gowan

The Freedom of Bread

Image

I bake bread most every weekend.  The smell of fresh baked bread in the house is one of those pleasures that can only truly be experienced  if you’ve had your own hands in the dough, rolling it out, kneading it, feeling its warmth.  I don’t use a bread machine, but a big mixer and my own hands.  I use my own vegetables (squash mostly) in the dough as well as the spent grain from the beer I brew.  I do this for many reasons, but mostly the bread feeds me, but also and perhaps most importantly, my curiosity.

Baking bread is one of the human endeavors that separate us from other animals and bread is one of those few cooking endeavors that brings to life rather than takes life from the things that we cook (to paraphrase Michael Pollan [Cooked]). I’m not quite sure why, but bread-making is not only useful, educational and fun, but it is also as addicting as it is necessary.  That first mouthful of warm, wheaty bread is a luxury; the taste is exquisite.  But, it is not in the eating of the bread that the imagination takes flight, but rather in the making of the bread that mind finds solace.

There are hundreds if not thousands of recipes for bread that can be easily found, and I’ve tried a few, but the bread I bake is best when I simply poke my fingers in the dough before letting it rise the first time, adding flour or water as I see fit.  The best bread I bake is that bread that I scoop out of the bowl and watch the filaments of gluten and protein strands stretch and break.  Life from water, yeast and flour somehow gives life to mind, body and imagination.  This is, realize, all symbolic for something greater than bread.  I do bake bread, but I also garden, and am about to embark on beekeeping.  These all symbolize the same concept: freedom.

I am often reminded by many that I tell these things to that “it doesn’t pay”, and that “why do it when it is so easy to ‘just go buy it’.”  But to me, their words ring empty.  I answer, “Why just go buy it when you can just do it yourself?”  Their only answer seems to be that “It is easier.”  But, I ask, why is “easier” better?  Is it better bread?  Do you learn from it?  Are you freer?  For a while I couldn’t understand why it seemed that so many people became defensive when I talked about doing things rather than buying things, but then it dawned on me: baking bread, keeping bees, gardening, brewing beer; doing things symbolizes what we all believe that we have, but also reminds us that we often don’t actually have it and how difficult it is to achieve.

Baking bread comes at a cost.  Now that I bake bread, I want to make my own yeast strains, grow and thrash my own wheat; in short, become self-sufficient.  I have learned that while “easy” comes at a cost, so does freedom.  There are limits to what we can do, and there are limits to how free we can become.    Aristotle defines a virtuous life as one lived intellectually with intention.  This, he claimed, will lead the virtuous man to Happiness (Eudamonia), but in order to achieve this Happiness one must realize one’s limitations.  In other words, the road to freedom is paved with many un-risen loaves, but of course you can always compost them!

The Freedom of Food

Recently I have embarked upon path towards freedom.  This word, freedom, so often misused and thrown around as to have lost its meaning, is such an important concept to so many people but to be free means to limit one’s freedoms.  In my case, I have begun to limit myself to that which I can do myself: self-sufficiency.  One of the areas, and the most important in many ways, is the ability to feed your self.  To eat is to cook; cooking is a simple and yet necessary activity that has, in the past one hundred years or so, become defined not by us as individuals, but by faceless corporations and conglomerates that do two things: tell us what to eat and provide us what they think we ought to eat.  In one sense, these corporations and conglomerates have given us freedoms: we no longer have to cook; but, in another sense, these corporations and conglomerates have taken away our freedoms: we no longer can cook.

It is not only cooking that counts, it is the ingredients as well.  These companies have not only begun to cook for us, but they have also provided and created the ingredients that they cook with.  This may sound as simple and innocent but alas, it is not.  I was in Denmark over Christmas with my Danish family and had the pleasure of “cooking” with my nephew.  We made lasagna (a classic dish).  My nephew took out a jar of pre-made sauce (with meat), a box of pre-made béchamel sauce, and boxed platter pasta.  He poured each of the packaged ingredients over the pasta platters and set it in the oven.  Oua’ la!  I do not mean to downplay my nephew’s willingness to make a family meal, but what he did was not cooking.  However….

According to Michael Pollan in his book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, the definition of cooking has been dumbed down.  My nephew’s activity is considered “cooking” by many.  Of course language is a social phenomena and we as a society are free to define terms as we see fit.  Historically, words of all kinds come and go, get redefined and defined again.  But to redefine a word that encompasses a quality of freedom that is only found in the transformation of ingredients to food is to devolve linguistically.  To dumb down concepts is to lose freedoms.  The consumerism society created by corporations is not concerned with our freedoms, but with profit and profit alone.  And so, to redefine words (such as cooking) to fit their ultimate goal of profit at the cost of a higher form of freedom is in fact taking away the freedoms of us as individuals.

Today, most are aware that agriculture, the production of food products, is by in large defined by the production of corn, typically GMO (Genetically modified Organism).  The three ingredients that my nephew used were all corn-based (probably not GMO; we were in Europe) in the form of high fructose corn syrup and corn starch.  And so once again, what we perceive as freedom is not freedom at all, just like what many perceive is cooking is not cooking at all.  Cooking food from scratch, with basic, non-processed ingredients is not the illusion of freedom, but a higher form of freedom.  Choosing to buy basic non-processed ingredients also allows others (farmers in particular) to have true freedom and not the illusion of freedom that corporate farming offers.

It is just recently that I have learned the correlation between what I cook, what I eat and my freedom, but as I continue to learn I find that my expectations of what freedom is continues to rise as does what I am willing to eat.  For starters, I am not willing to support farm and corporate practices that include CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), GMO’s, non-organic pesticides.  The list of what I will not support continues to grow as does the necessity of my taking responsibility for where I spend my money, what I do with my time, and what I put in my mouth.  In other words, as I limit myself, my freedom grows.

Often these issues are perceived as political, and in a way they are, but so is the concept of freedom.  By limiting what I will accept I have found that the freedom that I have (through the continued path towards self-sufficiency) grows ever deeper and wider. Michael Pollan puts it appropriately.

“Of all the roles the economist ascribes to us, “consumer” is surely the least ennobling.  It suggests a taking rather than a giving.  It assumes dependence and, in a global economy, a measure of ignorance about the origins of everything that we consume…” (Cooked, 407)

If we truly are what we eat, then food is freedom in the end.