Fulcaster wheat. He was surprised to see three spikes of beardless wheat within this ocean of bearded grain. He plucked those three and sowed them, continued sowing their children, until “he obtained sufficient seed to distribute it pretty well over the country” to farmers like George Rose.

In the same month, in the same year, Abraham (my father) established the Department of Agriculture. He nicknamed it the People’s Department, determined that it serve farmers and provide food to all.

Father grew a beard after his first inauguration. Grace Bedell, an eleven year-old girl suggested it, told him a beard would make his thin face look better. And help win votes.

Six years after my father was killed, every single state, including each and every one which seceded from the Union, received free seed of Fultz’s beardless wheat from the Department of Agriculture.

That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address

My father gave it on November 19, 1863. Exactly one week later, at the same time the country sowed its wheat, he celebrated the first official Thanksgiving. The establishment of this holiday was prompted by The Battle.

I wasn’t there that day. But the amputee was, the artilleryman with clankering teeth was, the captain with a morphine chippy was. All dripping with tobacco juice spittle, all uncorking public pints of hooch and hope. The roots of the trampled wheat were there too, under all their feet, next to the bones without enough depth or width, in George Rose’s wheatfield.

The vast majority of the 15,000 living in the crowd did not hear the Gettysburg Address. Too much noise, too many heartbeats. Too many new roots emitting clicks and pops as they grew. Too much acoustic shadow. So much so that the men he was addressing, the country he was serving, did not plant the seeds of his words because, on that day, my father spoke without amplification.

If you’re out and about this Summer, I’m teaching four workshops around the country and one with our friendly tariff-resenting neighbors in the North. They will all focus on sourcing, milling, and baking with local whole grains:

Chimacum, Washington from July 3-6 (this is the most innovative grain farm—and my favorite place—in the country)

Honolulu, Hawaii from July 12-13 (locals only, brah. But if you or any bakers you know live on the Islands, it’d be great to see you)

The Kneading Conference in Maine July 23 (part of a tremendous line-up of other bakers, farmers, and millers)

Brooklyn Granary and Mill July 25-26 with Patrick Shaw-Kitch and Natasha Pickowicz (these two are the best bakers I know)

Rise Baking Lab August 16-19 in British Columbia (these are the other two best bakers I know)

I’m incredibly honored and grateful to announce that my book proposal has been accepted by a publisher. I can’t announce full details yet…but I’ll say now that I could not have landed with a better editor. I’m excited to share full details soon.

I taught in Japan this March and in between class I saw enough ramen being made that I figured out a recipe. For this one, you’ll need a pasta extruder (I’m working on a recipe without one). The recipe is made entirely with whole wheat Japanese flours from Takagi Alpha Foods and AgriSystem—you can substitute any locally milled, whole grain flours. Leave a comment if you have any questions.

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Recipe:

• 600 grams of freshly stone milled, whole grain flours (anything with low-to-medium protein is fine)

• 258 grams of room temp water

• 6 grams kansui (this gives ramen its traditional yellow flavor and mild bite—ramen needs kansui like a pretzel needs lye. Your skin needs neither—be very careful when handling)

• 3 grams sea salt

1. Combine the flours and salt in the pasta machine’s hopper. Dilute the kansui in the water and stir well

   

2. Begin mixing the flours and salt. Trickle in the water, ensuring no kansui is left undissolved

3. Mix for 20 minutes

   

4. Begin extruding the ramen to any length. Wrap and neatly bundle each batch

5. Refrigerate immediately and use with three days

What struck me most about Anushka was not just her young age or the fascinating locale of India, but how she is both fixing a broken system while simultaneously building a new one. Having been advocating for the exact same changes for seventeen years, I am always excited to learn from someone who is not afraid of obstacles. The more we talked, the more I realized that she is the type of person who—when someone tells her no—a switch inside of her is flipped to say yes. I recognize myself in her, as well as so many other people I admire; people who know that passion and integrity are the most important ingredients in any recipe. So is risk.

I’m so grateful that Anushka has added her stanza to the never-ending story of bread. I hope you enjoy it.

Graison Gill: I like to start by asking people about their first memory of bread…

Anushka Neyol: I grew up on our family farm in Punjab until I was 12 and it was my grandfather who first taught me how to make flatbread dough. My grandmother’s father had passed away, and in India there is a twelve-day mourning period during which the rest of my family used to go to their house in a neighbouring village. My grandfather stayed back with us, taught us all sorts of basic cooking in that period and thereafter. And that’s when I made my first dough for chapati, our traditional Indian flatbread.

I moved to Delhi for university in 2013 to study economics and business. From then on, no matter where I lived, my mother would always send wheat flour and ghee from our farm. I cooked often and having the right ingredients was essential.

GG: Can you give us a brief history of grains in India?

AN: The history of small grains in India is quite extensive and what I have deeply studied is very focused on wheat.

When I started researching, I found a few British colonial records from 1850 onwards, a government survey of every wheat variety grown across the province, commissioned because Britain needed to know what it could export to Europe. What struck me was not the wheat but the sheer breadth of everything else. Around thirty different crops were being cultivated across the Punjab region at that time: millet, barley, gram, tobacco, cotton, pulses, oilseeds. The landscape was self-sustaining.

Even within wheat alone, the surveyors documented dozens of locally-named varieties, each one adapted to a specific soil, a specific rainfall pattern, a specific way of farming. These were farmer-selected landraces, some of them thousands of years old. The soft red wheats, the hardy drought-tolerant varieties most valued by the people for food, made up over sixty percent of all wheat grown.

What changed that was a sequence of decisions made over about a hundred years. The colonial canal system, built to produce cotton and oilseeds for British industry, redirected newly irrigated land away from food crops. Between the 1870s and 1900, the area under millets, barley, pulses, and gram fell by seventeen percent while cash crop acreage grew at nearly twelve percent a year.

Partition in 1947 then divided Punjab and India lost roughly half its canal infrastructure along with the primary wheat research institution in a single blow. The Green Revolution arrived in the 1960s and did solve the immediate problem of grain supply, but the way it solved it was by replacing all of our specific, adapted varieties. Norman Borlaug’s new semi-dwarf wheat varieties from Mexico required intensive irrigation and high levels of chemical fertilizer to perform. The old landraces, adapted to rain-fed conditions and needing far fewer inputs, could not compete within the new system. And within one generation, they were gone from most fields.

The area cultivated with a diverse blend of cereals—millet, sorghum, and barley—fell from nearly 93,900,044 acres in the 1950s to under 64,247,399 by 2014. Meanwhile, the area cultivated with those new modern wheats more than tripled. This shift replaced nutritional diversity, which came from the cultivation of multiple grains, to just wheat in many parts of the country, including my home state of Punjab.

GG: Tell me about how you were introduced to agriculture.

My introduction to agriculture is really a homecoming story. I come from a family of farmers and I’m the first generation to have even left the land, let alone started a business. We have always been stewards of the soil. However, my parents never wanted us to pursue agriculture, primarily because of the economics of it and their own struggles with it. The best thing they felt they could do was give us a city education and the chance to build something of our own.

My first business was a baby spa in 2016-2017, which shut down briefly after it opened. Then I took a job at a venture capital firm, then a marketing firm. But I kept feeling restless—I’d already started something from scratch, and I couldn’t go back to a conventional job. So I started exploring ideas, and all of them were food and agriculture oriented. That’s when it hit me: I have a farm, what can I actually do with it?

I was 23 years old at the time, with no access to capital and no large network. I explored making biofuel pellets from our farm’s cotton crop, installing automated juicers in co-working spaces in the city and getting kinnows [a citrus fruit] from our family orchards, opening an avocado themed café, and even exploring the idea of urban beehive farming. A lot of ideas! Until one day I looked up and thought—my father grows a lot of wheat. What about that?

GG: What year was this?

AN: November 2019. I was living in Delhi when I came across a newly developed variety of black wheat that was generating a lot of buzz—several brands were already marketing its flour as rich in antioxidants, beneficial for people with diabetes, good for health, and commanding a premium price. I tracked down a scientist involved in its development, got hold of some seed and convinced my father to grow it across a couple of acres. Little did I know how India’s wheat supply chain actually worked or that he wouldn’t be able to sell it anywhere.

Then the pandemic happened and that changed everything. After twelve or thirteen years away from the village, my parents were frightened and insisted I come back to the farm until things settled. What was meant to be a temporary move became permanent and I am so grateful for it.

In April 2020, my father harvested that first crop of black wheat. We couldn’t sell it anywhere. “Why not? Isn’t it good?” I asked. And that’s when he explained to me how India’s wheat supply chain truly works.

GG: So what did he say?

AN: The critical piece of context is what we call Mandis—public wholesale markets for farmers which were established in 1961 and made the Green Revolution’s monoculture a permanent system. Punjab has over 1,800 Mandi yards and procurement centres. Because small farmers often lack the capital and equipment to pack and clean their produce themselves, they rely on licensed commission agents (also known as arthiya) who do it for them. But these agents have become the farmer’s entire financial ecosystem: they handle the sale of produce, offer collateral-free loans at 14–16% interest, and often sell fertilisers and pesticides. Once a farmer enters that debt cycle, it’s almost impossible to exit. And because farmers are growers, not marketers, most of the value in the chain is captured by people in the middle—the agents and traders. Exacerbating the problem is the M.S.P. (minimum support price) offered by the government—it is only applicable on select grades and types of wheat and rice in Punjab. So we couldn’t sell a single grain of that black wheat harvest because there was no infrastructure or market.

GG: Ok, so if we fast forward to how things progressed from that first harvest in April 2020, how was Three One Farms born—what did you set out to do differently?

AN: From the very beginning, I understood agriculture not just as a means of sustenance, but as something that must generate income—it has to make financial sense. So the model we built at Three One is essentially a form of contract farming, but on different terms. We provide our farm partners with seed, so they don’t carry that upfront cost. We also tell them not to worry about maximising yields—we’re not looking for the extra bag of nitrogen to squeeze out a little more grain. Our portfolio includes both modern and heirloom wheat, but we are far more interested in quality than quantity.

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In 2021, I started attending agricultural universities—every state in India has its own, as well as national institutions—where farmers’ groups gather, usually in small cohorts of a hundred or two hundred people. I was almost always the youngest person in the room, and often the only woman, surrounded by men in their fifties, sixties, even eighties. But that’s where I found my early farm partners after we outgrew our family farm’s capacity: people who understood what I was trying to do and were willing to extend the trust that I was in this for the long haul. The universities themselves often served as a credible third party to help establish that trust in those early rounds.

GG: So you’re going to these agricultural conferences across India, sparsely attended by old men, and asking farmers to grow wheat for quality, not quantity. And you’re buying on the direct market in order to disrupt the Mandi system and the commodity system which it feeds. After sourcing the grain—from neighbours, other farmers in other states, or growing it yourself—you’re milling it into flour?

AN: Yes, exactly. Right now we are growing and sourcing around eighteen varieties of wheat: einkorn, emmer, durum, khorasan, spelt, and common wheat, including both modern and heirloom varieties.

So much of Three One Farms has been built through chance encounters. You meet someone, you discover something new, and you think: I want to support this. That’s how our network has grown. And with every new partner, we ask the farmer to name their price rather than the other way around. That’s only possible because we control the entire supply chain, can absorb a higher cost, and work with niche bakeries and restaurants who understand and value what we’re doing.

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For milling, we work with a second-generation miller whose stone mill is forty years old. His father was the first person to set up a stone mill in our village, and every morning when it starts, it begins with our grain. We typically mill around 1,100 pounds a day, and we hold no stock—everything is milled fresh when an order is placed. We currently work with over 200 cafés, bakeries, and restaurant partners across the country. [For a sense of scale: the smallest industrial mill in India produces almost 1,000,000 pounds of flour per day].

GG: Choose two of your favorite heirloom varieties that you’re working with and tell me their names and their stories—what drew you to them?

AN: You always have your favorite children—even if you don’t want to admit it!

Early on, I learned (presumed, to be more accurate) that some of the highest-protein wheat in the country grows in colder, higher-altitude regions. So I thought: let me go to the Himalayas. I found only one research paper on wheat grown there, mentioning seven varieties—one of which reportedly had 14% protein!

I was completely captivated. I tracked an organisation known as the Ladakh Organic Farmers Foundation, called a number, and a gentleman picked up. There was a gap in communication somewhere, but I understood him to say yes, he had this variety. Without even asking for a sample, I ordered half a ton. I was that certain I had found a perfect wheat. When it arrived, it was the softest I had ever seen—a pastry wheat with just 10-11% protein! But the grains were beautiful: a mix of white, red and amber.

I travelled to Ladakh in August to meet the farmer and founder of LOFF, Mr. Zabeer Ahmad. He told me his grandfather had grown it and that was all he knew—it had simply passed from generation to generation. I later found records of this variety existing across the northern Himalayan belt. It’s called Safed Pissi and Lal Pissi—safed meaning white, lal meaning red, and pissi meaning soft. It makes the most extraordinary scones. The flavour is difficult to describe, but it reminds me of warm milk slowly coming to the boil.

Then there’s our rye. Some bakers I was speaking to mentioned a man living up in Kullu, one of the Himalayan hill stations, who worked with local farmers growing all kinds of Himalayan ingredients: amaranth, buckwheat, rye. His name was Woody. Woody turned out to be a 75-year-old German who had settled in India decades ago. The locals call his rye Neela Jau or Rusi Gehu—russi meaning Russian, gehu meaning wheat, neela meaning blue, jau meaning barley. They named them that because rye looks like wheat but isn’t, and looks like barley but isn’t. The flavour, texture, and aroma are extraordinary. It is sweet, floral and nutty. And in one of the harvests we found naked red and blue barley. We picked out 360 of these kernels out of a bag of 250 pounds to later put in our revival programme.

And one more variety I can’t leave out: in 2024, I found this soft red wheat called Mundi displayed at one of the stalls at the annual farmer festival called Kisan Mela at Punjab Agriculture University. Mr. Amrit Singh, the farmer and the president of the Punjab Organic Farmers Club, later told me that he was given the seed by a farmer in his late nineties who was saving it for decades. We are now working together to revive this variety in Punjab. Further research confirmed it as one of the truly iconic heirloom wheats of India.

GG: What would you like to be able to say that you’ve achieved at Three One Farms—three, five, ten years from now?

AN: My ambitions have evolved a lot. In the beginning, I wanted to build the largest genetic spectrum of wheat in India. Then it expanded to barley, then rye, then all of South Asia. But that has changed—because the more time I’ve spent in this work, the more I’ve understood how vast Indian agriculture truly is, and how small my piece of it is.

What I really want to see now is a hundred other entrepreneurs like me, spread across the country, each achieving scale in their own region. My core mission is simple: getting more whole grain into people’s bodies.

I’m also deeply concerned about the next generation. In Punjab, the average farmer is 55 years old. Young people have left for Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand—there are no new generations of farmers. But I am beginning to see something shift slowly: young people are coming back, or looking back, at agriculture with new eyes. They see economic viability where their parents saw only burden. They want to do this work and make a change, and they’re bringing global experience and entrepreneurial energy with them. If that movement grows, we could see something close to a revolution.

And personally, I don’t want to lose a single acre of the land I’ve inherited across seven generations. I want to be a good steward of it. Six years into this business, it genuinely feels like a full-circle moment. I think back to my childhood, before boarding school, when I was homeschooled on the farm—growing vegetables with my grandfather, grafting roses, working with earthworms in the compost at eight years old. That is what I want to preserve. All of it.

GG: Thank you so much Anushka. What struck me most about your story is your passion and relentless commitment. But I’m also fascinated by its similarities—there isn’t a single thing you said that I don’t relate to or that I haven’t heard before. So this parallelism is beautiful. But it’s also painful that artisan bakers, small farmers, and stone millers around the world are having the same experience with the commodity system—debt, lack of infrastructure, disinterested governments, chemical fertilizers. I’ve heard your story in some many other people’s voices: from Jordan to Japan, from Australia to Austria, from Miami to Minneapolis. But I think that’s what makes it beautiful—that it’s a story we all share, that it’s so human.

I leave for the airport at 4am. As the plane ascends, the corn fields below quickly change color in the dawn; first black, then yellow, finally bright bright chlorophyll green as the sun rises. Then is risen.

Layover in Atlanta. I try laying down. But the way they bolt armrests into airport benches makes it impossible.

Second plane: 6,850 miles from the Peach State to Japan. I don’t sleep at all. We fly north, right over Iowa again—I look down, the corn is still there. And I remember that I forgot my sourdough starter.

We cross thirteen time zones in fourteen hours. Last time I did that was the first time I dropped acid: a rave in Boyle Heights at the Plaza del Sol. I only remember the colors in the strobing lights, the way they kept expanding, exploding; blossoming. Bush had just invaded Iraq and the colors on the American flag were beginning to bleed.

Day Two

Twenty hours of travel. In my body it’s still day one.

In line for immigration, I entertain myself with similes for the jet lag: like I’m wearing rain boots half full of water, like a hangover I can’t drink myself out of, like a 200 pound parachute I’m dragging, like a Jacuzzi of quick sand.

An officer pulls me out. I’m ready to surrender so long as they let me sleep. He comes back later—ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours?—with my passport and a beautiful little stamp of Mt. Fuji affixed towards the back: sky blue, snow white, cherry blossom blush.

Days Three and Four

Melatonin, tempura, green tea, and black coffee. I look at the Tokyo subway map; it overwhelms me like the first day of high school. I go to museums, parks, shrines, a fish market, a flea market, a denim store. I’m trying to fatigue my body during the day so at night it will quit, rest.

Day Five

After breakfast, I see my friend Yukimi-san at the l’Ecole de Patisserie de Tokyo. We met two years ago at San Francisco Baking Institute—the vocational school where I trained and was later a guest instructor. She is one of the kindest people I know, with the nervous and necessary energy of a baker—always moving faster than a walk, as if something in the oven is burning. She runs a microbakery in Eastern Japan, making everything from Panettone to hot cross buns in a space no bigger than a V.W. van. We’ve been planning this workshop together for nine months—countless emails, WhatsApp messages, DMs, and voice memos later, it’s relieving to finally be here.

All the workshops I teach—Denmark or Australia, Prague or Portland—focus on local grains. I want to teach people how to bake with what’s around them. I find it sickening, mostly sad, that artisan bakers are making the same breads, in the same style, with the same imported flour—these days, you can find the same sourdough bread in Seoul or San Francisco. Bread is a mirror, I tell all my students, and you shouldn’t see someone else’s loaves when you look into it.

From an ecological standpoint, this is particularly critical in Japan. Rice is the country’s most important food source, providing about 30% of its calories. But since the end of World War II and the flood of Western food via the Marshall Plan, wheat has grown to become a close second—currently accounting for roughly one fifth of the average Japanese’s diet. The alarming fact is that Japan currently imports 90% of its wheat. That’s about 99 pounds per person, per year, of grain grown in Canada, Australia, and the United States. News around the world is choked full of awful reports about AI, drones, violence, and fresh wars—all of which are lethal. But the way I see it, nothing is more dangerous than this kind of food insecurity.

I didn’t come here to fix that. Instead, I try hard to interrupt the refrain I hear from bakers around the globe: our local wheat sucks, we can’t bake with it, so we make bread using the same flour as everyone else. In Japan, I will find out this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I eat my supermarket lunch of chicken katsu, teriyaki sauce, and white rice with furikake. Then Yukimi-san and I mix sourdough starters, chop candied persimmons, roast Hokkaido-grown corn grits, and measure out tubs of flour. Both of the workshop’s sponsors, Alpha Foods and AgriSystem, sent boxes of Japanese grown-and-milled flour to me in Iowa. Each bag had brilliant colors—rust red, beach-sand white, sunrise-yellow and beautiful labels with their names carefully: Honbetsu, Kitano Kaori, Smu-Rera, Yumechikara. I trialed twenty five recipes before settling on our final menu:

Roasted rice flour baguettes with einkorn and Japanese whole wheat

Home-made miso, nori, and sesame oil fougasse

Plum wine-soaked persimmon, roasted walnut, and cinnamon couronnes

Japanese rye and whole wheat country bread

I mix baguette dough. The school’s instructors, in tall toques and starched chef coats, regard the dough as a crime scene. I don’t speak Japanese, they don’t speak English, but I can tell they think it’s too wet, too loose, too dark. Delicately, the boss man removes it from the mixing bowl, places it into bins, folds it, and retards it in the school’s fridge overnight. Yukimi-san smiles, we leave.

Bright lights, neon colors on the walk home. It’s rush hour, in a city of nearly 38,000,000 people, yet the quiet is eerie—I’ve heard three car horns in five days. I pass a bakery: windexed display case gorged with delicate pastry and fluffy bread. All of it, all of it, made with imported white flour, which throws away 25% of the wheat berry to be made. When I went to the fish market, I saw every part of the animal used: cheeks, tail, eye, skin; grilled, steamed, salted, cured. If only we could bake how we cook.

I sit down in an izakaya, order sweet potato tempura, make a hard decision against caffeine. Back at the hotel, I dry-swallow 5mg of melatonin. Then sleep, knowing yet still hoping the baguettes made with 100% Japanese grown and milled flour are slowly proofing across town.

Day Six

First day of class. 9am, students arrive from around the country: Keiko from the West, Akiko from the North, Okamoto who is a part-time homebaker and full-time engineer in Yamaha’s motorcycle factory. Ikeda-san, a tall man in a broad felt Stetson, is a bread journalist who has never made bread; Suzu, Japanese but currently baking in London, has flown home to be here, Konomi is hoping to open a microbakery in the suburbs, Kristina is a Danish expat who opened a microbakery in Tokyo a few years back.

We do introductions, discuss expectations. I tell them that my goal is to teach them how to renovate traditional European breads—baguettes, ciabatta, country, couronne, fougasse, focaccia—from the inside out. Instead of making these loaves with wheat grown oceans away, I say we can use traditional forms to cradle local grain and their flavors. We start with a flour tasting of eight different Japanese-grown and milled grains to illustrate the point.

Then sixteen pairs of hands shape and bake the baguette dough from yesterday. When they come out of the oven, they’re stunning—open crumb, thin, shattering crust, light aroma of roasted rice flour, mild acidity in the back end of the bite. Whether it’s excitement or adrenaline, I ask the translators five, probably ten times, to tell the class these were made with 100% local flour. I go over to the boss man in his pressed whites and toque, slice him a piece of baguette. He bows, I do something dumb, more like a curtsy. He chews. We met twenty-four hours ago, yet still don’t understand each other. He chews more, then slowly smiles, wider, nods, thumbs up. We understand now.

As a class we mix 150 pounds of dough, watch a milling demonstration, eat lunch, shape more bread, head to a Chinese restaurant around the corner for dinner. Over a bowl of fried rice, Yukimi-san smiles, I wink. Fifteen hour day, wrap.

Day Seven

Second and last day of class. I arrive early to check the doughs in the fridge. They feel perfect—gaseous, taut, bubbly. And the colors are beautiful—the gold of the einkorn, the auburn of the Yumechikara, the cream of the Smu-Rera—all are gleaming.

I write this on the board: 风土. My hand is shaky, the lines and slopes of the characters come out jagged; I ask the students if they can read it.

“Yes,” they all say. “It’s fudo.”

Fudo is a Japanese philosophy about, well, everything. The character 风 translates as wind, 土 as earth. Fudo takes aspects of each—ecology, climate, landscape—in order to highlight the interconnectedness of, well, everything. In the context of food it is wrongly translated as terroir; wrong because it encompasses much more than what is beneath and around the food we grow. Instead, fudo is the belief that what goes into who we are and what we do defines what comes out—peoples and places, seeds and souls, memories or mountains, all are ingredients. I write this on the board because I have never found anything as succinct to explain what bakers do—what happens in a loaf of bread starts long before we get here. And ends long after we’re gone. Fudo is a mirror, but it’s also the reflection’s frame.

When I quit the monologue, I was convinced I’d told them something revelatory. If only. Everyone stares at me with a, Well, no shit look. I smile.

We do a grand tasting of the beautiful and delicious breads, group photo, goodbyes, promises to stay in touch, lots of Instagram stories, a few tears. All six of the supporting chefs, still in those toques and starched whites, wave while mopping the floor like naval deckhands. I wish I could do more than dip my body and say Arigato half a dozen times.

A few of us head to dinner. We get off at Shinjuku, the busiest train station in the world. I want to try whale. After I try it, I don’t want to try whale again. I go to the bathroom and when I come back, I notice a bag in the private dining room next to us. I rudely lean into these strangers’ dinner to look closer. I pantomime to the journalist to come over for translation. It turns out that one of the diners works at the Ecole de Patisserie de Tokyo. She took a dozen baguettes after her shift, and in a city of 150,000 restaurants, ended up eating at the same one as us.

Day Eight

One of the sponsors of the event, Hidehiro Ito, invited me to Japan’s northernmost prefecture. We meet in the hotel lobby—me with my big American suitcase, big American coat, big American grin after my medium Japanese breakfast. We bow, smile, bow, and rush towards the subway for a forty five minute ride to the airport.

I have the sensation of being underwater—the whoosh of train wheels, the windows and how they diffuse the sunlight, how me and Ito-san talk to each other with sound, but can’t reach each other with meaning. So out come the phones. For the next two days we’re together, we’ll communicate on Google Translate, condensing entire paragraphs and essays of thought into brief sentences, hurriedly punching the tiny keyboards on our smart phones and holding them in our palms until we both nod.

Ito-san’s father started Agri-System in the mid-80s. Originally, they were purveyors of the best products from Japanese farms. Based in Hokkaido, the country’s bread basket, Agri-system grew under Ito-san’s management and currently has eighty employees who source 500 products directly from producers. They also began farming twenty years ago: following the principles of Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic philosophy, Agri-System now grows various crops and pastures animals across 900 acres of their own land. They also grind over 1,000,000 pounds of grain each year—90% of Japan’s organic flour comes from their mills.

“Why did you start farming?” I type into my iPhone.

“As opposed to asking farmers how to grow better, we decided to show them,” he types back.

To do this, the company employs eight “field men” who act as in-house agronomists, managing the farms and disseminating their results in the form of practical proof, technical assistance, and research.

“Our goal,” Ito-san types back, “Is to contribute to society first. We want to encourage all ecosystems—human, forest, farm. A few years ago, I threw away the company’s sales goals and targets to support this.” He doesn’t share hard numbers, but tells me with earned pride that revenue has drastically increased.

We board our JAL flight. Drink options are water, apple juice, or onion broth. I try reading a Claire Keegan short story. It’s too claustrophobic, too clean. I sip my water, stare out the window, looking for fudo.

A friend of Ito-san’s, Ken, meets us at Obihiro airport. He’ll be our translator. Another felt hat (“no, not Stetson”) broad smile, ponytail, incredible patience. By trade he’s a forester, works with the government in hosting foreign delegations who come to Japan to learn about successful reforestation efforts—mangroves in Okinawa, fir and larch in Hokkaido. He records jazz and soft rock on the side.

It’s sleeting, the sky as ash-gray as the road we drive on. The land beyond the airport looks something between rural Pacific Northwest and the old Soviet bloc: birch trees weaved by low-cost asphalt; expansive grain fields threaded by soon-to-be muddy lanes; cinder-block homes next to slowly thawing creeks. There is no residue of Tokyo here.

We visit Agri-System’s offices, grain storage warehouse, and flour mills. Before dinner (“Genghis-khan style BBQ!”) we stop at the city’s most famous temple.

“Actually,” Ken says, “The more appropriate word is shrine.”

At a basin, we wash our hands. “Left first, then right, then left again, then bring some water to your mouth.” We approach the ancient building with a low-slung, almost weeping roof. I follow them like a puppy.

“Ah,” Ken says while turning around to me, “Don’t walk in the middle of the path. It’s reserved for the Gods.” Good reminder.

They show me how to clap hands, toss a coin into the wooden offering well, face the shrine, then pray. Three men, slightly shivering. A good, long silence.

A good, long prayer.

I’m thinking of my daughter when they surprise me by asking what I asked for.

“I pray for what I already have,” I say.

“Me too,” says Ito-san, smiling. But he’s always smiling.

Day Nine

We continue our tour of Hokkaido. In between visits to farms, an organic market, and a wood-fired bakery, Ken tells me of the region’s history.

For thousands of years, the Ainu people lived on the island of Hokkaido. Their numbers were small and they kept no written records. Though contact with Japan and Russia occurred, they were mostly left alone and treated as barbarians, used only for the occasional trade of pelts, kelp, and fish.

Japan went through its own Civil War around the same time we did. Known as the Meiji Restoration, the triumphant emperor sought to fast-track Japan’s Westernization: everything from firearms to clothing, from railroads to banking, were rapidly revolutionized. While the main islands of Japan were being dramatically transformed, someone turned an eye north. What about Hokkaido, they thought, that large, mostly empty land of those Ainu savages…Sound familiar?

Having carefully studied the West, Meiji Japan knew that the keystone to French, British, and American dominance was empire: to be civilized, a nation must colonize. So in their own version of Manifest Destiny, they marched north, forcing the assimilation of the Ainu, asking for volunteers to colonize the vast space, and building the infrastructure to support it.

After fighting to preserve the Confederacy, Brevet Brigadier General Horace Capron accepted an invitation from the Hokkaido Colonization Office in 1870 to develop the island in the image of America. For a salary of $250,000 in today’s money, Capron did everything from establishing a brewery (the famous Sapporo) and urban planning. He also introduced rye, tomatoes, onions, and cattle to Hokkaido. Most critically, he introduced wheat and the large, American-style farms required to grow it.

Too much is familiar by the time Ken, Ito-san, and I arrive at Nakagawa’s farm. A youthful 60-something, he is Agri-System’s favorite producer. Steadfast in his vision and his roots, Nakagawa-san has been farming his family’s 135 acres in the same way his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great grandfather did: organically, without chemicals. Despite all of his neighbors using glyphosate, neo-nicatonoids, and other intensive chemicals to grow grain, he tells me that he farms to honor his ancestors.

“Them. And to honor the land.”

We talk more about startling statistics: Japan’s total food sufficiency is 35%; Japan has one-sixth the amount of farms today than it had fifty years ago; the average age of a farmer is sixty-seven; the government provides subsidies to commodity crops (beets, soy, corn, commodity wheat) but not to organic farmers.

I’ve traveled the world and have found the same challenges faced by small grain farmers everywhere—subsidies to the big guys, government indifference, imbalanced market supports, addiction to chemicals. Nakagawa-san may be speaking a foreign language, but he is talking about a universal problem: I could be on a small grain farm in California, Poland, Oklahoma, or Australia. I’ve been in all those places and had this same exact conversation.

As we’re standing in a trial field of Swiss spelt, taking turns petting the cat threading our ankles, Nakagawa-san makes it clear that he doesn’t give a damn about the future, despite the obstacles in the present. Everyone in the local agricultural extension offices think he’s a kook, but he’ll keep farming like this forever.

As we get ready to leave, he looks at me and smiles. Ken translates. “He says you should meditate fifteen minutes a day.”

“Oh, well, I meditate for ten minutes everyday.”

Ken translates, Nakagawa-san smiles.

“Not bad. But he says he meditates five hours a day.”

We pile into Ken’s station wagon for more tours. “The cherry blossoms in Hokkaido will take another month, maybe another five weeks,” Ken says. “Hopefully you can see some of their color in Tokyo.” We drive in silence for a dozen miles, until Ken puts on Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman.“I love the Hammond organ in this song,” he says. “It gives it that big American sound.”

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Day Ten

Back in Tokyo. I go kimono shopping for my daughter with Yukimi and Kristina. Our thirty fingers regard fabric the shopkeeper brings us: polyester, cotton, silk. I watch as we take a pinch of each, run it between our thumb and index. It’s the same way we touched flour in class, feeling for color, texture. I settle on a vintage one, the family crest of the owner still sewn between the shoulders. It’s pale blue, the same soft blue of Camille’s eyes at dusk.

After dinner, I head to the onsen in the hotel basement. Two big naked Germans with enough back hair to make kilims are using their beer garden voices. I think about drowning myself until they suddenly leave.

A Japanese man and his son come as I go. The kid can’t be more than eight. He smiles, the father nods. I dry my hair and can’t think of anything as beautiful—just one father and one son on a Saturday night, washing, then bathing, in a city of 38,000,000. I watch Dad pour a wooden bowl of water over both their heads. I think of going back in. But it would be trespassing inside a poem that’s not mine.

Day Eleven

Last day. Soba for lunch, subway for airport.

We fly over a sea and an ocean, then Alaska, Canada. The stewardess declares, chicken or pasta? We’re in Iowa now and I see the corn again, 13,500,000 acres in this state alone, 99% of it GMO. Out the window, the sunlight is bright, bright, and I realize that I feel at home when I’m farthest away from it. But I’ve leaned too far over to look for what I already know is there, so I apologize to the American next to me. Because he didn’t see what I do, or because I touched him in my trying to see, I’m not sure.

The New Moon recedes from its fullness, the visible part of its face decreasing with each day. And the face of the man in this photograph is visible in the dim, half lit darkness of the gulag where it was taken. This is a mugshot (to be exact), the year of his birth and Russian name written just above the point at which the first button on his suit fastens his lapel. He wears no jumpsuit, holds no prisoner number save his eyes—two, dimmed, confronting the camera in a stare of defiant confusion. His eyebrows are turned like apostrophes without words to possess what is happening to him.

It’s clear that a particular Soviet hunger is working his skin like a growing seed works a fresh soil—displacing, burrowing, plunging tap root and rhizome through the matrix of dark matter, groping for nutrients, for minerals, for moisture. Even though, at the time of year this was taken, chlorophyll from the sun was meager.

If we take the year of his birth (1887), double it and add two zeros, we have a good estimate of the number of seeds this man saved: 377,400.

Saratov Gulag prisoner Nikolai Vavilov tramped the world to identify them, to gather them, to catalog and save them in his St. Petersburg seed bank, the first of its kind in the world. His work was concerned with a concept he created—genetic erosion—which sought to protect the loss of diversity within seed varieties. Recognizing that declining diversity in our seeds threatened the entire human race, Vavilov saved millions of lives by protecting precious germplasm from extinction. He sojourned five continents, traveled tens of thousands of miles, spoke six languages, and filled his bank with species which keep our bellies full today: each time we bite an apple, shell a walnut, or chew a crust of bread, we are eating his work.

That man is now dying in this portrait of hunger—look, his eyes are open but his mouth is closed. His face is round, though not fully illuminated, and the photograph, really, is two—what he sees when looking at us is different than what he sees when looking away.

In both photographs each eye looks to me like a seed—perhaps flax, perhaps sesame, maybe melon, maybe Lima bean—elliptical, half illuminated, waning gibbous like the moon on the night of his death, waning gibbous like the moon will be tonight, as if all the light of a full moon could not, would not, open them further.

After a full lunch in the Kremlin Stalin, wiping bread crumbs and pork fat from the hem of his mustache, condemned Vavilov to death. Look, he said, starve this man who brought us seeds but not food. So while on a collection trip in the Ukraine, the NKVD hoodwinked Vavilov, his pockets full of seeds (did they spill when they split his head with a zinc pipe? did his cracking ribs make the same sound of roots being pulled?), and brought him to prison for a rich diet of beatings, confessions, and apologies. For what? For looking too closely at the Earth, for speaking English, for not aligning the dialectic with rapid harvests, for believing too much in Mendel and not in Marx.

Genetic erosion begins.

It is January 26, 1943. 236 miles upriver from the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Russians are starving themselves and the Nazis, Nikolai Vavilov dies of hunger in the Saratov Gulag with that look on his face. And I can’t take my eyes off his eyes—their hardness, their hunger—which are planted in his huge forehead as if in soil, as if in a soil which will not yield, soil which won’t release the roots of something it worked so hard to grow. And that look on his face, a curse, a prayer, from the silent seeds of eyes, his eyes, asking that will someone, will please just anyone, remember to water our garden?

When much of the world seems to be falling apart, I look for stories about those who try to keep it together.

For more information about Nikolai Vavilov, these two books are great explorations of his explorations: Parkin and Nabhan. And this podcast tells the story of how colleagues of Vavilov protected his bank in St. Petersburg during its Siege in the Second World War. Nearly thirty of them died: though surrounded by 187,000 different varieties of seeds, they chose hunger in order to protect genetic diversity.

From a recent textbook: “Biodiversity provides the food we eat. Throughout our history, human beings have used at least 7,000 plant species and several thousand animal species for food. Today, industrial agriculture has narrowed our diet. Globally, we now get 90% of our food from just 15 crop species and 8 livestock species, and this lack of diversity leaves us vulnerable to crop failures. In a world in which 800 million people go hungry, we can improve food security (the guarantee of an adequate, safe, nutritious, and reliable food supply) by finding sustainable ways to harvest or farm wild species and rare crop varieties.” This is what Vavilov was doing all along.

Keep in mind that each time a seed is planted, a new story is told.

Saturdays were my busiest day–selling at a farmer’s market, to a few cafes, a restaurant. That meant all my dough had to be made Friday night, then baked between midnight and dawn on Saturday.

Before starting, I would make an elaborately awful dinner at my squat-cum-apartment. Something like boiled yams, cheap cuts of pork from a gas station butcher shop, onions–all steaming and mashed together with tahini and too much Tony Chachere’s. When the food was ready, I’d bang a mop handle on the floor between my bathroom and front door. That was right above Herbie’s head, a denim-eyed Irish painter with a Van Dyke beard, who lived in a cavern below. Four quick blows and soon I’d hear him, cursing and climbing upstairs like a drunk spider, smiling once on solid flooring with an armfull of dirty empty Tupperware and pockets of rolling tobacco. He’d immediately fill his lungs with smoke and stories, jumping into broken-plotted fragments about Francis Bacon’s sex life, the IRA’s field operations in Cork, about paint pigment and Mississippi River driftwood and the majesty of that one time he saw a whale coming up for air. Have you ever seen one? Fuck mate it makes you realize you aren’t alone in the universe. It has to break the surface of the water just to breathe. I saw one, his big eye looking at me, a whale, christ mate, that animal has the biggest soul in the world. I’d fix plates and we’d sit, cross-legged on the rusty fire-escape, fifteen yards in the air, with New Orleans and its sunset sinking below our feet.

I gave Herbie the leftovers and went to bed. If I were lucky, I’d get two hours of rest before my roommate and his dog came home. As soon as he’d slam the door, I’d hear the cap of a whiskey fifth unscrew and then I knew it would begin–the Bounce music of Katey Red, Partners-N-Crime, 5th Ward Weebie, and Choppa quivered the plywood walls of my tiny cave as he began to practice for his DJ set. Now it was my time to bake.

I stepped into nighttime air the temperature of blood. Walking the thirteen blocks to Piety and Desire, passing all the tenderness of a New Orleans night. Magnolia trees that forced their roots through the sidewalk, rupturing and tearing the concrete like cookie dough, gardenias in full bloom, the skeletal limbs of crepe myrtles with dark bark bruised blue like my grandmother’s skin. I walked by all night bars and United Taxicabs lurking for fares and people in costume for no particular holiday and everyone was smiling, everything was slow, the humidity coating the city like cane syrup over biscuits. I passed crime scenes and poker games and bonfires and ambulances floating yellow lights without urgency. I walked past my favorite Auntie Man on Press St. who stopped humming Back that Azz Up to graze my cheek and say go make that bread baby and I just took it all in, the charm all contagious, me not saying a word but filling my lungs. The levees may have broken, the government may have failed, but the story of New Orleans was alive in its freedom. I wanted my bread to taste like this, I needed my bread to taste like this, to possess just one ounce of this power. So I would stay up all night baking. Language was inadequate.

I arrived at the bakery, breathing out cigarette smoke just as a breeze from the river would blow it back into my face. I open the door and it smells like a barroom–the evaporating alcohol from the sourdough is everywhere. I didn’t know how to manage fermentation yet, so it went everywhere, the small metal bowls bubbling all over the tabletop like spilled pancake batter. I had tried putting bags over them, cinching them with rubber bands, but the pressure broke through, there was too much heat, the whole mess now ringed in a frothy moat.

The ritual begins. I haul fifty pound bags of flour to the mixer, tilting them on its lip and pouring their contents on top of the water (always first), then salt (always second), then yeast (always third). I didn’t use timers, just measured the recipes by cigarettes–the country bread was one Camel unfiltered, the baguette two, the ciabatta three hurried. I watch as the mixer slaps dough against its steel bowl, the gluten unraveling further with each figure eight. The heat inside is thick and in the blinking fluorescent lights I strip down to a tank top and swim trunks and I make more Turkish coffee and I turn up Sidney Bechet’s “Summertime” on the FM radio and listen as his dark soprano troubles each note like a wing too arrogant for flight.

When the kneading stops, I pull the dough from the mixer. I throw all of its 200 pounds, warm and dense as a sleeping body, onto the mapletop table. It’s the color of flesh. There is a poem in all this that I’m too tired to write. Anyways, there is no person here to talk to, no one here to touch or hold or make promises with. Just the silence, just my waiting now for the dough to rise and the moon to lower. To keep from sleeping, to stop the fatigue drowning me like quicksand, I do vague work–sweeping the same floor, lining baskets with rice flour, washing a cup in cold water, labeling the spice rack three times.

Finally the dough has doubled in size, I plunge my urgent hands into its moistness, pinching and slapping and clutching. It feels like flesh. And it’s as sticky as a naked body. I portion and pull, I tear and shape, I gently round and weigh each piece, dividing it like mitosis. Throughout the midnight I see nothing in front of me but my hands in this moist warmth of dough and its body teaches my body how to touch it–if it tears it needs to proof longer, if it isn’t rising it needs more time to ferment, if it’s loose it needs firm hands, if cold it needs heat. And what looks like a wound can simply be stitched by fingers, a gentle weaving of the dough across itself.

Inside these midnights I learn how to become a baker by reading fermentation, translating the braille of dough’s bumps and textures with my touch. So I reach to bring what I love closer–using the torque in my wrist, the twisting of my torso, the arch of my back, the pressure in my fingertips, to know when and how to permission a touch, to gently curve a taut boule, to turn gassy slackness of a resting baguette into something firm, to cinch the edges for a strong batard, to tease a rectangular package of gluten into a supple fougasse. I have to shape myself to shape the dough.

And the most beautiful, and the hardest part of these nights, is learning when the dough doesn’t need me at all.

It’s nearly dawn, time to bake. I neatly place bricks on the deck of the oven and light its pilot. I go outside for air, thinking of Herbie’s whale, and watch as the earth begins to awake. Everything is still and delicate. Birds call to each other from telephone poles, an impossible joke if told sober tears through a crowd of drunks as they leave a bar, an ambulance (or maybe a stray cicada?) whines in the close distance. I light a cigarette, look up. The moon is there, nothing but a thin comma, the only punctuation in a night without words. My work belongs to the night. There is no other country for it. Night absorbs the shapes of the day, reducing them to their most elemental–a moon has the entire sky to itself, a single tree becomes all of nature, dough becomes bread. And at night, with touch, the earth is most beautiful because now it is most fragile.

I close the door, dive back inside the bakery, back inside New Orleans.

I appreciate the journalist for writing about this topic–it’s relevant, debatable, and slippery with stereotype. Unfortunately, in the 1,200+ words she wrote, not a single one talks to, mentions, asks, interviews, or discusses the topic with a baker (in case she didn’t know, bakers–in Europe and America of all places–are the people who make bread). Instead, we hear from curated experts–an influencer-bro, a wheat breeder, some professors, and a doctor. They all have insightful perspective and topic-specific experience (except for the first one, who makes a living monetizing the vacuity of others. But with over 5 million followers and mentions in the Times, he is someone I clearly need to learn from).

I found this piece to be a sad example of how our culture siloes and delivers information–from the top down, from self-anointed experts to us consumers, from academia to the proles. Sad, because that’s no way to disseminate information. Sad, also, because most everything in this article about bread–though it’s absent of bakers–is wrong: we may be unschooled, but we’re not uneducated. In fact, most bakers I know have more experience than anyone interviewed for this article. That’s because we don’t study. We do.

What follows is the text of the article and my responses in bold. And I’d recommend, for the next newspaper that decides to write about a craft like baking, not to leave out its main ingredient: the baker.

Is the Bread in Europe Better for You? If you’ve noticed that certain baked goods are more tolerable abroad, it may not be all in your head.

It’s not. It’s in your stomach. And the soil. And the miller. And, most of all, with the baker.

In a video on TikTok, Christian Collins unwraps a crusty baguette and addresses his five million followers.

PLEASE let me know if you want to watch bakers unwrap crusty baguettes and address the internet. I’ve got unemployed friends who’d love the opportunity.

Why, he asks, can he eat “pizza and full-on buns every day” in Europe, but bread in the United States and Canada causes issues? These can include an upset stomach, fatigue and a “foggy head,” Mr. Collins said in an interview with The Times.

Thanks C-Dawg, Full On Buns is a dope name for my new channel. But I wasn’t sure if an upset stomach, fatigue, and “foggy head” were caused by watching you on Tik-Tok or eating food in North America?

Mr. Collins, who describes himself as a digital nomad, is just one of many people on various platforms who have, for years, talked about this puzzling phenomenon. In June, Joe Rogan amplified the idea that European bread products might be superior on his popular podcast. “Go eat bread in Italy,” he said. “You don’t feel bad at all.”

Is it too late to change the occupation on my daughter’s birth certificate? Digital nomad is so much cooler than the baker I shamefully wrote.

Dr. Alessio Fasano, a gastroenterologist at Mass General Brigham, said he had heard similar accounts from many of his patients with certain types of wheat sensitivities. When they eat wheat products in the United States, his patients say, they have bloating, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, joint pain, fatigue or brain fog. When they eat wheat products — particularly bread — in Western Europe, they have fewer or milder symptoms.

It is nearly impossible to correlate all these symptoms with one food. For one, these sound like someone withdrawing from heroin, not nibbling on a brioche. Secondly, it ignores the dozens of other foods people will (or won’t) eat on a vacation.

There isn’t solid research on why this may be, Dr. Fasano said. But he and other experts have some theories.

Theory No. 1: The wheat is different.

Because. It. Is. It’s not America.

A prominent explanation on social media is that the bread in Europe contains less gluten than the bread in the United States and therefore causes fewer symptoms in people who are sensitive to it.

Unfortunately, up to this point, this article reads like a prominent explanation on social media.

It’s true that the main type of wheat grown in Europe is “soft” wheat, which results in bread with less gluten, and the wheat typically grown in the United States and Canada is “hard” wheat, which makes bread with more gluten, said Brett Carver, an expert on wheat genetics at Oklahoma State University.

This is true. But, gluten is gluten–whether it’s soft or hard, Democrat or Republican, cis or nonbinary, its very presence will cause disruption to anyone who is sensitive to it.

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But flour millers and bakers in Europe sometimes add “hard” wheat — usually imported from North America — to their bread flours to boost the product’s gluten levels, said Dr. Emanuele Zannini, a professor of food science at Sapienza University of Rome.

This is completely wrong–there has never been a sometimes: before Washington crossed the Delaware and Canadians invented poutine, Europeans have been importing North American wheat for a number of reasons. (See my article here). In fact, it was American wheat, and before that Russian/Ukrainian wheat, which underwrote Europe’s Industrial Revolution and the massive population boom that followed. Due to globalization and climatic challenges, Europe has never been able to fully feed itself. Especially with wheat–its main source of calories. Here is some data for recent numbers of American grain exported to Europe.

We don’t know how common this practice is, how much “hard” wheat they add or how much it affects the final gluten levels, though. So it’s difficult to say if the theory about differing wheat types is correct, Dr. Zannini said.

One could find out how common this precedent is, not practice, by asking the people who use flour–bakers–and those that make it–millers. Oh, you’re asking me? I’d be happy to answer!

Every single country in Europe imports some amount of North American wheat to supplement their own supply. This is for various reasons–to improve strength, moisture content, enzymatic activity, etc–in their breads and pastries. France is the exception (don’t tell them, we don’t need to inflate their chauvinism)–because it is the one country in Western Europe with adequate arable land, infrastructure, and climatic conditions favorable for growing high quality wheat. So it’s no coincidence that modern bread–its flavor, aesthetic, names, recipes–originated in France.

Lack of bread in France, because of crop failures, also ignited the most cataclysmic change in modern world history: the Revolution of 1789. After that, they tried really, really hard to grow all their own wheat to avoid another inconvenience like that. You know, the one where starving people advocate for empowerment and self-determination. A sufficient supply of domestically-grown wheat has also caused other minor, unimportant events in Europe such as: the Irish Famine, multiple Ukrainian invasions, World War 1, and World War 2.

Theory No. 2: The dough is fermented longer.

If you buy a loaf from a small bakery in Europe, the bread was probably made with a long fermentation period, Dr. Fasano said.

Solidly wrong–artisan bread in Europe is just as good, and oftentimes just as bad, as it is in America. There is zero guarantee, promise, or proof that “long fermentation methods” are used in Berlin or Brooklyn. The decision is made by the individual bakery and is based on ethics, commitment to craft, nutrition, and business model–not geography. A cuisine is not only defined by its ingredients, but also by the methods which create them–if using the word “probably” in his dissertation got Dr. Fasano a PhD, I should transfer to his university now.

During fermentation, microbes such as yeast and bacteria break down some of the gluten in the dough. The longer the fermentation time, the less gluten remains, which could result in fewer symptoms in people with gluten sensitivities, Dr. Fasano said.

Phew, they got one thing right!

Traditional sourdough breads, which are commonly made in Europe, have long fermentation periods lasting 12 to 48 hours, Dr. Zannini said.

Again, traditional sourdough breads are made everywhere–Europe has no patent. I have been all over the world to teach, learn, and eat bread and I’ll say without any jingoism that American bread is better than any I’ve tasted because we don’t have traditional recipes which bind us (leading to innovation), we don’t have the same regulation on experimental grain varieties+supply chains (leading to smaller and more diverse options), and we have public research being performed (leading to diversified ingredients and more resilient long-term farming strategies). Europe doesn’t lack these factors–theirs just aren’t as robust as ours. This is further evidenced by the health of our grain chains (small, circular economies which value small farms, small millers, and small bakers in a direct economy) and the quality of baked good these systems create.

The yeast and bacteria in sourdoughs can break down not only gluten, but also certain types of difficult-to-digest carbohydrates called FODMAPs, which can cause symptoms like bloating, abdominal pain, constipation and diarrhea in some people, said Jane Muir, an associate professor of translational nutrition science at Monash University in Australia. As a result, she said, people who get those symptoms after eating wheat may be able to tolerate traditional sourdough breads.

Phew, they got another thing right. 2 for…err, about 26 at this point.

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Some bakeries in the United States do make bread, including sourdoughs, with long fermentation times, but such bakeries are more common in Europe, Dr. Zannini said. Most bread in the United States is fermented much faster — for just an hour or two — leaving more gluten and FODMAPs that can cause symptoms.

Again, this is complete conjecture and completely wrong. I promise you that most of the bread in Paris, France is as awful as the bread in Paris, Texas. Commercial bread and pastry in Europe is just as awful–palm oils, refined sugar, hydrogenated oils–there as it is here. In fact, in Europe’s capital of food, Paris, 90% of the croissants sold are made frozen by mega-corporations and baked “fresh” on site in charming, marbled, and stained-glassed boulangeries with smiling waitstaff and not a fleck of flour in sight.

Also, if the bread in Dr. Zannini’s Italy is so much healthier than the bread in America, why are diabetes rates (hugely impacted by the presence of highly-refined carbohydrates like white flour) in Italy nearly as high as they are in the U.S.?

Theory No. 3: The bread in Europe contains fewer additives.

You need only flour, water, salt, a leavening agent (like sourdough starter or yeast) — and lots of time — to make bread. To shorten the production time, bread manufacturers in the United States typically use a more commercial, high-speed process, Dr. Carver said. This can result in bread that is too dense, so manufacturers add ingredients like dough conditioners, strengthening agents, extra gluten and emulsifiers to improve its texture, as well as preservatives to lengthen its shelf life. Bakeries and bread manufacturers in Europe, on the other hand, tend to use fewer additives, said Robin Mesnage, a toxicologist at King’s College London. So it’s possible that the additives common in bread in the United States contribute to how people feel after eating it, he said.

In fact, the British (I know, I know–thanks to Nigel, Boris, and the Brexit gang they are no longer Europeans) invented the world’s most efficient industrial bread recipes. Twice! In the 1860s and, for good measure, a century later. So it’s complete shite to blame the Americans for “shortening the production time”–something Europe invented and still practices (over 80% of the bread consumed in the UK is of this industrial variety).

Theory No. 4: The bread in Europe is less likely to contain glyphosate.

Wheat growers in the United States sometimes apply glyphosate — an herbicide used to kill weeds, and in some cases to dry out the wheat itself — to the crop just before harvest. This can leave glyphosate residues on the grain. Growers in Europe, on the other hand, must abide by stricter rules. They can’t use glyphosate close to harvest, for example, so there is less chance that residues will be left on the crop.

Very, very, very wrong (I’m beginning to wonder if Candance Owens wrote this article for the NY Post). Glyphosate is Europe’s most widely used pesticide. And France is in the lead for its use (at least they’re back on top for something!) So even if Maurice, your mustachioed water in Nice, doesn’t offer you any glyphosate-fraiche to go with your Boulabaise, Roundup is somewhere else in your meal and all over the rest of your vacation. Hard fact to swallow? Take a sip of wine–oh, wait, sorry, European wines use more Roundup than almost any other agricultural sector in the entire world. And I know it was just New Years, but you may want to rethink Champagne–viticulture in France is the highest consumer of glyphosate in the country and bubbly is the worst culprit (one journalist likened the region to a nuclear wasteland due to its overuse). You’re better off drinking home-brew in Flint, Michigan over a plate of fried smelt. At least there’s no exchange rate and the locals smile.

We don’t know if the bread sold in the United States actually has higher glyphosate levels than the bread sold in Europe, Dr. Mesnage said. But even if it does, he added, the amount is probably so minuscule that it won’t cause symptoms.

True-ish. Unless–if you are passionate about flavor, mindful of traditional food ways, and interested in ecology–you are eating whole grain, stone milled flour. If so, be very mindful of non-organic grains getting milled into whole grain flour-all that glyphosate will travel from biomes, the farm’s and your own, as it’s milled into whole wheat flour.

Theory No. 5: Everything is better on vacation.

If you’re traveling through Europe, you’re probably more relaxed than usual, Dr. Muir said. “Stress is a very big part of the sensitivity” in your gut, she said. When you’re anxious or on edge, gas and bloating can feel more painful and uncomfortable than they might when you’re relaxed, Dr. Muir said.

Hmmm, I wish that’s how my stress manifested. Will get with my GP and report back. Anyways, this should be the only “theory” about the bread in Europe being better–it’s not and so our conception is entirely a placebo effect. The food (and farming) in most of Europe is just as “bad” as it is in America–they drink soda, eat margarine, refined sugars, processed meats, love American fast food, and hydrate as poorly as we do. Yes, their food typically contains less additives, little to no food colorings (fun fact–know why we don’t use Reds 1-39 in our food anymore? Because they were deemed carcinogenic and as a result banned!), and overall travels less food miles from soil to fork. But the urban poor of Europe eat food just as unhealthy as the poor in America because the industrialization and mass-production of food is a global pandemic. We live in a sadly homogenized world and the American perception of the ancient foodstuff–bread–as being unadulterated or more pure “over there” is a complete farce: nothing is sacred, especially on the world’s most secular continent.

Mr. Collins, the TikTok influencer, also said that he walks more in Europe than he does in Canada and the United States. Getting more exercise can improve digestion and can potentially reduce symptoms like bloating and constipation, Dr. Muir said. So it’s possible that your state of mind and your activity level while traveling can play a role.

C-Dawg was last seen walking at dawn–either Ibiza or Capri, TMZ reports are conflicting–telling local Uber drivers he was doing ketamine research for RFK and the NIH. Olivia Nuzzi may or may not have been with him, taking notes for her next memoir.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve found that the bread in Europe is more tolerable than the bread in the United States, it’s probably not all in your head, Dr. Muir said.

Yes, just like your therapist told you last week, it is all in your head.

The good news is that you can likely find bread you enjoy in the United States as well.

Pray, tell me more!

Seek out bakeries that sell traditional sourdough breads, meaning they were made with few ingredients and long fermentation periods, Dr. Muir said. Consult bakery websites and ingredient lists or ask employees how their breads are made.

I wish I had the time to list all the incredible bakers in North America (yes, that includes Canada and Mexico) making unbelievably delicious, digestible, and healthy bread with soft and hard gluten wheats. Some of the absolute best are: Fry’s Bakery in Canada, Matriarch Bread in California, Mill Fire Bakery in Oregon, Madruga Bakery in Miami, Brooklyn Granary and Mill in you guessed it, Boulted Bread in North Carolina, and Independent Baking in Georgia. And for full hemisphere pride, here are some in South America: Asha, Arbol del Pan, and Martoca.

And beware “fake” sourdough breads, often found in grocery stores, that may say “sourdough” on the package but were made with shorter fermentation times. You can spot a fake by looking at the ingredient list — if it is long and includes acids like lactic acid or vinegar (which give the bread a sour flavor), that’s a sign.

Damn, when are they gonna make one of these for politicians! I never realized they have the same ingredients as bad bread.

Keep in mind that if you have celiac disease — an autoimmune condition in which consuming any amount of gluten causes the immune system to attack and damage the cells that line the intestines — you shouldn’t eat any wheat-containing bread at all, no matter what country you’re in. People with wheat sensitivities can tolerate small amounts of gluten, Dr. Fasano said, but those with celiac disease should avoid it entirely.

Thanks doc–I’m sure people with this life-threatening condition needed the reminder.

The Real Bottom Line: mother nature doesn’t make us sick. It’s what we, as humans, do to our food which makes us sick.

People like those in this article, who blame ingredients as opposed to how they’re made, continue to perpetuate a false narrative that gluten is poisonous. It’s not, and it never has been. What makes us sick are the people who are fucking with gluten while growing wheat–pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, etc. And the miller who strips the most nutritionally rich components of the wheat berry to make white flour. And, lastly, the baker–who, if not using whole grain flour and fermenting the bread for at least six hours to break down phytic acid, provide pre-biotics to our bellies, and increase the bioavailability of vitamins and minerals is, in essence, feeding us a loaf of indigestible sugar which does cause “bloating, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, joint pain, fatigue or brain fog.” After all, the root word of gluten is glue–if unfermented and made with white flour, we shouldn’t blame it for doing its job.

For me, I try to celebrate easy gratitude in each day: hot coffee, warm bread, the cold pages of a letter I need, errr want, to write. Defining myself by what I have, not by what I don’t, is the beautiful medicine of this exercise.

We live in a time of overwhelming upheaval, anger, strife, and division. We live, as ever, in life. I am sad, dismayed, and despairing of the news and its reality. But I choose to stay connected to the durable moments: a stranger’s laughter, a playground of happy kids reminding us to stop being adults, more warm bread. That’s not ignorance, or cowardice. I think it’s courage—because it’s so damn hard to notice those moments.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who reads this and any Substack out there. Taking the time to do so is an act of gratitude, a strengthening of those durable moments, however innocuous it may seem. It means the world to me, especially, because I’ve always believed that the purpose of bread–and art, and food–is not to tear down the walls between us. It’s to prove that, if we look close enough, they don’t exist.

Some news:

I read too much. But some recent books of acute beauty and haunting power have been Sabrina Orah Mark's Happily and Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. Reading them over and over is maybe why I can’t get to that letter. Please get copies and check out Sabrina’s Substack.

Also, I’ve got two incredible workshops coming up.

The first is in Vancouver from January 15-17. I’ll be hosted by two of the best bakers in Canada and we’re calling the class Friends and Neighbors-North American Whole Grain Baking. It will be a tariff-free space.

The second is in Tokyo from March 17-18. Hosted by the Ecole de Patisserie, this will be a workshop exploring the heirloom grains and stone milled flours of Japan. Enrollment is open to any baker—primary instruction will be in English with Japanese translation. Please contact me for more info.

Lastly, I’m excited and grateful (there’s that word again) to announce that I’m working on a book proposal. I’ve signed with an agent and we’ll be sending it out after the New Year. This book is the longest loaf of bread I’ve ever fermented—bubbling away for about sixteen years—and it wouldn’t have gone anywhere without you, yeah you, being here, reading this, now. Thank you from the very top of this old year. See you in the New.

1. Fill a large pot with tap water polluted with nitrates, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, anti-depressants, endocrine disruptors, and fluoride. Place on the stove and bring to a boil. While waiting think:

2. The National Pasta Association reports that Americans eat 5.95 billion pounds of pasta per year. Making this pasta requires 3.67 billion pounds of flour and 2.38 billion pounds of water.

3. This amount of pasta actually requires us to grow 4.59 billion pounds of wheat because, due to flour current milling technology, humans throw away about 25% of the wheat berry when making white flour. Just to make that clearer, when we mill 100 lbs of wheat berries we get 75 lbs of white flour. The rest is trash

4. So that means for the 5.95 billion pounds of pasta Americans eat per year, we throw away nearly 1 billion pounds of the wheat’s bran and germ. These parts of the wheat provide complex b vitamins, omega 3 fatty acids, iron, niacin, zinc, thiamine, fiber, protein, polyunsaturated fats, choline, and other vital nutrients and minerals for the proper functioning of the human body

   

5. Therefore, due to this waste, we grow 25% more wheat than we actually need: that is 1,782,946 acres of wheat just for our pasta. This extra crop is larger than the state of Delaware and it requires 8,468,993.5 gallons of extra diesel and 169,379,870 pounds of extra fertilizer to grow

6. Now, salt the water which is about to boil

7. A typical yield for an acre of durum wheat, the best variety for pasta, is 2,580 pounds. A typical acre of durum wheat requires an average of 22 ounces of glyphosate. Arizona grows some of the best durum in the country–50% of its crop goes directly to Italy to make pasta which is milled, extruded, and then sent back to the US

8. The distance from Phoenix to Rome and back is 11,962 miles

9. A typical acre of durum wheat in Arizona requires 30 inches of water. This is 142,500 feet of water, or 27 miles or a mountain five times as tall as Mount Everest, to grow one year’s worth of durum wheat in Arizona

10. Once the water on your stove has reached a boil, place the dried pasta in the pot. Let cook for 10-12 minutes on high. Do not cover

11. The government of Arizona subsidizes water to its farmers at below market rates, a decision which has steadily depleted the Colorado River since the 1980s. To date, the total value of these water subsidies is $4.2 billion

12. Refined, simple carbohydrates like pasta are one of the biggest culprits of IBS, heart disease, colorectal and breast cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes

    

13. Last year, Arizona earned $131 million on its durum wheat crop. Last year, Arizona spent $8 billion on treating diabetes

14. The average cost of a single insulin dose in Arizona is $1.19. The average cost of one portion of dried Barilla pasta in Arizona costs $0.63. Therefore, the foods that make us sick are cheaper than the medicine which makes us well–but just long enough for us to eat the food that makes us sick again

15. Continue stirring the pasta to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pot

16. The pasta market in the USA is valued at $25 billion this year. Americans spent over $5 trillion on health care last year. The CDC estimates that 90% of American health problems are preventable. In other words, American hospitals are treating the American diet

17. The white flour we use to make pasta (and 95% of the other wheat-based foods we eat like bread, cookies, cakes, and pastries) is responsible for soil degradation, groundwater depletion, petro-chemical consumption, eutrophication, and the vast majority of our preventable diseases. White flour is making us and the planet sick: because what we grow, and how we eat it, are not just facets of climate change. They’re its main ingredient

18. Once the pasta is floating to the top, drain, toss in olive oil, and serve hot. Refrigerate the leftovers.

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Virginia Woolf

I had three choices: Roberta Flack, Bob Dylan, or Maria Callas. With my one free hand I grabbed Desire by Dylan because I figured that would be the easiest record to replace. In my other hand I held a lampshade stained with floodwater from Katrina.

By now the squirrel had calmed down and was poised, like a praying mantis, between the windowsill and the dresser. Like exhausted boxers we eyed one another, wondering who would make the next move.

I did. I threw the lampshade like a Frisbee and it landed over his body. He scrambled inside, scratching the walls and whining low. I then slipped the Dylan underneath the lampshade between the carpet and his body, feeling his paws crunch as I forced them up. But I realized I made a mistake when we caught each other’s eyes–the top of the lampshade was open. So I grabbed the Callas and now had a sandwich: Dylan’s second best album, a squirrel inside a moldy lampshade, and the 20th century’s best opera singer on top. Crouching, I lifted the entire contraption and, in a choreography I could never find on the dance floor, flung both my arms open wide, throwing the squirrel, two records, and lampshade out of my second story window. His body paused for a split second, like something out of a David Attenborough documentary, before he felt gravity and wished for wings his species didn’t provide. I then quickly shut the window, washed my hands, and realized I had to be awake in three hours to start baking.

*

For $900/month I lived above my first bakery in New Orleans. The four bedroom apartment was something between a trap house and a bedsit at the Salvation Army. My Vietnamese landlord used the place to house workers he brought over to build and service his Empire of banquet halls, restaurants, and Buddhist temples throughout south Louisiana. His guys slept like sailors on top of stained mattresses, ate from chipped bowls, shaved in mirrors fogged with grime. The kitchen smelled like fish sauce and oyster mushrooms, cigarette burns pockmarked the sofa like acne, and all sorts of animals lived inside–mice, roaches, and apparently squirrels. Despite weekly gunfire, the neighbor’s relentless Bounce music, and wildlife intrusion, the place had central AC and I was too broke to move.

When I started my bakery in New Orleans in 2011, my dreams fit nicely inside this apartment. It sounds precious, because it is, but I didn’t think or care about money then. I was so in love with bread that I worked my craft beyond any thoughts of financial consequences: I wanted to make sourdough bread in New Orleans and I’d be damned about a 401k. Meals beyond tap water and a burned baguette were a treat. I was proud–in a way determined and committed–to suffer for my art.

*

France is a modern birthplace of bread–all the things we eat and bake and recognize today have their origin there: brioche, baguettes, croissants, sourdough.

It is also from France that we inherited a story that the baker should be, and always is, broke. Few in the food industry have worse hours, work more or within such awful conditions. Bakers cope with hot ovens, limb sucking mixers, particulate flour dust which coats our lungs, slippery stairs, heavy bags, and graveyard shifts which suck the little bit of life left in our bones.

This story of poverty was founded on social stereotypes. Because until very recently, the bread baker in France was a literal idiot. At high school French students are–like American kids in college–made to pursue a career track. Any student (overwhelmingly male) who was deemed too dopey or too thick to do anything useful was sent to work in a bakery around the age of 14. It was there, exempt from traditional labor laws, that they made below minimum wage (often no wage beyond room and board) and worked more hours than doctors, lawyers, or chefs. This system of a social gulag allowed France to subsidize bread–by lowering the quality of labor the government could lower the price of bread. Better yet, no one cared: 99% of the country didn’t know that bakers lived like bats in the moonlight, working overnight shifts in dangerous asylums of flour, water, sourdough, and salt.

This model didn’t get transplanted directly to the U.S., but its attitude did. Artisan bakers in America are–as a rule–underpaid, under protected, under appreciated, and overworked. Sadly, we are expected–in an unspoken social contract–to provide the best, most consistent bread for less than the cost of a glass of wine in a restaurant or an oat milk latte at Starbucks.

What’s worse is that we bakers permit and perpetuate this story because we’re so enamored with our craft. Loving baking to the point of obsession allows us to oblige this exploitation. Most all the bakers I know, myself included, want to be integral to the very Community we feed. But the nature of our work– the hours, the commitment, the fatigue–disallow our participation in that community’s life: I worked Christmas day for ten years straight and I can’t count the amount of times I said no to weddings, dances, parties, soccer games, relationships. Eventually, people stopped asking. I missed most of my twenties because my hands were holding dough, not other people’s.

But this isn’t bread’s fault, this is our fault. This is a crisis of self-esteem.

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So who gets the dough?

The USDA has the answer: not to people who make or grow food. In a graph they update every few years, the USDA maps out where the revenue of $1 spent on food goes. The answer is startling: more money is made by finance/insurance, advertising, and transportation than by the farmer. More money goes to retailers and food services than to food processors (bakers). How is it possible that the least amount of money goes to the people who actually grow and make our food? In what other economic system is the primary producer at the bottom of the food chain?

The story about the squirrel is a stupid one (and certainly a First World problem). But the fact is my life and bakery mimicked that Food Dollar for years–I paid the landlord, the bank, the utility monopoly, the insurance companies, the IRS, Visa, Mastercard, Squarespace, Quickbooks, the laundryman, the flour mill, and the salt mine on time, all the time. But the person who was creating that money and value–me–was getting paid last (if I was getting paid at all). I didn’t have the cash flow, or the self-esteem, to do it differently.

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But there is something deeper here. This is why I mentioned France, because the cultural and social expectation that bread should be cheap is pervasive everywhere. It is this line of thinking that has led to a crisis. And, I think, kept our craft from developing, growing, and maturing like a healthy sourdough starter. How can bakers innovate if we are scared, broke, and tired?

As someone who has been doing this since Obama’s first term, the facts are clear to me: bakers don’t charge enough for bread.

So what has to change?

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During the brief interludes of downtime during my baking workshops and lectures, I talk to my students about value. I asked them about their pricing–if they know their margins, if they perform costing exercises. If, in other words, they are charging enough. But these are mostly feints to get to what I really want them to think about: the cost of everything else.

Consumers associate value with every purchase they make. We decide what we can afford, what we need, and what we’re willing to spend. We have–as defined by our economic circumstances–choice. It’s these value choices, made by the consumer, which push the baker into a defensive, self-deprecating corner of mild poverty and exhaustion. But is it really the consumer’s fault?

Let’s take four foods made by craftspeople: coffee, ice cream, beer, and wine. These four items, in the preceding decades, have become extremely expensive. But unlike bread, none of them require the same commitment, dedication, or expertise needed to make a loaf: you can run off to the gym while coffee is roasting, catch up on Netflix while ice cream is churning, and gestate a baby while beer or wine are fermenting. The active, hands-on labor of these crafts absolutely pale in comparison to baking. Yet, consumers are more than happy to spend $8 on a latte, $12 on a pint of ice cream, $10 on a craft beer, and up to $20 for a glass of wine. Why? because they ascribe higher value to these items.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde

In addition to thinking that none of these crafts require the same acute expertise or dedication that bread requires, I’d argue that none of the above are essential foods: one gets you jittery, one gets you sugar high, and two get you drunk. None provide anything remotely valuable like bread–calorically or nutritionally. And they all exploit that sad but true food dollar seen above; especially in the case of coffee where a poor farmer in Nicaragua or Ethiopia breaks his back to grow beans he sells for $3 a pound to some putz in San Francisco who dumps them inside a digitized roasting machine, checks Bitcoin and listens to Wilco for a few hours while they darken on an automatic rotation, and then sells the coffee for $30 a pound. What labor, what craft, did that guy in skinny jeans actually perform? What value–for the earth, the economy, the community–did he (or the ice cream maker or brewer or wine maker) create or preserve?

So just imagine: what if the baker charged the same amount the mixologist charges for a Moscow Mule? There’d be a riot, sure. For the people cruising the Farmers Market with an $8 oat milk latte in hand would gasp at the price of a $12, $15, or $20 sourdough. Never mind that whole grain sourdough bread has 11 essential amino acids, complex carbohydrates, polyunsaturated fats, complex B vitamins, fiber, prebiotics, and will keep for a week.

It’s been clear to me for decades that most consumers (and chefs) don’t value what bakers do. And neither do we. Until we apply the same creativity to our business as we do to our recipes, I’m afraid nothing will change.

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Bakers are, by our very craft, giving. We can’t survive just making one loaf–the compulsion to share is too great. We can only keep what we have by giving it away–it’s the literal nature of what we do. And it’s not even the bread we love to share–it’s our techniques, our recipes, our flour, and our experience. But in this giving of ours, what is taken? Do the stories we tell, which become the lives we live, empower us or imprison us? And where will the craft go if we keep believing in these medieval, self-effacing attitudes?

The fact is…bakeries are businesses. Whether you’re a Marxist or a Free-Marketer, profit on some level has to be made in order to keep a business in motion (you can’t keep a sourdough starter alive by feeding it old flour). The basic algebra of any enterprise is I need to make enough today in order to make something again tomorrow. But the pattern, the pervasive belief, that the baker should be broke ignores this fundamental requirement. If we continue to believe that our craft and our righteousness for it aren’t compatible with comfort, security, or success, then we will continue to deflate the value of what we, as bakers, create and provide.

I’ve always held that the baker shouldn’t just feed our communities. We should nourish them. But if we’re having problems making payroll, rent, and the utility bill, are we being nourished in return? Because when we don’t charge enough for our bread, we’re not only saying our bread costs less than. As bakers, we’re saying that our worth is less than.

For years I told myself this story. It nearly ruined my body and bruised my life–saying yes to last minute orders, extending credit, sleeping on flour pallets, slicing off fingertips with blades in my drowsiness, getting electrocuted on ovens because I couldn’t afford a tradesperson, working a double, triple shift…Why? Because I was afraid to break the spell of this story: it was sad and scary to realize that it was easier to devalue myself than it was to ask others to value me. But why would they do that if I didn’t do it first?

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There is as much poverty in the story of bakers being broke as there is when we repeat it. It displays not only fear and anxiety, but a poverty of imagination, courage, and individuality–the very ingredients which make us great bakers. So if you’re a baker or an eater, I’d love your thoughts: should bread be cheaper, should bakers be broke? If yes, if no, then who or what needs to change?

Lama Khateeb is a doctor. I mean, officially, she is a dentist. So by nature, what she does is help–she looks, she peers, she probes. She asks people to bite down. But in her work outside the office, she practices something more invasive, more painful, and even more expensive than dental care. She is changing the way an entire country eats and tells its stories.

In Amman, Jordan Lama has spearheaded an effort to rediscover and grow landrace (heirloom) varieties of local wheat. She’s not doing this as a scientist, as an agronomist, or as an employee of a multinational seed company. In other words, she’s not doing this for anyone but herself and her values. This doesn’t make her selfish; it makes her selfless. Because Lama has dedicated her time and money to her mission: to empower her fellow citizens to grow, mill, eat, and bake with the seeds of their history, the seeds of their place. In doing so, she has transformed the civic, social, cultural, and economic balance of power in Jordan.

The name of her enterprise is Al-Barakeh, which in her words, roughly translates as the abundance and prosperity that results from working and being an inseparable part of All–people and life. And in my seventeen years of baking, I can hardly think of anyone with a clearer purpose, stronger integrity, or more calloused hands (she plants and harvests wheat, in addition to milling).

She inspires me because Lama and Al-Barakeh embody my belief that bakers should not only feed people, but nourish them and the places we live. And she does it in a place–Jordan–which is the cradle of bread (archaeologists there found the world’s oldest loaf there, made 14,4000 years ago). She and I both agree that bread doesn’t just feed us–it leavens the stories which keep us together.

Jordan is also a place which is woven by memory, by craft, by nostalgia, and by flavor. It is a place struggling with urban and rural displacement, as well as biosecurity. In this vein, Lama has positioned bread and seeds in their rightful place: as tools, or weapons, of power. And empowerment. Mostly, though, bread and seeds for her provide security–civic, social, ecological, economical. And, critically, they provide protection–for how else can we protect ourselves if we cannot feed ourselves?

Lama looks into people’s mouths all day. In this way, she can see two things: the place where we tell stories from and the kind of food we eat. Thankfully for us, she has decided to change both.

Join me in saying, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

Graison Gill: I like to always start by asking guests…What's your first memory of bread?

Lama Khateeb: I was born and raised in Doha, Qatar. Commercial white bread was always present, available everywhere. But I remember that on the weekend, everybody went to small Iranian bakeries where they made this large leavened bread–it's called taftan bread. The bakers spread sesame and nigella seeds on it and it's very, very delicious. People don't wait until they arrive home to eat it; they devour it while they are standing in the bakery. This is something everybody did on the weekends in Doha. So this was, as far as I can remember, the best bread I had as a child. Although I come from a family of wheat farmers from my father's side, that wasn't my upbringing and it wasn't part of my childhood memory. But this bread was.

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GG: You were raised in Doha, but they have a lot of Iranian bakeries there?

LK: So automated bakeries that use white flour were everywhere in Doha or in Jordan. But small bakeries where you have workers who bake with their hands using large clay ovens were also around. These are very, very tiny bakeries where there are two workers and a large queue of waiting customers. Unfortunately, as far as I know, these are disappearing now, even in the Gulf. But they used to be a thing back then in the 80s.

GG: And that's something that would you say is an artisan bakery, or is it just a neighborhood bakery? Or is it something unique to the Gulf?

LK: I think it's interesting when you say artisanal bakery–what does that really mean? It means premium ingredients. So the answer would be no. But it's culturally unique and it's baked by hand, not automated. Would you say these are the definition of an artisanal bakery? I think not.

GG: That's a great question because I feel like we can't answer a question until we understand its premise. So for me, artisan is about craft. It's about hands. And yeah, you could use “bad” flour or “good” flour. But I think for me, the preemptive qualification for an artisan is doing it by hand. So, hypothetically, you could have a thousand employees working in a bakery and if everyone's using their hands, I would say it's an artisan bakery. Intimacy with the craft and the integrity of working with hands: that’s the qualifier for me for an artisan.

LK: Then we would say yes, these are artisan bakeries.

GG: Do you mind giving us a biography about yourself?

LK: I'm a dentist by trade. I'm still a practicing dentist. My, let's say, exploration of wheat and agriculture came when I was a university student. Because when I came to Jordan, Jordan was new to me. Spending time with my father's family in Jordan was relatively new to me. Exploring their traditions, their history. My father's family have been wheat growers in Jordan for tens of generations and they stopped growing wheat thirty years ago.

After graduating from university, I got involved in some social work and started my dental practice. But in 2019 my colleague and I decided to tour across Jordan. We wanted to sit and meet the remaining wheat growers, interview them. They keep repeating that since wheat growing stopped in Jordan, Al-Barakeh disappeared and I wanted to explore what they really mean.

After that trip, we made a decision to learn how to grow our own wheat. We asked a farmer in one of the villages we toured to teach us. We rented a plot of land and then Covid happened right after.

During the Pandemic in Jordan, the police used to distribute bread in neighbourhoods. During that time, my colleague and I were harvesting the wheat we grew ourselves. With no experience, we grew like ten dunam [about one 2,5 acres] of land and we harvested approximately two tons of wheat. And it was a very empowering experience.

Back then, we were distributing these grains and flours to our friends and family while everybody was actually buying flour during the pandemic, relying on the police to have bread. So fast forward to winter that year, 2020. We said, okay, this was such an empowering experience for us. Let's share it with people, the lock down back then began again once winter started and moving between cities and villages in Jordan was prohibited. So we posted on social media asking if they have a plot of land that is suitable for wheat growing inside the city and we were able to find seven. Then we invited people in Amman: If you want to take part in growing wheat collectively in our city, please sign up.

GG: So you were providing the seeds and the infrastructure and the knowledge for people that wanted to participate in growing wheat, but otherwise didn't understand or know how to?

LK: So there's no logistics except maybe the seed and you know, some machinery. So people would pay, let's say a subscription that will cover the cost of seeds and the rent of machinery. And we grew seven plots of land inside the city with guidance from few of the remaining wheat growers. Now why is that very, very important? Because historically speaking, the city of Amman used to be the center of grain agriculture in Jordan. Why? Because it has the highest rainfall in the country. Then in the early 70s, the city developed to the west where lands that were previously wheat fields became piles and piles of cement.

GG: Due to urbanization?

LK: Yes, yes. So the significance of that is that you want city dwellers to have a different relationship with their city, to see their city differently. Because if you ever come to Jordan, it wouldn't be bizarre to see, in the middle of a boulevard, a shepherd with his sheep crossing the street. So it’s not strange to see rainfed agriculture in the urban core. You'll find a very large modern mall next to a field of wheat. For people in Amman, this is not strange, but sometimes they do not understand that historically, the city is actually the invader, not the other way around.

GG: Lama, would you say that you are more passionate about ecology, nutrition and food, or are you more passionate about urbanization and reclaiming space for food and agriculture?

LK: I don't think you can separate them, especially if you're talking about native grains and their history. It’s always easy to say we are preserving those old native seeds, right? I think this is a romantic saying. But I think it’s the other way around: those grains have preserved us as communities for centuries. Because we grew grains collectively, it kept us from perishing as a community.

GG: Yes, seeds are our stories. I think grains retain the stories that we tell about our cultures and about ourselves…There are so many things I want to ask you, but I would love to hear more about how things have changed since the 70s and 80s.

LK: Okay, a little bit of a backstory. So until 1968, Jordan used to be self-reliant on wheat: we produced all we needed to consume. Now we are producing 3% of our consumption needs. Can you imagine the huge drop in the last 50 years? To put it plainly–Jordan only grows enough wheat to feed itself for ten days out of the year.

Food Aid programs started entering Jordan mainly targeting Palestinian refugees and American white flour was distributed as aid. This flour was new to Jordanians and Palestinians alike. I remember one of the Palestinian refugees we interviewed said that when she received the white flour she didn't know it was flour. She said, “The flour we are used to in our own villages is different in smell. It's different in texture and taste. We thought this was some kind of filling that we should use for bread.” From the interviews we did this flour was distributed only to refugees, it used to be also distributed to farmers in villages. A few years later this cheap flour flooded the market and local wheat could not compete in its economic feasibility.

Another contributing factor for disappearing wheat started during that intense period of urbanization, when much of the country’s suitable lands were paved over for development. When this happened, the government began importing foreign, subsidized wheat to lower bread prices and replace the lost domestic production.

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GG: What kind of flour were these Palestinians used to–something stone milled, whole grain?

LK: Of course. Even Jordanians, when I speak to my aunties, my grandparents, they had never seen white flour. So white flour has entered Jordan massively as food aid to Palestinians. Then it started to be distributed not only to Palestinians, but it started to flood the domestic market.

Something else you have to understand as well is that by the end of World War II, until maybe 1976, the United States pursued a policy of subsidizing its wheat. You see, the US Government was interested in subsidizing its wheat exports by purchasing wheat from American farmers at a very subsidized [artificially below market] price. Jordan used to import wheat from the United States, maybe until the early 2000s. Now we heavily rely on Romanian wheat…But the prices of wheat that enter our market cannot be compared to the price of wheat I will get from a nearby village because of these subsidies. In other words, local wheat cannot compete. And why is wheat not subsidized here in Jordan? Because in 1989, Jordan signed an agreement with the IMF where, as part of an economic reform agreement, Jordan stopped subsidizing agricultural and public transportation.

Let me give it to you in numbers. These are numbers for this year: one ton of white flour– not grains–is sold for $194 here in Jordan, milled from grains imported from Romania. One ton of local grains, not yet milled, is sold for $592. Approximately triple the price.

GG: What was the impetus behind that restructuring by the IMF? Is it the desire to join developing nations and to receive these funds? But, if a country says yes, are they going to have to sacrifice integrity and food security and biodiversity in order to get this money?

LK: Yes, but this is not something that is special to Jordan, because this is how works in the entire global south: this is the same story for rice in Asia, it's the same story for corn in Latin America–

GG: Millet in Africa. This reminds me of something someone I truly admire once told me, “We can’t have a cuisine unless we protect its ingredients.”

LK: Yeah. So why is food sovereignty very important? Because we have seen now, after Covid and then the Ukrainian war, then the wars in our region, the need for food sovereignty is very, very important. So that's why, especially for food like wheat, it's very important that you at least raise people's awareness of why they should buy from local farmers, and why it should be economically viable for local farmers to grow grain for the local market.

When we grew wheat inside Amman the first year, a famous commercial bakery here in Jordan joined the harvest. Then they said: our bakers are at your disposal–if you want to experiment anything with our bakers. So we tested some recipes and we were able to come with 100% durum wholewheat flour without mixing of white flour. It took us a month to come up with a good recipe after many experiments. When we announced it was now available for purchase, it was a massive hit. We thought that we would be selling maybe 15, 20, 30 bags of bread. We ended up selling 2750 bags per day. And the bakery started to produce this new bread on a daily basis using an automatic production line and it’s now its fifth year of production.

Using an automatic production line is very important as scale here is possible therefore being able to create actual change and provide relatively-affordable bread is also possible. This was a great success because we were able to introduce local whole wheat bread into a commercial automated bakery. Now, five years forward, we are working with 25 bakeries and restaurants in Jordan who are using this flour and we provide the flour in the local market as a retail product for the first time in Jordan.

GG: What is the appeal for people to use locally grown and stone milled heritage durum wheat in Jordan? Is it only for older people that remember that kind of flour, people with a sort of culinary nostalgia? Or are young people interested in it as well? Are people attracted by nutrition, flavor? Are people attracted to the fact that it's grown locally and they keep money in the economy?

LK: To be honest, it will be political because people want the kind of bread that is grown in their own country. I want the farmers of my own country to become part of the food chain. I want to meet the farmers. I want to know the grains. These are the grains of our own country. We have to know them. We have to know what they taste like. Even, for example, when we started having bakers visit our own mill, they will smell the flour & explore different varieties of durum wheat, they can choose to have a coarser or a finer grind for the type of bread they produce or a special blend of different local grains. This will create a variety of loaves. So not even in these 25 restaurants or bakeries, you will not find two identical loaves of bread because each has a different grain, a different grind, a different way of making it. This adds so much to the, let's say, richness of it.

GG: Can you tell me about a typical bread recipe in Jordan? I'm curious about what kind of bread is made with this heritage flour.

LK: Traditional bread in Jordan is always flatbread. One type that is not leavened is called shrak. Other types are for example Taboun bread, which is baked on clay ovens. You have Arboud. In English, the literal translation would be a disc of fire. So basically, you will dig in the sand and put some coals on fire, then put the dough directly on the coals. Then you cover it with coals. You'll have a very thin shell of dough that you will peel once it's ready, and you will eat the inside. Some people like to stuff the dough with onions before baking. This is famous among Bedouins who travel very long distances; they can make this bread in the desert.

If you go to an artisanal bakery, they will make the flatbread with sourdough starter. If you're going to a commercial bakery, they will use instant yeast. But in villages, people still have one piece of the dough that is usually stored overnight until the next day, which is usually like a starter. There is a very famous tradition with Christians in our region that the night of the birth of Christ, they will hang a piece of the dough covered in cotton on a tree branch outside and keep it overnight. The second day they will bake bread with it. Now, the genius of that is that dough will enlarge and ferment overnight and the yeast will feed from the bloom of the tree. So the next day they say the blessing of Jesus coming to our bread, to our houses.

GG: I’d love to know about the different varieties of grain, not just that you grow now, but any varieties that were grown in the past. Because the Fertile Crescent is a birthplace not just of grain cultivation, but of agriculture as well. In fact, the oldest loaf of bread ever found was discovered in Jordan: it is 14,400 years old. And, as some readers may know, the hard-durum wheat native to Jordan was the first wheat ever domesticated by humans.

LK: In the case of Jordan, it is illegal to grow grains that are not local. For example, I cannot import Mexican wheat and grow it here on a large scale. So if you are farming on large plots of land, they have to be local grains, which I think is amazing. So local native grains are available, but some varieties are disappearing. For example, Hourani, in reference to Huran Valley, which is in the north of Jordan. It's a variety of wheat that's very, very old. And it's considered to be the hardest durum, its traditional name is Qatmah, which means “bitten off heads” because the ears of this wheat variety have separated spikes on the top unlike other varieties .

Another wheat is called Nabi Jamal, or camel's tooth. I think in the United States you call it Khorasan [or Kamut]. It’s been dated to be more than 10,000 years old. We grow golden emmer or white emmer. We're also growing one variety called Elephant Tooth. It used to be a very old variety from West Iraq.

These are the oldest varieties we're trying to cultivate now. But we also experiment what are the varieties preferred by bakers. This is very important, because when you are working with a commercial bakery, convenience is key. So not every variety behaves in the same way, not every environment of growing gives similar results. So there's a lot of experimentation and knowledge that has to take place.

GG: I think it's critical to talk about biosecurity, especially when it comes to Covid and everything that happened there. And we’ve also seen how fragile things are because of the Ukraine conflict, plus the fact that Jordan's buying a lot of wheat from Russia and Romania. So I think it’s not just good ecologically to grow food locally, but when we grow food locally we also grow biosecurity and biodiversity by making ourselves more resilient to global events such as Covid and the wars in the Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. So it's beautiful to hear that you are doing this. Most impressive is that you are supporting diverse agriculture by not just relying on one variety or one type of seed. Because we can’t just have biosecurity and biodiversity on the macro level–food systems, local grain economies, etc. We also have to promote biosecurity and biodiversity on the micro level–in the field. Otherwise, we become too susceptible to drought, to pests, to climate pressure: biological and agricultural resilience is just as important as social and economic resilience ...That said, what's the average size of the land that the farmers you work with have? Do they have 20 acres, 100 acres?

LK: It varies, depending on the region. In Jordan, if you are working, for example in the city, usually it's rain fed agriculture. If you go to Jordan valley, it's irrigated and it's very fertile land. But it's a different dynamic. Most of the farmers do not own their land. Historically speaking, they used to own their land and they lost the land due loan sharks. So let's say a rich man will come, they will give you a loan, they will not be able to pay it back. So you'll give your piece of land instead of the loan. Historically speaking, this is what happened to the majority of farmers here in the region.

Farmers used to go to the government and sell them their wheat. The government will purchase the wheat depending on the cleanliness or purity of the grains. The transportation and labor cost will be upon the farmer and the government will pay four months after receiving the grains. The way we work is that we buy immediately from the farmer: we pay in cash at the beginning of the season, approximately 50% and 50% upon harvest. We take care of transportation, labor and cleaning. So the farmers save approximately 15% of the costs. So they prefer to work with us and they find it economically sufficient. We currently work with thirteen farmers in different regions in Jordan and grew approximately 500 acres last season.

Another thing that we were hoping to somehow achieve is to perform some kind of alliance of wheat in the Fertile Crescent. So we were able to speak and meet with farmers and wheat growers and millers from southern Turkey, from Lebanon, from Palestine, from Syria. Syria has been a difficulty, but it will be interesting to see if we can somehow work together. Yeah, so it will be interesting to see the grains of the region beyond borders.

GG: Beautiful. And my last question is what inspires you? Who inspires you? What do you think about first thing when you wake up in the morning? Who keeps pushing you? What keeps you motivated? Who keeps you curious?

LK: So if you remember the first question you asked me, I mentioned something called Al-Barakeh. It has no translation in English, but I will answer the question under the light of this story. The first time we grew wheat, I asked a farmer to teach us. He began by saying: You will need fourteen kilos of wheat for each dunam & make sure you add two kilos for the ants!

I was very, very confused–What do you mean by two kilos for the ants? He said, you'll never have Al-Barakeh if you don't make sure that the ants will get their share. When he started to show us how to throw the seeds and sow the wheat, he taught us a prayer that is part of our ancestors’ traditions in the Levantine area.

And the prayer goes like this:

O’ Lord, feed us and feed through us..

Feed the birds in the darkness of the night..

Feed the crawlers of the earth…

Feed the strong one, the weak one one, and the one lying sick..

Farmers believed that if you don't see yourself as part of nature around you and part of people living near you, you will never get a good harvest. And this is a culture that's very different from a capitalist culture that will calculate the input vs output of seeds versus. Or make sure to put a scarecrow so the birds will not come. Al-Barakeh is a culture, mindset and way of being that sees itself as part of a whole, one in which you share the gift you already have. In doing so you become part of the regeneration of this gift, instead of only a consumer of it.

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Invented by Ashkenazi bakers in Bialystok, Poland, bialys were traditional fare for the community. Not boiled or poached like a bagel, but resembling one due to its open hole, a bialy’s center is filled with a rich blend of onions, caraway seeds, roasted bread crumbs, and sunflower oil right before baking.

Bialys, along with their bakers and eaters, made their way to North America in the Jewish Diaspora during the late 1800s. In the Old Country, bialys were not made with commercial yeast or white flour because those two ingredients were not available to their consumers or bakers. Instead–like almost all the breads we eat today–their original versions were made with sourdough and whole grain flour. It was only when the recipe arrived in the New World that roller milled white flour and commercial yeast were used to make a more modern–though less delicious–variety. If you ever go to Kossar's in New York you’ll eat bialys just as they were made around the turn of the 20th century. But you’re not eating an authentic bialy, just a dull replica of a food which is an endangered species. That’s because the people who first made this bread went nearly extinct during World War 2.

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During the War, the Germans destroyed most of Bialystok and exterminated 90% of its 60,000 Jews in the Ghetto and Camps. (It’s important to note that during World War 2 the Germans also murdered 25% of Poland’s non-Jewish population. That’s the equivalent of 85 million Americans dying over the course of a six year war). The bialy eaters—and the bialy bakers—were nearly all gone.

The tragedies of life can reveal the beauty of food. Because even though countries and towns and an entire people can and do disappear, food lives in our memories and in our dreams. In this way, recipes are postcards–about where we’ve been and where we come from–that aren’t, for better or for worse, as perishable as human life. And so food can become a story which keeps identity alive, no matter the cost of our ingredients.

Here’s how I came about this recipe:

About fifteen years ago in Poland I couldn’t sleep. At the hostel where I was staying, the Australians in the bunk below me had just discovered vodka. I didn’t want to find out what they thought about it so I grabbed my cigarettes and went into the night. Wawel Castle’s walls were streaked in bright candles of spotlights, the tram car shuttled through its loose track, and eager dogs were walking their insomniac owners. I didn’t want any more malty Polish beer so my options were limited.

Soon, I saw one light that wasn’t a bar. Like a moth to a flame I went towards it. That’s when I smelled the bread.

The place was the size of a cavern, of a mine. Men in white, muscles tight as chains, were floating in a haze of awful Euro-pop and soot and cigarette smoke. Back then my Polish was as bad as my English (which has improved). But in my pocket next to my Nokia Lumia, I had a crib sheet of essential phrases I’d copied down from my Lonely Planet guide. One of the ones I cobbled together was, “I am a baker.”

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I went into the shop smiling like an idiot and thumping my chest like a gorilla at the zoo. “I am a baker, I am a baker” I said in awful Polish. They looked at me like I was a sick child. When that didn’t work I pantomimed a bunch of bread baking motions–shaping baguettes, scoring loaves, lifting flour sacks. And somehow, in some essential language I’ll call compassion, the chief bent his index finger and bade me inside.

I was home, thousands of miles from home.

I put on a stained apron and we talked all night with grins and back slaps and all the late-night language of a bakery where no one cares what you say so long as you do your work. And though my memory is finely coated in flour, we made something like this:

Yield: 12 bialys at 100 grams each

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What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we’re here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time…”

― Richard Wagamese

It starts like this:

I tell my students that bread is a story we tell about ourselves. I tell them that the shapes we form, the dough we knead, and the darkness to which we bake our loaves are the ingredients of these stories.

These ingredients create the flavor and the flavor creates the memory and the memory becomes the story we tell about our bread.

Then we say to the world, Here. This is my bread. Would you like to try some?

But what do the things we use to make our bread say about who we are? What stories do our ingredients tell about us?

This May I spent two weeks on the Olympic Peninsula in Chimacum, Washington. I was there to teach a professional class with their head baker Baylin and a class for home bakers with my friend Maurizio. In between these workshops, sleeping above the barn in a yoga studio, I learned about the most fascinating wheat project in the country.

Chimacum Valley Grainery doesn’t just tell the story of its place–a rural, but ag-gentrified corner of the Evergreen state. It doesn't just tell the story of its soil, its two granite stone mills, or its wood-fired ovens. What Chimacum Grainery does tell, unlike anywhere else I’ve been, is the story of all three components which make a loaf of bread: the farm, the mill, and the bakery. Because they perform all three of these rituals–farming, milling, kneading–I’ve never heard a story about bread told in such a voice.

It all began when a story changed their lives.

Imagine the late-90s: Cal Ripken was approaching his 2,000th game, a gallon of gas was $1.06, Che Pope was putting the finishing touches on The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, and two teenagers in Columbine, Colorado were about to change the world.

This is when Keith and Crystie Kisler read Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America, a book in which the author warns that America’s current farming practices will not just deplete its soil, but its entire society. After finishing it, Keith and Crystie decided to do something. They were young, broke, and committed to changing the world. But they didn’t want to outsource the change they wanted to see–they wanted to do it themselves.

In order to make a difference, to not participate in a story of agriculture which hurt America, they decided to buy a farm in Chimacum. (And by doing so, they participated in that other great American story–debt). With paper from the bank they bought 33 acres on Chimacum Valley’s floor and began to grow their own story of American agriculture.

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

― Terry Tempest Williams

They planted fields with grain that no normal combine, baker, or flour mill would touch: organic, heirloom, nutritious, diverse. They planted crops like spelt and clover and rye and buckwheat. Keith used the soil and the hills and the rainfall less like a farmer and more like a musician: he used trees and sandy loam and earthworms as instruments, not impediments to his unique seeds and diverse farming techniques. Crystie got involved with the Community and County, planting her own version of organic, heirloom, nutritious, and diverse seeds.

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Soon two kids were born, further land was leased, more loans were borrowed, a world-famous cidery was built. All this while, like Betsy Ross, the Kislers wove a very American quilt on Chimacum Valley’s floor…one acre of grain begat five, five begat twenty, and soon that neighbor’s hillside, then that neighbor’s, were stitched and sown with more wheat, more barley, more rye. Amber waves of it all.

Then Covid knocked. And this is where their story changed.

Keith bought a flour mill before the Pandemic. It sat alone and unused, gathering dust in the barn, like a story that hadn’t been told in a very long time.

As the world came apart at the hem, Crystie began to think: about food, about neighbors, about resilience. She began to think about all the bridges which connect all the land which is flossed by all that water of Northwest Washington. She began to wonder what would people do if Covid got worse, she began to wonder what would people do if a bridge went down? How would we survive? How would we feed our neighbors? All these stories scared her.

So in between the vaccines and the election, in between the shutdowns and the protests, Keith and Crystie asked themselves a question: what is the most shelf stable food on the earth? What doesn’t require electricity, refrigeration, ziplocs, or jars? What can keep for decades, even centuries and millennia if kept dry and clean?

Grain.

But people don’t eat grain, not really. They eat bread, they eat flour.

That’s when Crystie marched up to the barn. Standing between tens of thousands of pounds of their spelt and wheat and rye grain she said, “Keith, I think it’s about time we start using that mill.”

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I got the best sleep in years in that yoga studio. I made strong coffee on a hot plate downstairs, washed my face in a sink I shared with half a dozen farmworkers, and watched the world wake while sitting on a picnic table soggy from the morning dew. I smelled tractor diesel and woodsmoke and malting barley in between my sips. And I didn’t give a shit about my email or texts or to do lists. Maybe it was the deep rest, maybe it was my incredible students, maybe it’s the way a valley can hold your attention much longer than any other landscape.

Whatever it was, each morning at Chimacum Grainery I watched the story of an American family farm being told: the breaking and mending of heavy equipment, that nonstop agricultural shuffle of always moving to and fro, the patient opening and slow closing of gates. And I heard its story being told in the sound of pick up trucks groaning under their payload, the whoosh of a flour mill coming to life, the raking of coals across the brick hearth of a wood fired oven, the bronchial groan of an old fridge, the bark of a well trained sheep dog.

I thought about that trite old saying, that one person can change the world. I realized, against my best cynicism, that it was true. This one little place inside a pocket of the Olympic Peninsula has changed the world. It is a place which makes the old one feel new. They did this by telling a new story of how grain can be grown, how wheat can be milled, and how bread can be made–that it can be small, that it can be local, that it can be sincere.

These days, Chimacum mills a few thousand pounds of flour per week. Baylin leads a small crew that bakes and kneads hundreds of delicious loaves. Keith does all the farming and deliveries and brews some beer. Crystie emails rowdy customers and pulls the ears of small town politicians until their lobes droop like fishing lures.

Keith and Crystie and Baylin and everyone else at Chimacum Grainery could tell any story. They could be telling the story of monoculture and of Big Ag: stories of million dollar tractors, stories of “Get big or get out” told by Earl Butz, stories of depleting the soil with heavy equipment and heavier inputs. Stories, which frankly, deplete the soul.

Instead, they’re telling a story of small food. And it helps that they tell it in a photogenic place–rolling hills, a salmon creek, a wood-fired oven, a Golden Retriever who needs belly rubs. But when you listen, when you really listen to what they are doing with the way they farm and mill and bake–to the water table, to genetic diversity, to biosecurity, to local economies–their story becomes extraordinary. It became uniquely American–risky and duct tapped and generous and imperfect. But what I loved most about it was its honesty.

We believe in stories which we think are true.

Sometimes at dusk I’d walk the lane underneath clouds that looked something between clotted cream and meringue. I’d feel pollen settle on my harelip, hear the creek trickle off to my right, listen to someone shout after that husky Golden nosing in the compost pile.

It’s in these moments, when I’m removed from all the places which get so loud from my thoughts, that I think about story. All kinds: stories which no longer serve me, stories which no longer make sense, stories which were never mine to tell. But bread’s story has always told itself differently to me.

My time at Chimacum reminded me why I kept baking after so many false starts. It was because bread allowed me to tell a new story about myself each time I failed. And those stories required no ending, something I thought every story had to have. They all had the same power, they all had the same mercy. You just had to feed the story, like a sourdough starter: the more you fed it, the more it grew. The more it grew, the stronger it became.

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I realized, by the time I got to the bridge over the creek and headed back for dinner, that maybe bread isn’t just a story. It’s the truth. Because its story stops the same way it starts–making more, with hands plunging into the dough, to knead and shape and bake and feed the sourdough for tomorrow’s loaves. I find so much comfort in this rhythm; there is so much to rely on in this ritual. Where else is a story, like bread, told both backwards and forwards?

Among meals of overcooked salmon and underseasoned potatoes Baylin and Crystie and Keith and Maurizio and me spoke about the ingredients of our lives. We talked about bread and grain and granite. We talked about P&L statements and farm policy and baker’s gossip.

We talked dinner talk. But really we spoke about ourselves. Around cramped dining tables and campfires we used those subjects as camouflage, as ways to say, “I loved this” or “I’m tired” or “This really was my dream.” Even when not baking, even when not farming or milling, people like us use our work to tell stories about ourselves: we use what we do to talk about who we are. When we tell these things to others is the moment when everything comes together, when we reveal what’s behind the story. And during those meals I often thought about how I too often wanted my stories to have an ending, so I could start telling a new one.

After she spent two beautiful weeks telling me what she does, before I left I looked at Crystie and asked, “So, what’s next?”

She turned to me and didn’t answer. Not because she didn’t have one. But because an ending isn’t the point of the story they’re telling.

“It's a dangerous mission. You could die out there. You could go on forever.”

― Tess Gallagher

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-Scott Reynolds Nelson

Welcome to the first edition of my interview series. In these intimate conversations (I like the name “Wood-fired Side Chats”--let me know what you think), I will be listening to what I care about most: the stories behind our recipes.

I have a roster of the world’s most committed, ingenious, and obsessed bakers, farmers, historians, millers, and writers who will tell us their tales. Whether it’s a seventh generation farmer in India changing the grain landscape in the world’s largest democracy, one of New York’s most creative and finest pastry chefs, or a baker who single handedly mapped all the sourdough starters in the Czech Republic, these are people whose Visions inspire me beyond description. And I want to share their gifts with you.

I’m honored to kick things off with the author of one of my favorite books. Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World is a tour-de-force which positions wheat as the most important crop–and weapon–in ancient and modern history. The Financial Times called his book, “An incredibly timely global history journey from the Ukrainian steppe to the American prairie to show how grain built and toppled the world's largest empires.”

Join us on a fascinating rollick through the wheat fields of history and how grain made, and continues to make, our world. Along the way we’ll bump into Napoleon, Stalin, Lincoln, Trotsky, and Russia’s War on Ukraine.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Graison Gill: Scott, thank you for joining me. The first thing I'd like to ask is what's your first bread memory?

Scott Reynolds Nelson: It was the fourth grade, or fifth grade, outside elementary school and there were women who made these amazing rolls for breakfast. And our house was about half a block away from the school. At about six in the morning,we would wake up and smell the amazing smell of these rolls. At the elementary school, most of the kids were on free and reduced lunches–so that's why we’d smell the rolls first thing in the morning and again at lunch.

GG: So it was comforting–something warm and hot and starchy and filling?

SRN: Yeah, it definitely was. Because when you smelled the rolls you knew they were there again for lunch; those lunch foods would always disappoint but the rolls would be excellent and so you’d try to get the Lunch Lady to give you another roll. But unless you were really good at it you were not going to get another one.

GG: Yeah, or if you just showed her enough attention, you could get some empathy rolls.

SRN: Exactly, exactly.

GG: That’s great, thank you for sharing. Now if you could, please give me a simple introduction to your book.

SRN: Ok. But let me tell this in a little different way. Since we started with food, one of the earliest memories that I have of my grandmother is her telling me about her grandparents…So I was kind of raised by my grandmother and my grandmother was raised by her grandparents. They left Sweden in 1878 when things were very bad, the bottom of a depression, and my great grandfather remembers two things: hating his stepfather and being starving. One day my great grandfather found some apples and he put them up a tree so that he could get them later. His stepfather saw him put the apples there and he went over to the tree and he peed on him. This was the last straw for my 16 year old great grandfather and he did everything he could to escape from Sweden. He was so hungry and so unhappy. He left and that was because of food. So this memory of hunger was something familiar to him and he passed it on to my grandmother. My grandmother told me that the Depression of 1873 was world shaping. And so for me, that was an important part of how I thought about my relationship to my family; ever since, I’ve tried to understand the immensity of that Depression.

So, in 1985 or so 86, I'm writing my senior thesis and it's about the shift from iron to steel and the panic of 1873. And as I was reading all of these documents by steel manufacturers and railroads, they all said this was about wheat; that to understand this financial panic you had to understand wheat. That puzzled me, because American historians say that the Panic of 1873 had everything to do with a particular financial person who failed in Philadelphia and that was the cause of the panic. The German version of the Panic of 1873 is a housing bubble, the Russian version of the Panic is a crisis that starts in Ukraine and so I was struck by how each nation had its own explanation of how the Panic/Depression of 1873 started. So I was persuaded by the people at the time who said that the Panic had everything to do with wheat and it became a fascination. It was not something I could write a book about in 1986 when I was 20 years old. I wrote a bunch of other books, but in my mind the white whale was telling this story about wheat, and how a world market for wheat was at the center of this financial panic.

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I realized that we’re all bound together by food, not by oil, not by energy, but by food. In one book I found a person named Parvus, my man crush, who explained to me, finally, what was going on. In a piece that he wrote in the 1860s, he explained how a financial panic was developing and his explanation was that Ukraine had been replaced by the United States as the world’s bread basket. So, that's how I found out that Ukraine was at the center of the Panic of 1873…

GG: Speaking of Ukraine…in your opinion, do you feel like the rise of food prices was justified with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022? And then if so or if not, why didn’t we see prices rise during the Crimean invasion in 2014 or during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986?

"The war in Ukraine is a war for the wheat and corn that has fed the world, back to the Stone Age."

-Scott Reynolds Nelson

SRN: That's a great question. Let's just zoom back a little: in the 1790s the world's at war. Napoleon is invading, he's moving across Europe, but the one place to get wheat is the Black Sea, in Ukraine. It's a safe, neutral place because the British and French are not fighting with each other there. And so, wheat from Ukraine fed Europe during Napoleon's Wars. Because demand for wheat increased during the war, bread prices also went up during the war. But Ukraine comes to the rescue and it develops rapidly: it feeds Europe and does so from the 1790s all the way to the 1860s. So if you get a bun or a or a local bread in London, Liverpool, or Amsterdam, it came very likely from Ukraine.

GG: This grain is all milled and distributed and baked locally, but sourced, grown, and transported from Ukraine?

SRN: Exactly. It's milled locally in these big cities but it comes from Ukraine. (I promise, I'll get to Crimea). So then the United States emerges in the 1860s, after the Civil War is over, it starts to feed the world, it by far outstrips Russia in terms of its power for a lot of complicated reasons: industrialization, urbanization, etc. But fundamentally Russia, because of its possession of Ukraine, had been the world's provisioner of food for a long, long time. This all changed with U.S. hegemony after the Civil War: the U.S. replaces Russia/Ukraine as the world’s breadbasket. From then on, from around the Russian Revolution all the way up until the 1980s and 90s, Russia was only feeding other parts of the Soviet system.

Some historians have argued that the key to understanding why the Soviet Union fell apart is this: the great grain invasion. What happened is that the Soviet Union began buying its food from the United States, and because of this it went into a fiscal crisis, then a military crisis, then another military crisis, and then the Soviet system was over. Russia was trying to recover in the mid 1990s by exporting food: throughout this time, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine is building back its capacity to export wheat just in the way that it had from 1793 until 1917. And that capacity didn't really get to crucial levels until 2005-2007. This is why the Crimean invasion in 2014 doesn't see any grain stop flowing out of Ukraine. All the while, by the early part of the 21st century, Russia had become the world’s leading wheat exporter once again. The key is that most Russian grain bound for export has to go through Ukraine.

It's a really long answer to a very short question. But that's why we don't see these other conflicts in/around Ukraine mattering as much. However, by the 2010s, the world is dependent on Russian grain and Ukrainian grain. And so that's when we see the Arab Spring: it takes place when Russia blocks all grain exports in 2012. This led to a huge price spike across the Middle East, a place where in most countries grain is subsidized and wheat is crucial for keeping cities alive. The countries which can no longer subsidize cheap grain are led into chaos: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya…

GG: Like Ancient Rome?

SRN: Like Ancient Rome.

GG: Speaking of the old days, let’s talk about Ancient Greece. Scott, can you please tell us about “Persephone’s Secret”?

SRN: In the ancient world, people knew how to transport grain in a way that became lost during the Middle Ages; specifically, they lost the knowledge of how to store grain for long periods of time. And one of the things I talk about in the book is the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, her daughter. Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, and Demeter demands her release. He refuses, they bargain: Hades says she can come up nine months out of the year. Those other three months, during the winter, she stays down here, he says. And so one of the things that I show is that this is not a story about the planting of grains: it’s a story of storing grain. The ancient Greek world knew how to store grain underground. This is a problem for Alexander the Great because as he tried to take over this part of Europe, he discovered that, if grain is stored underground, you can't find out where it is.

Well, in the Dark Ages, after the Roman Empire collapsed, farmers lost the knowledge of how to store grain for more than a year or two at most. This makes feeding people–and nations–incredibly tricky. So Napoleon, after conquering Italy, sends a scientist named Chaptal to try to rediscover the secrets of Caesar as he calls it: in other words, how did the ancients store grain for long periods of time? And what does Chaptal do? He kind of reverse engineers the process. He finds a big enclosed, sealed vessel, the size of a large room. That’s when he says, Oh, I see what’s happening. The ancients were heating and drying the grain to get rid of all the air and this makes the grain go to sleep, like Persephone goes to sleep, once she goes into hell. And with this new knowledge, of storing grain in an anaerobic environment, Napoleon uses this to provision his troops as they're marching into Russia. That does not work especially well for him, but Persephone’s Secret goes out to the world because Chaptal publishes his results. Suddenly, the world rediscovers how to store grain, not for a year or two, but for 10 years, for 20 years, for a hundred years.

After this re-discovery, the grain elevator and silo become a new form of the bank: they are a storage container of the world’s most crucial food. By the 20th century, once further improvements were made to this storage process, you see an explosion of the productivity of wheat grown in Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. This is why–if you travel through the mid-West or any other farming area–you see silos. And grain elevators. These are nothing but sealed chambers where grain can wait for the market. So these efficiencies of growing, storing, and transporting grain create a perfect storm where we can feed a growing world for cheaper. [There’s no coincidence that the population of the earth exploded right after the discovery of “Persephone’s Secret”: in 1800, the earth’s population was 1 billion. Now, it’s 8 billion. That’s a 700% increase in little over 200 years].

"The cheap wheat produced by the American Civil War helped bring the world to the brink of famine, world war, and international revolution."

—Scott Reynolds Nelson

GG: Something very fascinating, that I want more people to learn about, is the “coincidence” that slavery in the U.S. and serfdom in Russia ended within two years of each other. Can you please talk about how this happened?

SRN: Yeah. Wow, let's see. So we think of slavery and serfdom as different and they are different. But legally, a serf had or could have some partial ownership of the land. A slave in the US had no ownership of the land. But Catherine the Great, in the 1790s, “reforms” serfdom to become more like slavery: serfs can be bought and sold as children in Russia. And so something more like chattel slavery existed in Russia after the 1790s.

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So we have two parallel systems. Except when it comes to the crop being grown. You see, the thing about wheat is that it doesn't require the kind of intense labor that cotton does. Cotton is something that has to be constantly attended to: it has to be grown and suckered and trimmed and weeded almost all year long. So in the US, people had to work year-round to produce and harvest cotton. With wheat though, if you’re basically an okay farmer and know something about the land and planet, you have about a month of intense work for the planting and about a month of intense work.

GG: But then it’s pretty hands off after that, except for the planting and the harvest.

SRN: Yes, so there’s relatively little you do in the meantime. Therefore, slavery doesn’t work in an environment where wheat is grown. Also, cotton has to have 200 frost free days and so it tends to be associated with the South, where it’s very warm. On the other hand wheat needs relative cold. And so, wheat tends to grow further North and cotton further South. And that's really the difference, you know, if you're going to talk about a line between freedom and slavery in the U.S. Therefore, the most successful wheat farmers are not people who have a lot of slaves, but farmers who hire help for a month to perform the harvest for them.

So you start to see two kinds of worlds emerge both in Russia (Ukraine is part of Russia at this time) and in the United States. It's a such a long story and I don't want to get too much into the details, but basically these two social systems of serfdom and slavery collapse at almost exactly the same time…In the 1850s Russia is trying to expand; it tries to defeat the Ottoman Empire and therefore gain full access to the Black Sea so it can freely ship Ukrainian grain around the world. This attempt leads Britain and others to fight against Russia in the Crimean War, where the Russians are defeated. After its loss, Russia spirals into a financial crisis. The Czar’s officials realize that the only way they can buy themselves out of the crisis is to end serfdom: they devise a method in which serfs may purchase their freedom by paying that State back over time. This buffers the government’s coffers and gives former serfs not only freedom, but in some cases, their own land.

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In the United States, a much more cataclysmic conflict between people who are connected to the land unfolds. Some people, concentrated in the North, are convinced that free labor is the best way to grow crops and they will fight like hell to prove it. In the 1850s, they made sure that Kansas was a free territory because that land is so valuable for grain. So really, the Civil War began in Kansas over whether Kansas would be a free or slave state: this is what Lincoln wants to defend. He doesn't, he says, care about slavery in Georgia. He doesn't care about slavery in North Carolina, but he doesn't want slavery in Kansas. And he doesn't want slavery in the corridor to California and lots and lots of other people agree with him and are willing to die for that. We're used to thinking of the United States as fighting wars that are primarily about principles, and principles are involved, certainly in the Civil War. But it’s also about land and soil and what’s the United States going to do: feed the world with wheat or clothe it cotton?

Unfortunately, for us, our conflict ends differently than the Crimean War: in that conflict, serfs get land. The way our conflict ends, the former slaves did not get land. And so many of the problems of the United States today have to do with the fact that we did not give land or sell land or mortgage land to the formerly enslaved.

GG: So is it fair to say that serfdom ended because it wasn’t profitable? And our Civil War was just as much about slavery as it was about economics and agriculture?

SRN: Mostly, yes, that’s correct.

GG: One thing that I feel, once again, needs a lot more attention is the holocaust in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Historically, I see an irony that the world’s richest agricultural lands was the setting for one of the world's worst famines. So I'd like you to talk about the Holodomor (Ukrainian for: “Death by Hunger”). Please tell us what happened.

SRN: Absolutely. So one way of thinking about this is how Stalin saw it. When he became premiere, everything that he had to do had to be approved by the grain merchants. And by large landowners, who were called the Kulaks. There's thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, including Trotsky’s father (who was a wheat farmer and Kulak from southern Ukraine). Most of the Kulaks were not Jews like Trotsky’s father, but instead ethnically Ukrainian or Cossack. But they were very powerful and very important because they controlled the grain: therefore, they controlled the country.

The Russian Revolution began with a famine in St. Petersburg and Moscow. So feeding St. Petersburg and Moscow is crucial to the Soviets and Stalin learns from those early years that having a market which dictates the price of wheat is a terrible thing because it can lead to speculation and price spikes. So in the early 1930s he created a system that basically says all farmers have to harvest all of their grain. And not save any for replanting the next season, which is crazy. Absolutely crazy. And then these same farmers have to request seed to plant it again. This is all an attempt to break the Kulacks, really it’s to make them pay for their own seed as opposed to saving it themselves: allowing the government to control the seed, as opposed to the farmers, shifts the balance of power firmly into Stalin’s hands.

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Needless to say, this is just an absolutely stupid way of organizing the distribution of grain. And it becomes, in a short time, an enforced famine [which not just affected Ukraine, but the entire Soviet Union]. Whether Stalin actually plans to kill people in large numbers is an open question. His real goal is to break the large scale farmers, the Kulaks, who are growing grain on hundreds of acres, and in doing so creates this crazy artificial system of pulling wheat off the farm and then sending it back to be replanted. Lots of the wheat spoils during this transportation and a lot of the wheat doesn't get delivered. And so by the early 1930s, due to this tactic, Ukraine and its traditional agricultural system of large wheat farms run by Kulaks and peasants was basically starved into submission. It's a genocide; people ate shoes, people ate the corpses of other people. I mean, just horrifying. Millions died, tens of millions suffered. And it was all an attempt to control the golden egg, the precious golden egg of Russia: Ukrainian wheat.

GG: The estimates are between four to seven million killed. …Some of my ancestors barely got out in time. Gareth Jones, the famous Welsh journalist, went there to report on the genocide. And his work was silenced by The New York Times.

SRN: It’s horrifying and it really helps us understand the kind of sense about people in Ukraine and their relationship to Russia today: the Holodomor is a really important factor in shaping this current war as a colonial process that the Russians are engaged in.

"The choice is between freedom and fear."

—President Zelensky

GG: Scott, can you please talk about the varieties of wheat grown during this time both in the US and Russia/Ukraine?

SRN: Sure. So I think it's Mencius, the Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period, who says we remember the names of kings, but we don't remember the most important people: those men and women who figured out how to grow more seeds and how to select certain seeds and grow them again. And in short, we couldn't have colonized the United States without the different land races varieties of Ukrainian and Russian grain that were brought here, frankly smuggled here, in the 19th century.

You see, it was farmers [in Ukraine and Russian] who grew these varieties over hundreds and thousands of years to produce all these different wheats [called landrace or heirloom]. The great thing about wheat is if you have just a few thousand seeds, after just three or four harvests you can grow that stock out and cover hundreds of acres with that grain. And so, this seed smuggling allows people to settle in places of the United States–Kansas, North Dakota–that previously wouldn't have been able to support wheat agriculture because the varieties available weren’t suited for that climate. But when farmers–and smugglers–arrived in America with wheat varieties from Ukraine and Russia in the early 19th century, American wheat agriculture exploded due to these varieties. In other words, nothing else could grow in these colder climates except the seeds from Ukraine and Russia: Red Fife, Turkey Red, Halychanka, and the like.

"Empires survive only as long as they control the sources of food needed to feed soldiers and citizens."

—Scott Reynolds Nelson

GG: I was once told ten years ago, by one of the country’s best wheat breeders, that something like 75% of the germplasm of grain grown in North America comes from Ukrainian and Russian seeds. So, like you’ve said, if we didn’t have this DNA the U.S. would not be what it is, not just now, but 150 years ago as well too.

SRN: Right, and the Land Grant system in the U.S. made all this possible. They began to ask the questions: how do we get more out of the land, how do we feed people cheaply, how do we feed the rest of the world cheaply? And that's really been the mission of the United States from its founding all the way to today. It’s what made it a world power and again, it would be possible with these Ukrainian wheat.

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GG: Okay Scott, I can talk to you for another five hours but I want to let you go. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.

SRN: Thanks so much. Thanks so much for reading my book so carefully, this was really amazing.

“They taught us a toast in Ukrainian which we like: 'Let us drink to make people at home happy.' And they toasted again to peace, always to peace. Both of these men had been soldiers, and both of them had been wounded, and they drank to peace.”

― John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!”

I couldn’t stop staring at her boobs. Because she came over three times to refill my sweet tea and each time she bent over and asked if I needed something, maybe some more ranch for those hot wings? they were there and so were my eyes. I was 23, maybe 22, immature enough to be looking and mature enough to be ashamed. It was my first time in a breastaurant and my nerves and the loudass Nickelback and the FD&C Red 40 from the chicken wings were working me without mercy. I was a long way from the lentils and jazz and unfiltered Camels of my apartment in New Orleans.

Then Toby Keith came on and the guy I was waiting for came in. He was taller than I thought: Tom Selleck mustache, Dockers chinos, an untucked shirt as wrinkled as the corners of his eyes. He didn’t know what I looked like but he came right over to my booth: either because I was the only one not lip synching to “As Good As I Once Was” or because no one else would wear a tweed newsboy hat and gingham button down in a place like this.

I’d spent a few years trying to take this guy out. But my overtures were always rebuked. And then one time, for some reason, he finally said yes. And when he did I said, “I’ll take you to any restaurant you want.”

“Do y’all want some more wings to go with them cheeseburgers you got comin’?” The fabric of her striped shirt stopped where the cleavage began. And a whistle–bright as a nickel on the bottom of a deep fountain–was resting there. She was dressed as a referee, I was dressed like an extra in a highschool production of Les Mis, and my date said “Yeah, we’ll take a dozen more.”

I was sitting across from one of Louisiana State University’s (LSU) most important agricultural professors. And like I said, I’d known the guy for years. But only in the way the Internet allows you to know someone: I knew that he studied the sex life of wheat and corn and other cereal crops, that he knew the Latin names of weevils and beetles and aphids. His path to becoming a PhD of Triticum aestivum was as tidy as a field of wheat.

While he was learning all this, I was rollerblading in Jnco jeans and smoking weed from cored apples. My path to being a baker was, well, a bit zig zagged. Yet here we were, to talk about what he knew and what I wanted to understand: how can I use Louisiana-grown wheat in my bakery?

So when he suggested this lunch in Baton Rouge, close to LSU’s campus, I drove two hours in traffic there and three hours back because I thought it would get me closer to my obsession for local wheat.

“Alright boys, so another round of wings. Want some wet wipes in the meantime?” She smirked, I blushed, and the Wheat Doctor began to speak.

“So you want to bake with wheat grown in Louisiana?”

The summer before the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln signed two acts which had tremendous consequences for American agriculture. The first was the Homestead Act, which was designed to incentivize slavery-free westward expansion by subsidizing the cost of real estate for new settlers. And its cousin, the Morrill Act, was designed to teach these new land-owning citizens how to become more efficient and productive farmers.

At this time in the U.S.'s history, most Native Americans who hadn’t been killed by European germs or violence were concentrated on reservations. This left wide swaths of the Heartland vacant; Washington’s idea was to populate these expropriated lands–Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana–with smallholders. Under the Homestead Act, 160 acres of land were sold for next to nothing to thousands of farmers who swarmed aboard the newly built railroads to till the American Dream.

The wide planes and rich soils of these places, along with their warm summers and cold winters, were perfect for one crop. Wheat.

With passage of the Homestead Act, the Feds got what they needed–a new tax base, a constellation of settlements across the bulging frontier, and yeoman farmers incentivized by cheap land to be responsible citizens. This agrarian republic, built on the solid foundation of land-owning and self-reliant small farmers, was Thomas Jefferson’s dream for America. With its small plots, family farms, cheap transportation on the railroad to market, and technological innovations such as the reaper and combine, the Homestead Act underwrote Manifest Destiny and taught America how to feed itself.

But the federal government did not just give small parcels to farmers. Under the Morrill Act, also passed in 1862, over 10 million acres of expropriated land were gifted to the states by the federal government in the so called “Land Grant” system. But there was a catch: to receive these land grants the states had to establish public universities and colleges “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts…in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The Feds were wise enough to anticipate that handing out land to smallholders at firesale rates was pointless: they understood that these new farmers needed an infrastructure to teach them how to become even more efficient American farmers. State and college universities, all of which still stand today (LSU, University of California, Texas A & M, Oklahoma State, University of Iowa, and Clemson to name a few), were created by the Morrill Act.

In the decades after their founding, the Land Grants became the pinnacle of American ingenuity. A sort of crowd-sourced Silicon Valley, they were a fulcrum of technology, agriculture, innovation, engineering, research, and seed breeding. By harnessing public resources (land, revenue, bureaucracy) and leavening them into public innovation (reliable public seeds, free information, accessible research), the Land Grants built the foundation for the America we recognize today. All this was achieved by breeding new seed varieties, by researching new growing techniques, by adapting varietals to different climates, by innovating new methods of irrigation, and by listening to the local, geographically-specific needs of farmers. And all of it was done in the public’s interest, for free (or minimal expense), by educating the sons of farmers to become better farmers than their fathers.

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The stereotype of Carnegie, Morgan, Rockellefer, and other Barons forcing progress and innovation on post-Civil War America is true. But what really changed America–and its role in the world–was the food it grew. Rising yields, massive acreage under plow, new and modern varietals, efficient transportation, and an unrelenting desire to do better and make more underwrote the tremendous success of American agriculture, and therefore America, during the mid to late 19th century. None of this would have been possible without the Homestead and Morrill Acts. (It’s important to mention that, during the Civil War, the South starved while the Union was not only feeding itself and the liberated Confederate States–it was also exporting huge amounts of wheat to Europe because of the success of these Acts. In fact, by the end of that war, wheat grown in California was renowned around the world, usurping the reputation of Richmond, Virginia for making the finest flour).

It was then, when America began to feed the world, that it became a world power. And it was the Land Grant schools, coupled with the Homestead Act, that changed what before them was an American experiment into the American experience. Not by proving that this country could work, but by proving that it did.

This is why I was at lunch that day.

One guy told me to fuck off. A lot of them hung up on me. Some laughed. But mostly it was unreturned phone calls, unanswered emails, and kind secretaries who swore they’d give the professor my name and number first thing on Monday morning, honey.

I was too young, and too single, to recognize that this was rejection. It was 2009, a few years before the breastaurant, and I was reaching out to every Land Grant school in the South. While my friends in New Orleans were out being kids–sewing Mardi Gras costumes, playing in bands, riding freight cars, swapping spit–I was spending my free time in an Internet Café copying down the numbers of all the wheat breeders at Southern Land Grants into my Moleskine. Then I’d go home, try to find privacy in the 800 square apartment I shared with four people, pick a name, dial the number, and give the professors my pitch.

“Hi, I’m Graison Gill and I’m a baker in New Orleans. I’m interested in wheat that is bred for flavor, not yield. I have a small flour mill and I’d like to learn more about the varieties you’re growing, as well as any farmers who are growing them. Do you have a few minutes to talk?” If I were lucky enough to get someone on the phone, I’d be even luckier if I made it past a few syllables. The dial tone–its hollowing, consistent timbre–became as familiar as my heartbeat.

Despite the rejection, I was undaunted because I was obsessed with finding local wheat. Ever since I began to explore flour and wheat as ingredients which have flavor–not just generic products sold in 50 lbs bags–I had a dream to source regionally and locally grown wheat to use in my bakery. I had a mad vision that the food system could be remade in the image of those who fed us–farmers, families, millers, bakers, breeders–not the brands, companies, and corporations who crippled it. But my hubris was that I thought persistence, coupled with my righteousness, would be contagious. After two months of those unrequited emails and phone calls, I realized I was obsessed and wrong.

But then I had an idea. What if I gave these Land Grant professors historical proof that this used to work?

That’s when I began to go to Tulane University (not a land grant) to read archival documents. It was there that I found out the French, when they arrived in New Orleans, immediately planted wheat in Bayou St. John. I also found out that a stone mill, run by slaves, operated where the Audubon Aquarium now stands. And a few decades after the city’s founding, when Europeans realized New Orleans was too humid for wheat, a thriving trade was established when grain grown in the Upper Mississippi River Basin was shipped to the city. This wheat not only fed New Orleans, but was shipped to Mexico, Cuba, and farther afield. Last, but not least, I found out that certain soft wheats grew well north of Baton Rogue because Land Grants had researched the seed and made it available to local farmers.

Eureka.

South Louisiana had a local and regional grain chain. It just needed to be put back together.

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“What do you want, Graison?” I couldn’t get the smell of blooming onions out of my nostrils and the dye from the chicken wings was staining my fingers.

“Well, doctor, I’d like to start using Louisiana-grown grain in my bakery. And I’d like you and me to work with regional Land Grants to research the old varieties that used to be grown in the Basin.” He looked at me with pity, like an adult about to tell a 3rd grader that Santa doesn’t exist (thankfully I’m half Jewish so I had a head start on him).

I interrupted to prolong the embarrassment. “I know that right now Louisiana grows 60 million dollars worth of wheat per year. I know it all goes to animal feed; but what if, instead of growing this cheap wheat that people don’t eat, we find out what varietals can do well down here? If we did this, the farmer could earn more money by selling the grain on the direct market, local bakers and consumers would get a healthier wheat, and we could improve the quality of the soil by growing more ecological seeds? I mean, isn’t this what the Land Grant is supposed to do–serve its stakeholders by providing research and quality seeds?”Now, his look turned into a glare, as if a half-Jewish 3rd grader just told him that Santa doesn’t exist.

Over the last of the wings and half-baked undergrads and pints of Arnold Palmers, my naive hope about working with the Land Grants wasn’t just deflated. I was eviscerated.

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The Wheat Doctor told me a lot and was very generous with his time. And I’m still unsure if my expectations, or his explanations, are what hurt more. Regardless, that lunch was a crash course in American farm policy: the disconnect between eaters and farmers, the abysmal state of grain in America, and how our public institutions have become private boardrooms.

What’s happened is that, over the past 80 years, the Land Grant system has become a research firm for private seed companies. Instead of responding to local farmers, the universities began to react to market factors: their prerogative slowly shifted from serving diverse small farms to serving larger and then huger corporate farms. Where they once researched and developed grain varietals which were well suited to local climates and the small to mid scale farms of their constituents, Land Grants shifted their research to high yielding and disease resistance varietals for these massive farms. This was because its new constituents, Big Ag, weren't interested in crop rotation, diversified farming, or flavor. They wanted, and still want, profit. In wheat, this translates to yield: the more you harvest, the more you make.

So it was in this way that food and farming in America after World War 2 became a business. And because of this, so did our Land Grants.

This change inaugurated two major shifts. The first was that when the constituents of the Land Grants changed from farmer to corporate firm, the cultivation of wheat became more concentrated. Where once wheat was grown throughout the country as part of diversified farms, it was now relegated to massive monoculture enterprises in places with proven high yields ( Midwest). In turn, the smaller pockets of regional wheat cultivation (Northeast, South, California) were withered and transitioned into cash cropping. A glaring consequence of this shift was the imbalance it created in biodiversity and soil health. But the most glaring consequence of this shift was how it destabilized our diets: when we stopped eating locally and regionally, our country began getting heart disease, diabetes, and generally sicker at an alarming rate.

The second shift is that normal people–like me, like you–became disenfranchised by the Land Grants. These days, if an artisan baker or miller or small farmer goes to the Land Grant for wheat seeds, it’s like someone going to their local library and asking for books by Anaïs Nin and James Baldwin. “Sorry,” the librarian says, “We only stock books on computer engineering, blockchain, and digital marketing because that’s what Amazon, Tesla, and Google want their employees to read. It’s a new policy.” Then the citizen says, “I didn’t get that memo. I pay my taxes, which fund this library…Can I see a copy of the changed policy?” “Well,” the librarian says, “We never officially changed the policy. It’s just different. There’s a little free library out back, you’re welcome to rummage through there.”

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This is how it works: a Land Grant’s legal and historical focus is to research, and then release to the public, quality seeds at an affordable price. But what these private seed companies do is take this thoroughly researched information from the Land Grants and then mine the genetic data of these public seeds. They then slightly tweak a gene here, throw an extra disease-resistant diploid there, and voila they have a “new” seed which they promptly patent. Promising that they’re more efficient and higher-yielding than the original public varietal, these companies then sell their private seeds back to the very people who paid for their research and creation in the first place: farmers. And who eats that flour? Every one of us.

“The eternal raison d'etre of America is in its being the "sweet land of liberty". Should a land so dreamed into existence, so degenerate through material prosperity as to become what its European critics, with too much justice, have scornfully renamed it the "Land of the Dollar" - such a development will be one of the sorriest conclusions of history, and the most colossal disillusionment that has ever happened to mankind.”

― Frank Norris

The Wheat Doctor told me none of this of course. He did say that his prerogative, as a public employee, was to serve the needs of his constituents. But his constituents are Big Ag–Monsanto, Sygenta, Cargill, Corteva, and their ilk. And they loiter in the shadows of this country like the Five Families of New York: they sanitize the narrative of their work (“Feeding a growing world! We help make food systems more resilient!”) and they plaster Land Grant schools with tax-write off donations by sponsoring buildings in their names. All the while, it’s our public money which is subsidizing their privatized profits.

“What you want to do, Graison, is a fine idea. It’s just too small. Bakers like you can only buy so much wheat–barely a drop in the bucket. I just don’t have the funds to research something which has no market share.” In plainspeak: Your dreams, no matter how plausible, aren’t possible. There isn’t enough money in them.

I felt small. Small as a grain of wheat in a field of an awful truth.

I had come to lunch hoping I could blow the whistle on the American food system and convince this guy to do something different. I wasn’t pretending to be a savior, just a hopeful and naive American who knew about the days when Land Grants and their constituents worked together in a civic spirit of progress and mutuality and affordable tuition to make food better and more plentiful. Best of all, most surprisingly of all, it was that the government made this successful. I had to beg forgiveness for my nostalgia.

Nothing in American agriculture changed that day. But someone changed that day.

Me.

In some fundamental, painful way, I became an adult that day (despite the boob staring). Because during that lunch all the previous rejections via phone and email were rolled into one: I was finally and firmly told to my face that my dream was impossible–wrong, silly, cute, dumb. I was told no.

So I decided on that day that I would always tell myself yes.

I became an adult when I refused to let my passions and dreams be regarded as childish. This was conviction, but really it was faith. There’s no fertilizer quite like it. And it’s what our country, I thought, was meant to stand for. I can still see that place, sometimes, even if I have to squint.

Happy Inauguration.

“Now I am terrified at the earth! it is that calm
and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal,
annual, sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts
such leavings from them at last.”

“Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of the Wheat”

Walt Whitman

I’ve been methodically practicing and developing this baguette recipe for two years and I’m happy to be sharing it here behind the paywall (it’s just $30/year for access to this recipe and more to come). It tastes delicious, the colors are beautiful, the crumb is light and open, the crust is thin, the active working time is low and flexible, and it incorporates 50% stone milled whole grain flour for exceptional nutrition and flavors: everything I look for in a baguette.

Because everyone’s flour strengths are different, please go easy on the bassanage (double hydration)--it’s best to add too little water the first time you make this recipe. Once you have a handle on the dough, you can increase water according to your flours. If you’re in Europe or the Northeast US, your overall hydration should be in the low 80s. Send me a DM in Substack if you have any questions.

More about the recipe: the long pointage (first rising of the dough where the majority of flavor is created) and freshly milled whole grain flours create the deep flavors, supple handling, and unique crumb structure of this baguette. This dough is also great as pizza dough, ciabatta (add some olive oil), or flat bread. It can hold in the fridge between 12-20 hours.

Happy baking!

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Melissa Febos

Maybe it’s winter. The way the morning’s take longer to rise, the way the sun seems more bright because it’s so brief, the way the cold takes away so much of a day’s possibilities and turns its precious hours into a kind of claustraphobia. The world has always seemed smaller, much smaller to me in the winter.

Bakeries are different too. Time is leavened more slowly in a December bakery. The dough always needs more yeast; the water in the mixing bowl needs to be warmer, about the temperature of blood; the oven becomes a place to congregate, and sometimes you can smell the singed hair of a baker who stood too close to its warmth; customers linger longer after a purchase in the winter, talking about things that don’t need talking about out loud.

I don’t have a bakery anymore. So I travel now–to teach, to consult–and I layer my clothing according to the winters I’ve recently arrived in: Bermuda, Poland, Stockholm, San Francisco. Travel is meant to make the world bigger–but airports just make the world feel smaller to me. During each arrival I find my body in a different time zone than my watch; the money in my pocket has strange colors and stranger faces. When Customs asks me if my trip is for business or pleasure I laugh knowing that, at 37, I still don’t know the difference. So I wait for that voice to say, “You are now free to move about the cabin.”

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It’s baguettes. Always baguettes. That’s what my students want to learn most. Maybe because the crust is so brittle and tender, or because of its aromas of popcorn and malt, of sweet yeast and butter. Maybe it’s the rich brown color if it’s baked well, or the tiny blisters on the crust that betray solid fermentation, leopard spots bakers call them. Maybe it’s the moist crumb, creamy as a brioche. Maybe it’s their portability, the fact that a baguette can be carried and consumed, can be torn and shared. Maybe it’s because we should eat a baguette the day we buy it. There’s pleasure in knowing about this perishability.

For bakers baguettes are the yardstick of our craft. The baguette, often weighing just 350 grams, is the summary of our skill: how beautiful, how delicious, how aromatic, how evenly shaped. It is here that the crossroads of our talent as bakers can be seen and tasted and smelled and felt: it should be light, it should be dark-crusted to a color between clay and molasses, and its inside should be moist and creamy and al dente from that first bite.

So everyone I teach wants to learn baguettes because they want to learn what validates them; I was no different. I give them my recipe. We measure its ingredients, we gently mix the dough together, let it rest for four hours, mix it again, and then fold it a few times before it rises overnight in a cold fridge. The next morning there’s frost on the ground (or in St. George’s, Bermuda just dew and a breeze). But inside these bakeries it’s warm and soggy from the bodies of bakers and the oven. And in the cold of the dawn we cut this baguette dough, portion it and pre-shape it and let it rest and shape it again. We let it proof, til doubled in size, and then we bake it. Students loiter around the oven, rubbernecking at its glass window as the loaves bake, in awe at the mystery of how in just 20 minutes this limp piece of dough becomes a loaf of bread. Each time the baguettes come out of the oven–singing with heat, whistling as the steam escapes from the too-hot inside and splits their crust, glimmered in a rich sheen from a full bake–everyone takes a deep breath. Then exhales, smiling. We made something beautiful and the world just got bigger.

For me, the solution to fear is curiosity and presence. I can’t be terrified and curious at the same time.

Mary Karr

As a kid the world felt tremendously big. And there was generosity in its vastness: no matter how fast I ran, how late I tried staying up for Santa, or how much cake I ate at a birthday party there always seemed to be more. Nothing could extinguish the moment I was firmly in; not even time–or calories–had consequences. My metabolism, actual and spiritual, was as fast as the world was large. Early childhood felt like a bowl of proofing dough that just grew and grew and grew: no matter how much I poked at it, it never deflated.

I’ve been going through a lot of pain lately. The kind of pain which is really just change. But it’s the kind of change I don’t have clarity on, it’s the kind of change that happens when a recipe you’ve been making for years just doesn’t come out the way you’re used to. So the solution to this fear seems to be to double down, to change the ingredients but not the process, and otherwise do what’s familiar. But what’s familiar is what got me here. And this fear of change makes my world smaller; it threatens what I realize now is a cul-de-sac I’ve been looping around. All along I was calling it a highway.

When I show up to teach a class everything is unfamiliar: the oven, the flour, the bakers, the salt. But the unfamiliar becomes familiar when I remember that I’ve been touching these things everyday for the past sixteen years. So I get my bearings: I taste the flour, I drink the water, I eat the salt, I put a hand in the oven to read its heat. And I shake hands with the bakers. Then with our bodies, we make the bread. Our gestures connect us to the process–folding the baguette into a neat pouch, tightening the sourdough into a taut boule, stretching the ciabatta into a rustic slab. Our materials and our tools–steel, wood, marble, brick–have as much texture as our hands which use them: durable, soft, pliable, worn. And with each motion, with each gesture, the rituals of breadbaking remind me of what I cannot see by what I am feeling and touching: I don’t think about the fear then, because it’s not something I can hold. We’re all curious what the bread will taste like. We take a picture of the loaves, tear one apart while it’s hot, and pass it around. And it’s then, with that tiny piece of bread in my hands, that the world becomes bigger. Even in the winter.

I wrote this piece after reading the article “Food As You Know It Is About to Change” by David Wallace-Wells. I was on a long-haul flight and had too much time to think about its message: climate change is not only changing what we eat now, but what we’ll be growing in the future. 

Sitting in steerage, contributing to greenhouse emissions as the jet fuel below propelled me back to America, I realized that too much of the climate change and food discussion is about innovation: it’s about fixing systems which aren’t totally broken and about finding ultra-profitable and patentable solutions for Tech and Ag. All the while, as productivity (stimulated by innovation) is claimed to be the end-all to hunger, People and Planet continue to starve and degrade.

I don’t think the discussion should be about innovation, a proposed solution which has failed us in many, many ways. Instead, we need to start looking at how we eat what we already grow. Because what we grow, and how we eat it, are not just facets of climate change. They’re its main ingredient. 

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Wallace-Wells states that the main solution for food’s role in climate change is “adaptation and innovation.” He cites startling statistics–the price of food in the U.S. has increased by 21% in the past three years; we are using more land to grow less food; global obesity and undernourishment are up while our food’s micronutrient density is down. He bundles these issues and the many more we’re facing into the phrase “a food polycrisis.” 

Such a call to arms for agricultural innovation has always given itself the challenge “to feed a growing world.” This bell has tolled for centuries and its intention is an honorable endeavor. From Fritz Haber’s fertilizers to Borlaug’s dwarf wheat, Science has successfully applied its arsenal of R&D to seeds and soil. Innovation–along with its corollary PROGRESS!–was always its crucible. But in the process gastronomy, ecology, foodways, and genetic diversity were mauled by its innovations. 

For the past fifteen years I’ve been saying that grains are the most misunderstood and neglected ingredient in our cuisine. Whether it’s corn or wheat or sorghum or rice, the foundation of a healthy diet–for the planet and its people–are complex carbohydrates. Properly fermented whole grains provide everything the human body needs: from protein to polyunsaturated fats, from amino acids to choline. They also aid the earth in the sequestration of carbon, in complex root systems which encourage microbially-rich soils, and as rotational crops which encourage diversity and habitat flexibility. 

And I agree that we need to feed a growing world. But too many people continue to believe that we can grow our way out of what is actually an eating problem: food insecurity is the fault of humans, not nature. And most bakers–the world over–are getting flour wrong. In doing so, we’re perpetuating the problem.

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Wheat, the most widely grown crop on the planet, accounts for 1 out of every 5 calories consumed across the world. And the white flour made from it is treated by bakers and eaters alike as a product. But I’ve spent my career saying that flour is an ingredient. (I’m pretty sure it’s why I was a James Beard Finalist in 2020). I believe this not just from a culinary perspective: fresh, whole grain flour is deliciously alive and encourages bakers to respond creatively. But also from an ecological perspective–the self-stable, tasteless, colorless, anemic white flour we’re all used to is killing our bodies and the planet. 

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Based on some airplane napkin math I did before coffee service, I estimate that 95% of the world consumes ultra-refined white flour. This product is made via roller milling. In this process the grain is moistened to make it pliable and then sent through a series of steel roller pins (between 8-16) which chaff and reduce the grain into finer and finer particles. If the massive digitized mills and the “miller” who babysits them are doing their job, 100 lbs of whole grain will yield 75 lbs of white flour. The other 25 lbs is a wasted byproduct which the mill sells for cereal or animal feed. (Imagine throwing away 25% of the ingredients you bought to make dinner!)

Before the invention of roller mills in the mid-19th century, the entire world used some variation of a stone mill. In these mills whole grains are placed between two stones and crushed. Unlike the roller mill, stone mills cannot distinguish between different particles of the outcoming flour. In other words: all 100 lbs of whole grains go, all 100 lbs come out as flour. 

Putting this in ecological terms: milling 75 lbs of unhealthy white flour requires eight to sixteen times more energy than milling 100 lbs of super-healthy whole grain flour. Not only that, but it takes 25% more acreage–and all the commensurate energy, inputs, transports, material, packing of the waste, and water–to make up the difference in total flour yield. 

So we’re committing three fatal acts when we’re buying and baking with white flour: we’re throwing out whole food to make refined food, we’re using more energy to transform whole grains into white flour, and we’re using more land and resources to compensate for this waste by growing more wheat we don’t need. All of this for a product which is making us, and in turn the planet, sicker with the cocktail of modern plagues: diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and colo-rectal cancer. 

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Let me give you an example of how white flour hurts and works: pasta. That starchy, soporific comfort food which spikes our blood sugar and then quickly staggers our stamina. All major Italian pasta companies use durum wheat grown in the U.S. or Canada because Italy has limited arable land. What’s been happening for decades is that these companies–Barilla, De Cecco, etc.–corner the market on grain grown in Arizona, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. This wheat–where in Arizona it’s grown in the desert with patented seeds and government-subsidized water sold at below market prices–is then transported across the American continent, across the Atlantic, and finally delivered in Italy. (Barilla alone uses 3,086,471,671 lbs of grain per year). This North American wheat is then sent to local Italian roller mills which strip away about 25% of the grain’s total weight (that’s 771,617,918 lbs of nutritious wheat bran and germ discarded annually) to make white flour. Water is added and out comes pasta which then makes the journey back to North America to be sold in our supermarkets and restaurants. Talk about food miles. Talk about waste. Talk about a lack of innovation.

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The most poignant question from Wallace-Well’s article was this: “How [do we] extract more calories from less land and how…[can we do] so without bankrupting the earth and its soils along the way?” Although I used pasta as an example, the implications of white flour in all products–bread, cookies, cakes–are no different. 

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I’ve traveled the world to teach and learn about baking–Eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Western Europe, North America. And everywhere I’ve gone ultra-refined white flour is pervasive. I’ve come to realize that one solution for the food and climate change crisis is to invert Wallace-Well’s statement: when we use white flour we are extracting less calories from more land and in doing so we are bankrupting the earth and its soils. So if we ate less, but more nutritionally dense bread made with regionally grown and milled whole grain flours, we’d get more quality calories and need less land to grow them. 

On the first point. I covered this fact above–that it takes about 100 lbs of whole grain to make 75 lbs of white flour: so we are wasting our wheat before we’re even eating it. The resulting white product is nutritionally vacuous–it lacks most of the essential vitamins, nutrients, and minerals found in whole grain flour. Not only does it take more resources to grow, mill, and transport; white flour gives us less energy and leaves us more hungry and less full because it is not a calorically dense food. So we need more of it just to feel half full. (Try eating an entire loaf of whole grain, naturally leavened bread from your local baker in one sitting. Impossible. Try eating an entire loaf of white flour bread, which is under or not fermented at all, from any supermarket in one sitting. Very possible). 

On the second point. The grains grown to make white flour require more inputs than the grains made into stone milled flour. These varietals are–as a rule–more disease prone, more thirsty, less flavorful, less calorically dense, and do awful damage to our soils and bowels. This is because wheat breeders throughout the country, following the well-intended precedent set by the Green Revolution, design wheat to be higher yielding, stronger, and more plump (so easier to shear off in the roller mills). The cost of these goals is unsurprising: these wheats require more fertilizers, more herbicides, more fungicides, more water, more sophisticated equipment, and more guidance to grow them successfully. Sometimes, but not always, these seeds are also patented. (I mention this again because the privatization of food solutions is a very dangerous integer in this already fragile equation). 

In essence, the problem we face with white flour has just as much to do with the planet as it does with the bakers using it: just as we’re dedicating more of our land to grow food to feed animals, we are also dedicating more of our ovens to bake loaves which don’t fully nourish us or sustain the earth. And as I wrote above, the climate change and food discussion should not be about innovation. It should be about how we’re eating what we already grow: to continue on this path of using ultra-refined white flour we harass our ecosystems by growing nutritionally decent wheat. But then we turn around and make this grain nutritionally deficient by refining it, throwing away all the parts which make it healthy and whole. In doing so, we contribute to climate change by mercilessly requiring more of what, in essence, we don’t need: we need to feed our growing world, but we also need to eat the growing world. 

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Value is the most neglected topic in the climate change and food discussion. Most people in the Western world do not balk at spending $18 on a cocktail, $6.50 on an oat milk latte, $15 on a glass of wine, or $9 on a pint of “craft” beer. Yet, if an artisan baker dares to charge $12 for a loaf of wholegrain, sourdough bread those same customers raise eyebrows and pinch pennies. This–despite the fact that none of the above things–require a fraction of the skill, labor, or technique it takes to make healthy and delicious bread. For whatever reason, right or wrong, most food consumers place a higher value on everything except bread. 

So the baker becomes a terrified reactor to the value others impose on their loaves. Scared to charge what they should, artisan bakers then devalue their craft by underselling the true cost of their work. Even worse, most of them run for cover from stone milled whole grain flour because it’s more expensive than processed white flour and they’re terrified of raising their already low prices. Not only does this fear hurt the earth, it also strangles the financial feasibility of bakeries as businesses. And it chokes the creativity of the baker who, instead of working with regionally grown and milled flour, uses the same dust as everyone else. The result is a global artisan baking culture which is defined by homogeneity: I find the same open-crumb single-score white flour batard from Malaysia to Montana, from Lima to London. Our loaves have become copies of copies of copies.

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Chefs respond to ingredients everyday. Most of them embrace terroir–the belief that each ingredient is expressed by its particular place. The best ones cook with the whole animal and the entire plant. By choosing to use ingredients this way, value is preserved not just on the plate but in the soil. Doing so requires less energy for the planet and gives eaters more calories, fiber, fats, protein, minerals, and vitamins. Yet bakers neglect their main ingredient everyday: it comes on a pallet in a sealed bag and we scoop it out by the shovel full without once wondering about where it comes from or what it tastes like. 

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I care very much about the ecological cost of white flour. But I’m just as concerned by how we suffocate our creative potential as bakers by using the same lifeless product everyone else uses. If bakers began using freshly stone milled whole grain flour, we could eat less bread and be nourished more. We could restore integrity to our craft and value to our ingredients while preserving the health of the planet. Most inspiring is the creative potential of stone milled flours: unlike white flour, whole grain flours are alive. They are nutritionally dense and incredibly flavorful because everything that nature puts into whole grains is preserved in these flours. So instead of being an edible napkin like white flour, which bakers saturate with fat and salt and sugar and overripe sourdough to mask its vacuous taste like something, whole grain flours offer a full scale of texture, flavor, and nutrition which bakers can use to express themselves and where their flour comes from. After all, the food we make is a mirror. Might as well smile.

I know that the climate can be changed if bakers embrace their creativity by using whole grain flours. Otherwise, we’ll be culpable in its chaos. To me it’s clear that the world doesn’t need innovation: Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos don’t need to develop wheat to grow on Mars, thank you very much. (And God forbid if they ever make a baguette). Their kind of innovation is not necessary because the problem is not the solution: we need more food, yes. But really, we need to eat more of the food we already have. And if we re-oriented our growing of grains and baking with them–if we preserved their integrity and our own by using them whole–the planet would slowly heal by us using less. Because in turn, everyone would be getting more. 

I don’t know how hot bread on a warmer planet will look and taste. But I do know that right now we don’t need innovation. We don’t need special tractors, we don’t need research companies whose profitability is proportional to the problem, we don’t need silver bullets. And we don’t need heroes. We just need whole grains. 

Andre Dubus

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I’m shoving aside the normal post this month to share some news and updates.

Before that, I want to say thanks to everyone who takes the time to support my work: reading, clicking, commenting, sharing, unsubscribing. However you engage, I appreciate it. Really.

Since I began this blog in the Spring, my goal has and continues to be sharing stories—however pretty, however ugly—about bread, about wheat, about memory. I take the adage seriously that if no one is writing what you want to read, you must write it. That attitude, however flawed or fabulous, is what helped me build my bakery in New Orleans so many years ago when no one was making the bread I wanted to eat. 

These days, I’m stepping into a new life of old work.

I’ve left the project I built in London and am now focusing on teaching, consulting (this Fall I’ll be in Maryland, Phoenix, and Bermuda), and writing for my blog here and for my friend Maurizio over at The Perfect Loaf. I’m also going back to school to finish my Bachelor’s. At LSU Alexandria. Online, no less. It’s as glamorous as it doesn’t sound. (This Summer I did an independent study on the role of bread in the American Civil War. Knock yourself out by reading it here if you like footnotes and muskets).

Through it all, there’s been tremendous personal changes this past year–some welcomed, some surprising, some brutal. No matter, my hands and my heart always return to bread: the mixing, the kneading, the recipes, the sharing. It’s my compass and forever will remain so.

I’m honored that this blog has 4,000 subscribers across 40 states and 44 countries. It’s validating and vindicating to realize that what I wonder and don’t know and want to know resonates with you. This connection is what has drawn me to art and writing and music since I was a kid. And it’s this power which wooed me when I found bread: not just the alchemy in the making of dough, but the stories we tell of the bread itself. For me, telling and hearing stories is how I feel someone without knowing them. And in this being reminded of how someone else is living, I’m reminded of being alive. Stories leaven our lives just as yeast leavens bread: without them, both are flat.

So I will continue to write. Not as work. But as a way to learn, to wonder. Sometimes as a way to forget. Mostly, as a way to remind myself of the things which keep us together, souvenirs to these moments we share.

If what I do has value to you, I’d appreciate your contribution–a yearly subscription is only $30. My goal is to have 500 paid subscribers by the end of the year. I’d be grateful if you can be in that number. I want to see if I can earn a part of my living, at least for the time being, without a brick and mortar bakery. So I’m trying my damndest to build a bakery with my stories and imagination. In the coming months, I’ll be adding some recipes to this blog for paid subscribers. And I want to launch a podcast on bread and stories with a friend in the new year.

I’ve taught about 2,000 students in 200 bread workshops in the past ten years. And I’ve got a few more planned for this year (links and info below). Every time I teach–whether it’s in Prague or Paris, Baton Rouge or Birmingham–I teach with stories. It goes like this: I find myself somewhere new and investigate flavor through local stone-milled flour. Then I design a menu, a map really, and use my techniques and experience to accommodate the flour’s flavor and strengths and weakness. With this blueprint, I show my students how to bake great breads. Many, many times the loaves we make together are beyond belief: the depth of flavor, the textures, the colors are radiant. Many students never expected that what we make was possible with their local flours—too many people told them it wasn’t possible. Even though this was how they wanted to bake bread, they seldom tried because of the dissuasion.

When I opened Bellegarde 12 years ago nobody wanted the bread I made. I’d cold call New Orleans chefs before service and get laughed out of their kitchens. Doors were slammed on my face, phones were hung up on me in mid-sentence “I’m making sourdough—”. If I was lucky enough to cross the barbed wire and get someone’s attention in the kitchen their responses were four-letter variants of NO. The bread was always too, too, too: dark, expensive, flavorful, chewy, sour, strange, crusty. I was disheartened and sensitive. But I kept going; kept waking, kept baking. And—for whatever reason—I didn’t change my recipes. I dug my heels into my soul and kept making the bread I wanted to make. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t making the bread for them. I was making that bread for me. I was trying—and mostly failing save a few incredible supporters—to tell a story about how I wanted to make bread.

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
Robert Bresson

So in every class I teach, I tell students that bread is a self-portrait. Of where you’ve been, where you’re going. Mostly, it’s a mirror about where you’re from. Bread is the story bakers tell about ourselves.

There’s no better way to tell that story than by working with the flavors and flours which surround you. There’s not just power in this self-expression: there’s pleasure because bread is delicious. But no one will believe your story if you don’t believe it yourself. So I ask each student, before we start and before we leave, “What is the story you want to tell?”

Below you’ll find some upcoming classes. Please join me if you can. And if you have or know of a bakery which would like to host a workshop, please let me know.

• San Diego: October 20-21 2024

• With Maurizio Leo in Phoenix or Seattle. October 27-28 2024 (details to come)

• San Francisco: November 11-15 2024

• Sweden: With Sebastien Boudet, Mid-December 2024 (details to come)

• Poland: Early December 2024 (details to come)

  Sourdough Madrigals is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $30/year.

  

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