All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

When Jennifer and I started the Happy Monk Baking Company, the world seemed larger — too big, it seemed, for a small fish like me. I set my sights on selling bread to anyone who wanted it up or down Gowlland Point Road, South Pender. There was a neighbourhood email list, and that was my market.

For the first bake day, there were 14 orders. More than expected, I was overwhelmed. The pressure was on. And the orders kept coming. Soon, I got calls from all over North and South Pender Island. In a few months, I’d made a thousand loaves and shook my head in disbelief. Not entirely feeding the multitudes, but this was Pender Island, not the Bible.

Humbling

I’m now in my sixth year and have surpassed 13,000 loaves. It’s humbling to think of the support I’ve received for the bread, deliveries and friends I’ve made.

That experience, a story about bread and the Pender Island community, is similar to that of Daniel Leader, one of the original North American “artisan” bakers. He started his bakery, Bread Alone, in 1983 in New York’s Catskills Mountains. His focus on handmade, old-world, wood-fired sourdough bread with organic ingredients earned him wide recognition from customers and bakers alike.

Now, legions of artisan bakers follow the same formula, a stark departure from the world of “plastic bread” — the Sunbeam and Wonder Bread 1 brands that fill the grocery aisles. Tasteless bread with little substance, misleading ingredient labelling, and loaded with preservatives and mould inhibitors. 2

Feeding the multitudes

But the present-day Bread Alone is barely recognizable. The wood-fired oven, built by a French masonry oven master, is largely cast aside, and bread is now produced in a massive stainless steel baking plant. It produces 150,000 loaves of sourdough bread weekly using organic ingredients in a solar-powered, carbon-neutral factory.

The loaves are distributed to grocery stores, cafes, farmers’ markets, bread shops, and wholesale companies in the eastern U.S. But you can also order a loaf online.

The baking operation is managed today by Daniel Leader’s son, Nels. Daniel is still involved, though the scale and means of production are like night and day compared to the bakery’s early days.

150,000 perfect loaves

Watch this video featuring Nels, who gives a tour of the Bread Alone plant and the bread production process. The operation combines baking innovation on a grand scale but also considers manufacturing’s environmental impact and ways to make it more earth-friendly.

“Nourishing the world”

“The pursuit a long time ago might have been trying to create the perfect loaf,” (Nels) Leader says. “The pursuit now is trying to feed a lot of people.”

“Bread is simple, honest food combining flour, water, and salt and with care, creating this piece of food that is nourishing to the world.”

Laudable aims

These are laudable aims, and the operation produces a healthy product that looks beautiful. But it’s hard for me to look at the operation and the quantity of bread it produces and square it with the idea of artisan bread.

“And there goes about 800 pounds of sourdough,” Leader chuckles, as an enormous glob is dumped into a processor that cuts the dough into pieces and loads them into a smaller bin for proofing.

To a small-time rural baker who makes 70 to 80 loaves a week — instead of 150,000 — it’s mind-boggling. And yet, Nels’ plant tour checks all the boxes of a so-called “artisan” baking operation: the attention to ingredients, the details of mixing and proofing the dough.

These are all things I think about day-to-day.

Handling the dough but not touching it

It’s the scale of the operation that gives me the shivers. How odd to see hundreds of loaves tumble off conveyor belts, then machine-sliced and loaded into “carbon-neutral” biodegradable plastic bags. Plenty of employees are handling the dough, but not many seem to touch it.

The Bread Alone bread seems to lack soul, though I’ve never tasted, smelled or touched it. The loaves look beautiful; their colours and shapes are glorious. The bread is perfect in every respect.

But where is the personality? Where are the imperfections, the odd-shaped bulges, the charred crusts or brick marks on the bottom sides?

Bread is human food

There is a sterility to the loaves despite all the attention to detail and the laudable commitment to organic ingredients.

My preference is for bread that wears its imperfections because it’s human-made. It’s a human food. People break bread together, and it connects them. There’s no reason a machine-made Bread Alone loaf can’t perform the same miracle. But it would still be missing something.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

By Richard Brautigan, 1967

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