It’s another Tuesday night. I’ve made a decent amount of bread today, there’s a dried dough bit stuck somewhere behind my elbow as usual and a weird twinge in my back under a shoulder blade. It’s been a over a decade of using my human form as a piece of bakery equipment and the wear and tear is deeply felt. Hours standing, hefting a peel holding 15 pounds of loaves in and out of 6 shelves of hot oven, making repetitive shapes with hands and fingers, carrying 50 pound bags of flour and grain, lifting tubs full of kilos and kilos of dough. Cutting, folding, shaping, placing on boards and lifting boards of kilo sized dough balls into a rack configuring 64 loaves at a time, moving in a little circle around a room while watching the light change through the windows. Morning folk tunes feather into afternoon Motown and then slip into evening jazz. Hands move through soap bubble dishwater, sweeping motions, and knife-work for meals in between. A life lived in a never ending flow dance of handwork to a background melody.
I occasional marvel at what a human can do, spurred on only by an engine of hope perhaps and cyclical dreaming. What I know in my body, a computer can never truly understand. When I stand in the middle of the bakery I can feel the atmospheric pressure, a coming storm or cloud in my very bones. When I place my hand under the tap, my years of experience tells me what temperature it is, I can visually assess that a dough needs more water, that the flour is not milled quite as fine, that fermentation is skipping along quickly, or that a thousand other minor sensory inputs vary by slightest degrees. I can even generate my own electricity. I feed myself an omelet, bowl of oats or piece of toast, and turn it into the labor that creates so much more food. I don’t even pollute the earth very much, turning a cup of tea into a bit of sweat equity. For about $2 of breakfast, I can get a lot of work out of me. I can even generate new thoughts and ideas while I scrub dishes and whistle. How special a machine must be to do all of that. Somewhere between strength and tenderness there is a middle road for how to handle a dough and shape a loaf, and a way to make a life outside of the machinery of greed. In between there is time to joke around with a child, listen to a dream, read a poem.
I have seen the factories that make most modern bread, dough mixed, cut, shaped, balled and baked by machines, slipped into plastic, packed onto trucks and driven so many miles. The amount of electricity, exploitation, cheap commodity additives, plastics, and carbon emissions it takes to get you this staple food are enormous. Is this preferable to a human in your neighborhood (in my dreams, in every neighborhood) making a simple 200-400 loaves a week and handing them over warm wrapped in compostable paper? No machine yet can turn two eggs and a slice of toast into the manifestation of maternal love, community spirit, and simple human contentment.
Just as factory farming and factory food has been disastrous for health and humanity, the factory farming of data is the next great idea to replace human work, ingenuity, dreaming, and magic with another ecological nightmare.
Don’t eat factory food. Don’t settle for factory farmed art, writing and ideas. Make your own out dreams of a better world out of toast and tea. Thanks for supporting local sourdough bread made the old fashioned way, by a person you know in your town.
-Bonnie