This is a guest post by Lola Milholland, co-founder of Umi Organics *Originally published on Communal Table   In my early twenties, I was riding my bike across the Broadway Bridge over Portland’s Willamette River on a warm summer night when a dust of wheat bran and dirt covered my legs. My eyes followed the dust cloud down to the riverbank to a barge attached to a mammoth structure of cement cylinders by a claptrap of metal ramps. I had biked past this scene thousands of times in my life. At home, I looked the place up. The Cargill … Read more

Hello, bread lovers— I recently sat in on a panel called “Can Heritage Grains Actually Feed the World?”, moderated by baker Peter Reinhart. There were some heavy hitters from the grain community: Dr. Stephen Jones, the director and head wheat breeder at the WSU Bread Lab; Glenn Roberts from Anson Mills; Amy Halloran, Flour Ambassador extraordinaire and the author of The New Bread Basket. It was here that I was also introduced to Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef. So, can heritage grains actually feed the world? The answer is a bit complex. Did you know that we produce enough … Read more

I handed him a loaf of bread and he made a joke about orgasm. That’s because to him, bread is pleasure…and shame. For the past year, he’s been Paleo. He dropped fifty pounds and started lifting weights. He feels better than he’s ever felt. Wheat had become the enemy, and he was hitting the streets to preach the word. He’s now a man married devoutly to protein, he assured me. He would only sneak bread on the side. Later that day, he sent me a private picture of himself stuffing a piece of toast into his mouth with a … Read more

This is a guest post by Claudia F. Savage   In the years before the birth of my daughter, River, I had serious insomnia. The only thing that calmed me was baking my mother’s wheat bread, the first recipe I knew from memory. In the starlit cold of the Colorado mountains, I shuffled to the dark pantry, pulled out whole wheat flour, honey, yeast, and my largest cream-colored bowl, its soft glow the only light on the way to the counter. The act of stirring and kneading a known rhythm, a balm, in the still dark. The bread didn’t … Read more