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This World Won’t Survive On Bread Alone
In 2011, I watched the movie No Impact Man and became inspired to reduce the amount of waste I created at home. I stopped buying a lot of the staples that my kids considered kid food: juice boxes, yogurt tubes, all those questionably healthy bars in their shiny mylar wrappers and made a commitment to baking bread from scratch. That’s when I learned the art of Irish Soda bread.
Bread is just about as basic a food as you can get. In fact, it can literally mean food or money — whatever it is that personally gives you substance. I grew up on neatly sliced white bread — the perfect squares turned brown in the 70s when my mother learned that Wonder Bread was less than wonderfully nutritious.
Bread was one of the first foods I decided to stop buying and explore making. I believed that baking bread at home increased my control of the nutritional intake of my kid's diet and decreased our output of garbage. While that wisp of plastic the average loaf comes packed in probably does not add a ton to the landfill, there was also the potential carbon footprint of the packing and shipping that I had considered. And I was looking for little ways to make less of an impact on the planet.
I was also fascinated by the idea of bread. Like cheese and wine, bread seems based on a kind of culinary alchemy — the magic of yeast turns grain into gold…
