Читать книгу Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own - Andrew Whitley - Страница 32

When we choose a loaf of bread, we are not simply choosing a shape, a flavour or even the method that was used to make it. We can also choose how its basic ingredient is grown. We can opt for bread made with organic flour, milled from wheat grown in soil kept fertile by compost, crop rotation and green manures in a system that minimises the use of synthetic chemical biocides. Or we can choose flour from conventional wheat production, which uses energy-intensive chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides to maximise grain yield and milling quality.

I grew up in a village with a ‘glebe’ – a piece of land adjacent to the church, which was originally part of the vicar’s benefice. The word comes from the Latin gleba or glceba, meaning earth or soil. From this comes the old English hlaf, or loaf. The Russian for bread is khlyeb. Old German was laib. And so on – because bread comes from the soil, is of the soil. The fertility of the glebe gives rise to grain, the staging post between soil and bread. Bread’s roots are in the soil.

In bread we gain access to the vitality of the seed, a vitality that surely extends beyond mere bodily function to include what George Stapledon called ‘its ability to enliven’¹⁴. For this and other reasons, it seems to me that the quality of our food, and therefore of our life, is inextricably linked with the condition of the few inches of ‘the delicate organism known as soil’, beneath which ‘is a planet as lifeless as the moon’ (as Jacks and Whyte put it in their 1939 book, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion). In the words of Robert McCarrison, whose comparative research into the diets of the Hunzas in Northwest India and the urban poor of Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s helped establish the link between food, soil and health: ‘[Natural foods], when properly combined in the diet, supply all the food essentials, known and unknown, discovered and undiscovered, needed for normal nutrition, provided they are produced on soil which is not impoverished, for if they be proceeds of impoverished soil, their quality will be poor and the health of those who eat them, man and his domestic animals, will suffer accordingly.’¹⁵

Thanks to advances in molecular biology and genetics, we know that the expression of genes in wheat differs markedly depending on whether the grain has been grown organically or with synthetic nitrogen fertiliser¹⁶. Further research may tell us whether organic flour is more or less palatable than non-organic, particularly in relation to the gliadin proteins that are responsible for wheat allergy and intolerance.

To my way of thinking, there is a deep sympathy between organic agriculture and slow breadmaking. In both, the natural world is not an enemy, to be bludgeoned into submission by an arsenal of chemical weaponry. It is, rather, one element in a web of life that sustains us all. The prudent farmer seeks to understand natural processes and to work with them, appreciating that the world we inhabit tends in the long run to reward perseverance and restraint and to punish exploitation and shortcuts. In organic agriculture the transmission of nutrients – of life – depends on the creation and maintenance of the right conditions in which millions of tiny unseen agents (bacteria, fungi and protozoa) can work most effectively. It is a project requiring patience, observation, humility and some compromise between productivity and permanence. By comparison, the chemical model of fertility has all the subtlety of an intravenous injection: a small number of active ingredients, chosen for their immediate effectiveness, are delivered by the most direct route to the heart of the organism. The equivalent in baking is to rely on additives rather than time to produce the changes in dough that make it fit to eat.

The scientific and agricultural establishments have tried hard to play down any evidence of the superior quality of organic food. Such evidence is not plentiful, largely because not many people are gathering it: less than 2 per cent of the UK’s agricultural research and development budget in 2000 was allocated to organics. But a review of all the available and valid research conducted by the Soil Association in 2001 did conclude that ‘eating organically grown food is likely to improve one’s intake of minerals, vitamin C and antioxidant secondary nutrients while reducing exposure to potentially harmful pesticide residues, nitrates, GMOs and artificial additives used in food processing.’¹⁷ Earlier I cited evidence that a combination of organic growing and stone milling significantly increases the available minerals in bread flour and that modern plant breeding has produced varieties that are poorer in certain nutrients than their forebears.

The work of gathering such evidence is painstaking and important. But it does seem to me that for an individual to put off any action on the source of his or her food ingredients until some sort of ‘conclusive’ proof is available is, in fact, deeply irrational. If the notion that healthy soil gives rise to healthy plants (and therefore animals and people) is so threatening to today’s orthodoxy, try turning it on its head: would you expect the kind of depleted, unhealthy soil more typical of intensive agriculture to produce healthy food? If not, then it is simply good sense to seek to produce the healthiest soil possible and to choose food that has grown in it.

For me, it is a matter not of mysticism but of observation that wholeness (which is the precursor, through its ancient variant wholth, of our word health) is the outcome of a process in which many elements interact in complicated and changing patterns. It demonstrably consists of more than the sum of its constituent parts and is diminished by separation, rupture or reduction. Health is not a static condition, but one that requires us to engage intelligently with our surroundings, enlarging our understanding by patient observation and experiment. Collaboration, coexistence, sufficiency – these are the watchwords; not exploitation, domination, maximisation.

The kind of breadmaking that I advocate is in harmony with this ‘organic’ approach – not just in the provenance of the raw materials but in expecting the healthiest outcome from processes in which we temper technological enthusiasm with a little humility.