May 4, 2020

I still miss bread. I was diagnosed with allergies to wheat and eggs more than 30 years ago, and although there are lots of ways to eat well without those two things and lots of gluten-free substitutes that are far superior to what used to be available, I’ve never found a non-wheat bread that really stacks up.

I’m married to a really good bread-baker—or rather, a bread-baker who makes one really good kind of bread. He found an English muffin recipe many years ago and adapted it to make a single loaf of bread, which he makes every week. One of the reasons he likes this recipe is that it doesn’t require any kneading; he’s after the experience of eating the bread, not the baking itself. It doesn’t rise as much as a kneaded loaf, but it makes superlative toast and an amazing grilled cheese sandwich.

This week he made two loaves, which he sometimes does when he wants to give one away to somebody. Usually he uses King Arthur bread flour from the supermarket, one of the few things we still buy at supermarkets. This week, though, it was flour from wheat grown and milled in New York state, a recent addition to our local co-op’s bulk section. It’s browner than the usual loaf, but just as chewy and deliciously dense.

Over the past few years, we’ve been getting more and more of our groceries from the co-op. Ever since I became deeply involved with the leadership of the organization we’ve shifted our shopping patterns almost completely. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a bunch of things seemed to fall suddenly into place for us and for the co-op. First, it was very easy for us to stop going to supermarkets altogether. Who needs them? We co-own our own grocery store, and we’ve learned how to shop there for most of what we eat. The produce is bountiful and beautiful and a lot of it is locally sourced. There’s plenty of ice cream and chocolate, two pandemic bestsellers, it turns out. Like everybody else, our store is having trouble finding toilet paper at the moment, but unlike nearly everybody else, we’ve found that our shorter supply chains have been enabling us to stock things that have been hard to find elsewhere, like dried beans and bread flour. Those two items come to us through a mid-sized regional distributor whose western Massachusetts home base lets them source from around central New England and into New York state, a foodshed not unlike what existed before the era of supermarket dominance and coast-to-coast trucking. The resurgence of local agriculture and the rebuilding of local food economies in this part of the country means we can draw on these resources to put together a pretty complete shopping list of foods produced and processed within not much more than a hundred-mile radius.

COVID-19 has accelerated that process of rebuilding, literally and conceptually. It’s one of those moments when a lot of people are thinking harder about the sources and safety of their food. Our sales at the co-op have more than doubled since the stay-at-home order went into effect in Massachusetts. In turn, we’ve more than doubled the amount we’re buying from our largely-local suppliers.

This wasn’t the case even a couple of months ago. Despite being incredibly lean and nimble in our operations, we just weren’t able to pull clear of the weight of five years of operating in the red since opening our small storefront in the nearly-empty center of a former mill town. This past February we were on the point of considering bankruptcy.

At an emergency meeting of the members, we came to the collective conclusion that too much would be lost if we let the business fail. We accepted the need to find a way of filling the financial gaps and continuing to build toward our shared vision of a store that could work in a future when dangerously long supply chains might fail us and we would need the strength of tighter, stronger food connections. We raised enough money to stay afloat in the short term and committed ourselves to longer-term fundraising toward that future.

Then along came COVID, and suddenly we were in the future. Our in-house agility and our relationships with our suppliers have served us well in the past few weeks. We’ve added a remote ordering and curbside pickup service that old and new customers alike have gratefully embraced. We’re past the break-even point for the first time ever.

Our staff has been amazing but it hasn’t been easy to shift into high gear so rapidly. So the extra loaf of bread that Fred baked this week was for Julie, our store manager, who is putting in long hours and juggling even more details than she usually does. I added a jar of wild blueberry jam made from berries that I picked last summer in a field owned by one of our board members. Julie’s family made short work of all of it. Last week Fred shared some of his homemade date and apricot paste with Nalini, the wonderfully inventive cook who runs our prepared foods department. Nalini added some red wine, cumin, and other things and turned it into a savory marinade for baked chicken. We’re all feeding each other in small exchanges and larger ones that are increasingly outside of the big supply chains whose many weaknesses are being so frighteningly exposed.

In our current moment of profitability at the store, it has become much more possible to see and feel what cooking, shopping, and eating would be like if we were able to keep moving in this direction. I got into all of this because I was interested in thinking about how historical models of food and farming systems might serve us in the present, but that feels increasingly beside the point as I get deeper into it.

The point is about building and broadening our relationships around food, and practicing care and attention—not abstractly, but with very specific actors—all along the supply chains. It’s slow work and there’s lots left to do (for example, we get those dates and apricots at the co-op, but I have no idea who grows them and where). And I still can’t eat bread. But I’m feeling incredibly nourished by being in the midst of these exchanges, and more hopeful than I was before COVID about where it all might lead.

Ingredients

4 cups bread flour

3 tsp sugar

2 tsp salt

1 pkg dry active yeast (2¼ tsp)

Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl (Fred uses a 3-quart bowl).

In a mid-sized bowl, proof yeast in 2-3 oz water at 110 F for 10 minutes with ¼ tsp sugar.

When yeast is foaming and bubbly, add more water at 110 F to make 2 cups total. Mix.

Add liquid ingredients to dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Let rise in a warm spot (the oven heated to 170 F and then turned off is ideal) until dough is near the rim of the bowl. It should look bubbly and uneven, not smooth and flat. Depending on circumstances, this may take between and hour and 20 minutes and two hours.

Preheat oven to 350. Use a spoon or spatula to turn the dough into a greased loaf pan. Bake at 350 for 42 minutes.

NOTE: It takes some experience to learn how to make this simple bread work reliably. Fred is happy to consult; contact Cathy if you want to reach him.

Cathy Stanton is a cultural anthropologist and public humanist who teaches at Tufts University and lives in north-central Massachusetts, where she serves on the board of Quabbin Harvest Food Co-op in Orange.