“Scott Cutler Shershow’s Bread, the newest entry from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, maintains this connection between food and work, insisting that the meaning of bread not be separated from questions of labor.”
“For Shershow, bread is everywhere because it is a miracle, and miraculous because it is everywhere.”
“To know bread, he argues, one must work with it. Learning to bake teaches the baker just how much is beyond his control.”
“First, yeast digests the sugars stored in the flour, producing carbon dioxide. Then, strands of the protein gluten emerge to catch these bubbles, giving the bread its shape. At this stage, variables such as time and temperature matter far more than the hands of the baker.
The miracle of bread’s rising, then, has to do with its ability to trap and contain that which develops inside.”
“This goes for its chemistry as well as its semiotics.”
“Shershow writes:
As a metaphor, bread has more meanings than one can count, meanings that both multiply and fade over its long history. Especially in the realms of ritual and religion, the myriad figural and metaphoric meanings of bread proliferate so readily and in so many directions as to make it a kind of master signifier, a figure of figurality.”
“Bread has grown so replete with meaning that it threatens to burst, or as a baker might say, overproof.”
“One question Shershow’s slim book neglects to adequately address is why artisan bread now. Fancy bread is popular today, in part because the builders of today’s pyramids — creative-types who spend their days in coffices and the cloud — desire food with provenance.”
“The time investment and training required to make artisan loaves, in turn, promise a sense of authenticity lacking in their work lives. In response, a spate of bread cookbooks has hit the market. In the contemporary creative economy, bread offers meaning itself.”
“The precarious position that so much creative work requires makes any tangible success that much more rewarding. Whereas the work of software engineers purportedly solves problems, poiesis can make no such direct claim. Baking one’s own bread offers creative workers one way to fill that gap.”
“But tradition means more than just authenticity for Robertson; it also means good health. He contends that naturally fermented breads (commonly known as sourdough, meaning any loaf fermented without the benefit of commercially derived yeast) offer the eater benefits of good digestion, and perhaps, even, an antidote to gluten intolerance. Robertson develops this argument in his Tartine Book No. 3, a book dedicated to ancient and whole grains.”
“Excavating traditional techniques encourages, the home baker, as he puts it, to “rejoin our nascent age of invention.” And this invitation to remake tradition in the form of tangible, edible products sounds quite appealing to the writer toiling away at his prose.”
“Robertson’s promise has inspired many kinds of disciples. His friend and protégé, Ken Forkish, stands as the only real competitor to Robertson’s celebrity. Forkish’s Portland bakery (the aptly named Ken’s Artisan Bakery) and his best-selling book (Flour Water Salt Yeast [2012]) have made him a food celebrity in his own right, even though Shershow does not cite his work in Bread.”
“we should applaud Forkish for being so forthcoming: these clear-eyed descriptions of the toil of labor, rather than the whimsy of craft, give the reader a better sense of the real life and times of an artisan baker.”
“Despite the awful hours, though, there is something inescapably romantic about getting up early to tend an oven, especially if you are used to getting up early just to beat the traffic.”
“What books like Tartine and Flour Water Salt Yeast offer the amateur baker, then, is the promise of standing outside the dull world of work — craft instead of customer service. Many of Kobek’s “affluent youth,” have unstructured time to dedicate to learning the technique. Baking produces its own reward. And you get to eat it, too.”
“While Shershow’s only mention of new artisan cookbooks comes in a footnote in Bread, elsewhere in his book, he offers the reader a complex and accurate depiction of their blind spots.”
“He explains:
Unless I am also planning to set up as a farmer and a miller, I will always remain — precisely as a baker — multiply dependent on other people and a complexly organized society […] It has also made me conscious of being part of a certain “history” insofar as today’s so-called artisanal breads are the ultimate example of what famed Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne calls “retro-innovation”: the rediscovery and redeployment on a “quasi-industrial scale” of preindustrial techniques of production.”
“Shershow here notices the contradiction of “doing-it-himself” in a society that runs off the division of labor.”
“These books appeal to creative workers precisely because they accentuate the same imperatives as creative economies: (retro)innovation, self-reliance, loosely structured time, the honesty of handcraft, and the limitless frontier of individual creativity.”
“If bread is a kind of art, this fact might explain why Shershow’s Bread treats its object much like a critical theorist does language, as a human invention that exceeds human control, and why the skillset offered by these cookbooks appeals to creative workers in the arts and high-tech industries alike.”
“Shershow concludes:
Perhaps this is why bread, as object or idea, is so often experienced as somehow sacred or magical or miraculous: because we simply cannot help but taste in it, day by day by day, the explosive promise of the plural, the exhilarating undecidability of more.”
“Replace “bread” with “capital” and “taste” with “sense,” and this passage could have been just as easily written by David Harvey, or maybe Marx himself.”
“The meaning of bread is still nascent, requiring human intervention, but not beholden to it. Bread means more than any one book can say, but it is often produced in response to less.”
“More time to bake means less structured work time. On the American scene, this freedom often comes at the expense of all of those things that sustain us beyond bread alone — job security, reliable health care, pride in one’s work, a meaningful life.”
“Many like myself who were called to vocations that promised meaningful work are drawn to bread because it offers the chance to create free from the burdens of mastery and exchange.”
“All creativity invites risk, but even an ugly loaf is still edible. While baking bread, the day is one’s own, even if the baker needs to check his work email while the oven preheats.”
“David Haeselin is a lecturer in the English Department of The University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota.”