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This blog is a strange mix of things that I happen across that make me think about the nature of making real bread and why it brings me so much pleasure to make and share the bread with others. Sometimes I’ll post about my process and experiments and other times about things that are a little more philosophical. This is a more philosophical one.
Guy Claxton’s book Intelligence in the Flesh Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks is right at the heart of my day job as a dance artist and scholar. But in the quote below he is talking about the work of Sociologist Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character:
Sociologist Richard Sennett has studied the changing fortunes of a bakery in Boston. Back in the 1970s the work was hard, you had to get up early, people got burnt, but there was a sense of communal pride in a delicious, beautiful batch of focaccia. There was craft: the flour varied in texture, so an experienced baker, feeling the flour in his hands, would make an adjustment to the amount of oil added or to the baking time. By the late 1990s, there were a lot of part-time workers who hardly knew each other, and computer-controlled machines that just had to be fed bags of ‘croissant mix’ when the appropriate icon blinked. The environment is safer now, but it is craftsman-hostile, because human craft is neither needed nor possible, and so no pride ensues. All the intelligence has been appropriated by a machine. But if the machine breaks down, there is hardly anyone left who actually knows how to make bread. One old Italian man said to Sennett: ‘I go home, I really bake bread: I’m a baker. Here? I just push buttons.’ As Sennett’s work powerfully attests, this loss of pride in craft knowledge, and of a satisfying sense of belonging to a skilled community, is a personal tragedy, but it is also, writ large, a social, even a global issue.
This craft knowledge that Claxton (and Sennett) are describing sums up why I make bread from flour, salt and water: I’m a baker and I really bake bread. It has nothing to do with pushing buttons and automation.
