Our Daily Bread

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The Baking of Bread as a Spiritual Act

Every Sunday at the Open Door Community, we observe the Eucharist. The table is carefully adorned with a tablecloth, handmade pitchers and cups filled with grape juice, and a loaf of two-toned bread baked earlier in the week. Bread is significant for a number of major religions, and remarkably so for the Judeo-Christian narrative. Thus, the baking and breaking of bread is an important part of our shared life together.

In the Jewish tradition, challah bread is baked thinly with eggs, and on occasion, honey and raisins. Unleavened matzo is used in Passover celebrations. Muslims have a high respect for bread for its simplicity, believing that Allah hates wastefulness. And, of course, the Christian tradition is ripe with imagery of bread. Manna in the wilderness, Christ’s reference to himself as the bread of life, the Eucharist, and the breaking of bread on the road to Emmaus are all ways in which the Christian narrative connects us to our neighbors and God through bread.

In ancient Palestine, all of life was dependent upon the harvesting of wheat and barley. Much like the Nile River for Egyptians, bread was considered sacred. It was a reminder of hospitality and friendship. In fact, our word companionarises from the Latin words com (with) and panis (bread). We get a sense of this in Mark 6:8 when Jesus tells the disciples, “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.”

To have not expected or accepted the bread offered to them by others would have been at dire odds with the Beloved Community that Christ was inaugurating.

Ched Myers reminds us that “Bread breaking rightly stands at the center of the church’s life as an invitation to ‘remember’—to remember the economy of grace practiced by our ancestors in the faith, and to remember what we ourselves must do to embody an ethic of equality in a world deeply divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’”

To bake bread is a reminder of our dependence upon one another and on God. It is a reminder that all of life, even bread, is sacred and that we are made whole by sharing it with others.

The Baking of Bread as an Environmental Act

We’ve altered and mutated bread in such a way that it typically no longer has the nutritional components it once did. Bread once contained einkorn, emmer, and spelt—all forms of wheat. However, the germ of wheat, because of its oiliness, tends to have a short shelf life. To cope with this, the iron roll mill was developed, which removes the wheat germ along with much of the nutrition. This process replaced traditional stone wheels, providing a much longer shelf life and producing the white bread that remains widely popular today. As a result, by the end of the Great Depression, Americans and the British were suffering widespread malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. Britain mandated that its bread be made with the wheat germ included; America did not follow suit but opted to “enrich” bread synthetically.

In its simplest form, bread is little more than flour and water, but mass-produced bread today contains a great deal more. It includes fats, flour treatment agents, chlorine dioxide gas, emulsifiers, preservatives, and several chemical processing aids to delay staling. Yeast is increased for larger yields, which ironically speeds up the staling process, requiring more processing enzymes—and so the cycle continues.

The problem arises when we fail to think about where our food comes from. For many, grocery stores are magical places where food just “appears.” Most of us no longer maintain a connection with the earth or the seasons. Well over 80% of America’s daily bread is mass-produced, which, in addition to requiring large amounts of energy, releases chemicals in the form of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and hormones into the land, water, and air. Further, we must consider the harm done by bread’s plastic packaging, most of which ends up in landfills.

The Baking of Bread as a Political Act

The “big food” industry’s subsidizing of cheap food preys on the poor. While it does give them access to more affordable food, it is also a contributing factor to their poverty in the first place. This connection can be traced through history.

In France, bread was once an indication of social class. The peasant class sought to imitate the aristocracy by consuming wheat and white breads, in contrast to the dark rye, barley, and oat breads they traditionally ate. Bread was also symbolic of revolt—the poor would often throw their crusts at the feet of their rulers as a way of declaring that they had failed to live up to their title of “nourishing prince.”

An example of how bread can and should be understood politically is a British bakery founded by Dan McTiernan. The Handmade Baker, in the village of Slaithwaite, operates as a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative. McTiernan believes, as do I, that the choices we make about food—particularly the choices we make with our money—are inherently political. I would argue that community bakeries such as McTiernan’s, as well as bread baked in one’s own oven, offer us new ways of imagining community, self-sufficiency, patience, and a deeper connection with the source of our food.

As Mahatma Gandhi made the spinning wheel a symbol of resistance, Christians do the same with loaves of bread. And, just as the spinning of yarn was once an act of defiance, so too can be the baking of bread. Capitalism, environmental harm, and systemic poverty have become synonymous with what it means to be an American. By baking our own bread, we reject all three.

Of course, the way we deal with these things is not limited to bread. But the environmental, political, and spiritual implications of bread lead us to ponder the way we seek to live within the world. One way leads us to the chain grocery store. The other way leads us to an oven.

Author’s Note: Special thanks to Nelia Kimbrough, whose August 28th teaching helped cultivate this article.

Zachary Crow joined us as a Resident Volunteer at the Open Door Community last May after graduating from Harding University. He bakes beautiful, bountiful, and tasty bread for our Eucharist services each week.