Dear Bread Fans,
Why do we believe so much in food?
Why do we think food can do so much more than offer nutrition? So many metaphors of love and care get attached to bread, like bread is a blanket and will warm up everyone, strangers, family and friends. The Beatles sang All You Need Is Love, and we consider food so potent that you could swap bread or food for love. But what an oversimplification I think this is. Filling bellies can’t stop war, forced migration or climate change.
I get mad at the weight we give food. Part of this anger comes from the six years I ran a soup kitchen and food pantry. At first, I was really excited about the job. Feeding people, I felt noble. The connections I made as I served lunch felt strong.
But the satisfaction wore off as I saw what hungers I couldn’t address: people were starving for ease, for a break from the chaos poverty causes. Folks faced medical crises and transportation hassles. They were weary from arguing with landlords about bedbugs and furnaces, from the demands of low-paying jobs. I came to see that food was a bandage for broader and deeper deprivations. If people had basic rights such as stable livable wage jobs and affordable housing, then maybe they wouldn’t have so many problems, and maybe they could afford food.
Four years ago, I left that job so I could write. The timing was lucky, in terms of missing the challenges of the pandemic, which only strained the “emergency feeding system” to really provide for folks. I remain connected with a food pantry in my neighborhood, and I know that food pantries are under even greater duress now than ever before, as more people come to them for food, struggling with inflation, gas prices, and minimal wages. The return to relative normal has hardly eased the strain on people’s budgets, and we in community need to keep assisting these places, even if they are not solutions to economic inequality. Everyone has the right to three meals a day.
Fundraising for charities leans on the hopes that our donations of money and/or food will deliver individual care. When food charities tap into those hopes and promises of food, I know it is not manipulative. Given the limits of the existing situation — short of an overhaul in housing and employment — this is one practical thing we can do for each other. And yet I wonder about that blanket of food. Why do we wrap food up in so many emotions, judgements and trust?
I’m digging into these concepts with a local project. I got a grant from a local arts center to invite people from the area to explore food memories and recipes and stories — of the farmers' markets, our bakeries & restaurants, and any meal they've ever had or made.
Food takes us back in time as it brings us into the moment. The scents of cooking, the tastes and textures of food, the care we put into feeding ourselves and each other, our hungers, and our lacks — these are potent feelings. In my own writing, I tap into the power of food, and I have a hunch that asking people to taste and think about food will help us in Troy get to know ourselves — as individuals and families, and as a community.
Next weekend, I’m setting up a booth at the farmers’ market, and a virtual memory box, called Food Story Stations: A Memory Feast to get people thinking and writing about the strong emotional current food carries. I’ll be working with my friend Justin Baker (check out his Art Town podcast) to create a podcast about the project, and I’ll let you know when that’s ready too.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you, dear readers of Dear Bread. I’ve put the writing prompts I’m going to use in Food Story Stations into this quiz, and if you’d like to mine your own food memories, please do. No need to have any connection to Troy, New York, in this instance — I am just curious about your feelings about food and want to get your mind and heart moving. Thank you!
Here’s a picture of a food thing that moved me this week, celebrating my mother’s 85th birthday!
Love, Amy
Notes:
The emergency feeding system is the name for the secondary feeding system that has been operating in America since the early 1980s. Diverting food from the larger food system to people in need through a funnel of food charities has become a norm, and now the industrial food system is designed to rely on the emergency food system to absorb its excess & waste, and in many cases, also offer tax breaks. This parallel food system largely exists in the shadow. As a food system activist/writer, I would rather our first-tier food distribution system of retail and wholesale outlets discount the food on supermarket shelves rather than funnel it into a separate, second-class eating channel – food pantries/shelves/soup kitchens. This would let us all shop together and destigmatize not having enough money. But I’m not running things, am I?
Food Story Stations is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Arts Center of the Capital Region. The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market graciously sponsored me in this effort, and are providing me space and practical support to explore food memories. Look for Food Story Stations starting 10/21, and again on November 4, when the market moves indoors to the atrium. The TWFM table can direct you to my booth.
The cake I made for my mom, a cornmeal poundcake, is from Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years by Greg Patent. If you are curious about baking history, this is a good way to explore it in your kitchen. It may be out of print, but as always, check your library or dive into the easy access realm of used books online.
Remember how I enthused about Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen? Well, I got to interview her for Civil Eats! Please take a look.
A new anthology by Old Iron Press, Playing Authors, comes out at the end of the month, and I have an essay in it! This piece is a version of what will be a chapter in my next book. This is a small print run, so if you are interested, please pre-order a copy.
The reason I mention this is because the title of his book, Baking in America, always reminds me of one of the most amazing two volume set of books published in the late 50's on baking history in the US. Entitled, Baking in America, they are the most extensive and incisive history of bread, bread baking and bakeries in America I had ever seen. Not sure it's ever been outdone. The books also well referenced with sources I had never heard of it took me almost a decade to go through them all.
From his book, Montana Cooking, which references some of the works he used for Baking in America (readily available on Amazon and many used book stores in digital or printed forms). EBay has it for 3 or 4 dollars. "Greg Patent is a food writer and cookbook author whose most recent cookbook, A Baker’s Odyssey: Celebrating Time-Honored Recipes from America’s Rich Immigrant Heritage, which includes a companion DVD, was published in December 2007, by John Wiley & Sons. His previous cookbook, Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years (Houghton Mifflin), won the 2003 James Beard Award for Best Baking Book of the Year and the World Gourmand Cookbook Award for Best Baking Book in the English Language. He is also the author of A Is for Apple, co-authored with his wife, Dorothy (Broadway Books, 1999), and numerous other cookbooks."