Speaker 1: Perooka, no ingredients, nod la limento. My name is Martina Es.
Speaker 1: I'm from Aca, which is a town that is located
Speaker 1: in the lower Mixed Tea means land of the Cochineal,
Speaker 1: not just gland, is the main entrance to the mixed Teca.
Speaker 1: I personally define myself as a person with values, with principles,
Speaker 1: and with a great faith. I value my roots and
Speaker 1: my culture very much. That is why I have always
Speaker 1: liked to rescue and value all the customs and traditions
Speaker 1: of my ancest No no no pan mass mass, notritio,
Speaker 1: no pancor the no pane problem lost Celia. I opened
Speaker 1: my bakery in March. Originally, my idea was not to
Speaker 1: open a bakery, but another type of business where I
Speaker 1: could provide good sources of nutrition to people. But my
Speaker 1: mother is from a nearby community called There is a
Speaker 1: bakery that was closed for many years, So I said, okay,
Speaker 1: why not ask the community to give me that bakery
Speaker 1: and start using it. The community agreed, so I started
Speaker 1: working in the bakery. But I wanted to offer something different,
Speaker 1: ingredients that are healthier because here in our communities the
Speaker 1: daily food is bread. So I said, why not offer
Speaker 1: a more nutritious bread. Not a bread that makes you fat,
Speaker 1: not a bread that gives you problems to those who
Speaker 1: are Celiac, not a bread that produces obesity, but a
Speaker 1: different bread, a bread with high nutritional value, and a
Speaker 1: bread that I could take ingredients from my locality. My
Speaker 1: favorite item is the cons because then the bakery conchs
Speaker 1: can never not be on the menu. There are different sizes,
Speaker 1: big ones, small ones, different flavors, different colors, and why
Speaker 1: not offer some delicious amaranth concs right that would have
Speaker 1: a high nutritional value Above all, something very important that
Speaker 1: I want to teach to my community. As I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: tat well tat healthy tape products are breads with natural ingredients.
Speaker 1: Why not use recipes that are from our community? There
Speaker 1: are local that are organic. That way we can support
Speaker 1: our local conduct that welcome back to point of origin.
Speaker 1: On today's episode, we're talking about a global movement of
Speaker 1: whole grains and that intro you just heard was Martina
Speaker 1: Julietta Castellanos Lopez and her daughter Carmen Reyes from Rincome
Speaker 1: de la Granda Bakery and Wahaca, Mexico. Bread is the
Speaker 1: most widely consumed food in the world. Not only has
Speaker 1: it provided nutritional sustenance for international communities well over the millennia.
Speaker 1: In many ways it represents the center of culinary and
Speaker 1: communal life. But over time the contents of the bread
Speaker 1: we eat has been wildly disconnected from the wheat and
Speaker 1: grains of our ancestors. Today we're looking at why that is,
Speaker 1: how it came to be and the agrarian shift that
Speaker 1: has ensued. We're chatting with journalists and grain researcher plus
Speaker 1: amateur baker Simon Tebow in Halifax, Canada. Then we go
Speaker 1: to southern Italy to Puglia where Leo Petrucelli is reviving
Speaker 1: his grandparents farm using ancient grains, and finally in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. We chat with Jonathan Bethany, baker and owner
Speaker 1: of Saylu Bakery, who uses grains like millet and sorghum
Speaker 1: on his menu. Today's guests are focusing on recentering whole
Speaker 1: wheat and ancient grains in their natural form and moving
Speaker 1: beyond the standardized, the prepackaged, and the painfully uniform industrial grains.
Speaker 1: Today on point of origin, we're going beyond the wheat
Speaker 1: types of grains that you can be milled and be
Speaker 1: used in baking. I mean you have everything from buck
Speaker 1: wheat too emmer to ride. Um. My name is Simon Tebow.
Speaker 1: I am a journalist and food writer and author and editor.
Speaker 1: I'm based out of Halifax, Nova Scrocer, Canada, and grains
Speaker 1: have become the rabbit hole of my life over the
Speaker 1: past two and a half years. You have spring wheats
Speaker 1: and winter wheats. You have red wheats and white beats.
Speaker 1: I am friends with a Canadian food writer name named
Speaker 1: me do Good, and she said, you need to come
Speaker 1: and meet Dawn. And I had heard of Dawn the baker.
Speaker 1: So I go and I see this table and there's
Speaker 1: Dawn with her daughter, Evelyn. The name of the company's
Speaker 1: Evelyn's Crackers. And I'm just standing there and there's like
Speaker 1: stuff that you expect to see at anybody's table, you know,
Speaker 1: like there's pastries and pie and breads and like the usual,
Speaker 1: like uh, loaves of rye and loves of a few
Speaker 1: of the things. I'm like, okay, sure, uh. And then
Speaker 1: I decided to try um one of our brownies. So
Speaker 1: brownie is pretty like nondescript, their lovely things to have
Speaker 1: on occasion and Uh, this was a buck wheat flower
Speaker 1: Cardiman brownie. But at that initial moment when I bought it,
Speaker 1: I was buying it to be polite. At the time,
Speaker 1: would have considered myself a competent home baker, like I
Speaker 1: would have been the guy like I had made my
Speaker 1: sour doughs. But everything was all white flower all the time,
Speaker 1: and the triumes. I tried to make anything with whole
Speaker 1: grains flower or whole wheat flowers, it never turned out right,
Speaker 1: and it was just this weird thing. I'm like, this
Speaker 1: is not worth my time. And then I've been into
Speaker 1: this thing and I was like I just kind of
Speaker 1: went and it was this delirious kind of thing. And uh,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't just like, okay, cardimon and pocolate are
Speaker 1: amazing first of all, but I mean beyond that, the
Speaker 1: texture of this. It was like, what is this texture?
Speaker 1: And because it was soft and pillowy, most of us
Speaker 1: in North America, when we think of whole grains, we
Speaker 1: think of things. We hear those words, and we think dents,
Speaker 1: we think unpalatable, we think the loaf of bread that
Speaker 1: can be used as a doorstop, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And this was none of those things. This was luxuriant,
Speaker 1: this was beautiful. The journalist in me and the writer
Speaker 1: in me went wait a minute, like, how did she
Speaker 1: do this? How did she do this? What is necessary
Speaker 1: to get to this point where the preconceived notion we
Speaker 1: have of what whole grain baking can be versus this
Speaker 1: platonic ideal which is achievable? What is that? And it
Speaker 1: just started from there and from there I have been
Speaker 1: starting research on this for two two and a half
Speaker 1: years now and uh, I have gone across North America
Speaker 1: for the first time in my life. I went to
Speaker 1: California to meet with a miller in Pasadena named named Kohler.
Speaker 1: She runs gristin Toll, which is wonderful urban mill. I
Speaker 1: went up to Washington State to Washington State's campus in
Speaker 1: Burlington where they have the Bread Lab where Dr Steven
Speaker 1: Jones is doing all kinds of work. Over there, I
Speaker 1: went to Montreal to another grain conference to hear from
Speaker 1: women and men from around the world talking about grains,
Speaker 1: and the further I dig into it, the further I
Speaker 1: keep seeing how grains are emblematic of every single thing
Speaker 1: that has happened in food production over the past two
Speaker 1: to three years, and the huge amount of erature that
Speaker 1: has happened in terms of ecological, economic, cultural, and culinary
Speaker 1: advantages and disadvantages that we now experience. As eis. So,
Speaker 1: what you're saying is because of the ways in which
Speaker 1: the food system has been industrialized that I guess flower
Speaker 1: is a severe example of how we've lost touch with
Speaker 1: our food. With apples, for instance, we can name multiple varieties,
Speaker 1: or we can name multiple varieties of vegetables, and yet
Speaker 1: we can't do that with wheat. So and this hyper
Speaker 1: processing of weed, not only are we losing nutritional value,
Speaker 1: but we're also losing, as you pointed out, the cultural
Speaker 1: value and the loss of that knowledge. Well, let me
Speaker 1: give you a preaking pretty easy scenario. You're going to
Speaker 1: go into a grocery store and you're gonna go and
Speaker 1: buy flower. Okay, that's you will find all purpose white flower.
Speaker 1: Bleached or unbleached, doesn't matter. In this scenario. You're gonna
Speaker 1: take that flower home. You have a general before you
Speaker 1: even buy it. You have an estimation of how much
Speaker 1: this is going to cost you. You have an estimation
Speaker 1: of how long it's gonna last your household. You have
Speaker 1: an estimation of how it's going to behave, how it's
Speaker 1: going to taste all of these things? How do we
Speaker 1: get here? How did we take what is a living
Speaker 1: thing the same with it apples and like other things
Speaker 1: that we grow in the ground, or even like varietals
Speaker 1: of animals that we raise for food production. How did
Speaker 1: we get to this uniformity of experience that anybody can
Speaker 1: take this and use it and know what to expect
Speaker 1: and have a sense of what is what it's worth
Speaker 1: to them in terms of time and money and effort.
Speaker 1: And who gets to gauge what that is worth? Who
Speaker 1: gets to gauge all of those things? And that was
Speaker 1: the thing that kind of made me go, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: like what is this? And the thing is that that
Speaker 1: system that makes that happen, that creates that ubiquity, this
Speaker 1: homogeneity within baking and within access to food and all
Speaker 1: of the things that brings it to play, everything from
Speaker 1: food security, which we experienced no matter who you are
Speaker 1: in North America or even like throughout most of western
Speaker 1: Europe when COVID hit, baking shelves were decimated and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, like and I kept on having conversations
Speaker 1: with people who were stalking the shelves and they're saying
Speaker 1: people are trying to understand now, like how food distribution works.
Speaker 1: And I mean from from a certain perspective, the whole
Speaker 1: thing of like that flower, you know it's gonna last
Speaker 1: a year roughly speaking, like it's baking qualities will not
Speaker 1: be impacted in the first year of that thing being
Speaker 1: out there, so you know, you've got a good amount
Speaker 1: of time. But that was this kind of like someone's
Speaker 1: rattling the cage of the food system right now, and
Speaker 1: it's a disease. And why because you don't know where
Speaker 1: that was milled. You don't know how long that's been
Speaker 1: on that shelf, You don't know hong, that wasn't the truck,
Speaker 1: You don't know how long that wasn't a in a
Speaker 1: storage facility. We wheat and grains are the most whitewashed,
Speaker 1: arguably one of the most whitewashed foods out there when
Speaker 1: it comes to understanding the procedures necessary to feed us
Speaker 1: as human beings and s s society. I guess the
Speaker 1: more crass and cynical part of me feels like we
Speaker 1: shouldn't really be surprised that industrial food producers are more
Speaker 1: willing to discard the parts of the grain or the
Speaker 1: wheat that are more expensive to produce, because obviously these
Speaker 1: companies are purely driven by profitability. So how can we
Speaker 1: make people understand the urgency of really thinking more critically
Speaker 1: about this and maybe even acting in opposition to this
Speaker 1: system when, for instance, we don't really even know where
Speaker 1: to buy these flowers. We can't buy these flowers at
Speaker 1: the grocery store. So what are we as consumers supposed
Speaker 1: to do? It becomes this question of who gains access
Speaker 1: not just to the ingredient, but who gains access to
Speaker 1: the money that plays into this two More importantly, I
Speaker 1: would say, the information that is necessary to use these
Speaker 1: products to the best degree possible. And when I say best,
Speaker 1: I don't mean just in baking at home. I meaning
Speaker 1: questions of social equity and inclusion and an understanding of
Speaker 1: the culinary and cultural background that are intrinsically linked to
Speaker 1: not only bringing these grains into North America, but also
Speaker 1: into how to use them and how those things fed
Speaker 1: generations of people. And now we are at a point
Speaker 1: where that information is nearly erased, and we cannot deny
Speaker 1: that the proliferation of especially in a country like Canada
Speaker 1: where I live, The proliferation of this uniformity and this
Speaker 1: homogeneity in terms of distribution and the flavor, or rather
Speaker 1: the distribution of no flavor, also brought about a greater
Speaker 1: amount of food security, because grain is a living thing.
Speaker 1: I have um grains in my cupboard that i've been there,
Speaker 1: that I bought in California that are two years old,
Speaker 1: and I have yet to mill them. They're fine. The
Speaker 1: second I mill them, they start to turn rancid, So
Speaker 1: I have six months to use that flower. That whole
Speaker 1: rancidity is basically what most of us believe that whole
Speaker 1: grains and whole grain flowers taste of, and that's what
Speaker 1: we're accustomed to. And so the removal of that creates
Speaker 1: an ease and a facility that allowed generations of individuals
Speaker 1: to be able to bake at home in an affordable way.
Speaker 1: And we cannot deny that in the same way that
Speaker 1: like um, you can't deny that UM. The progressions of
Speaker 1: canning food, of frozen foods, the development of supermarkets, all
Speaker 1: of these things emancipated people who cooked. And we're talking
Speaker 1: mostly about women here, oftentimes woman of color, and especially
Speaker 1: in the Southern United States in certain parts where grains
Speaker 1: are even more part of it that this emancipation and
Speaker 1: this ease fostered huge changes in how we view um
Speaker 1: the work necessary to create these things, whether it be
Speaker 1: baked goods or like making a roue in Louisiana, or
Speaker 1: if we're making biscuits. I am not anti white flower.
Speaker 1: I've been baking for the past two to three years
Speaker 1: with whole green flowers, and I had a huge learning curve,
Speaker 1: and I still bake with white flower and occasion, depending
Speaker 1: on what I'm making. Having said that, there are also
Speaker 1: other benefits, especially in a place like Canada and where
Speaker 1: there are things such as the Wheat Board of Canada,
Speaker 1: which is a government body which helps ensure a arguably
Speaker 1: equitable or fair pricing system for grain, which is a commodity.
Speaker 1: So let's say you are a person of enough means
Speaker 1: to pay um, let's say seven or eight dollars for
Speaker 1: a kilogram of buck wheat flour or ten dollars for
Speaker 1: a kilogram of locally milled and grown corneal arguments. Say
Speaker 1: you're able to do that, You're gonna take that home?
Speaker 1: What are you gonna do with it? Do you know
Speaker 1: what to do with that? You don't we have because
Speaker 1: we don't have to anymore. We have lost. But that's
Speaker 1: the loss and that that we have experienced as eaters.
Speaker 1: And I think that we have been robbed of this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I really do, and I think it's unfortunate.
Speaker 1: And I think we can have all the best of
Speaker 1: intentions and when it comes to the ecology and when
Speaker 1: it comes to the economics and the ethics of these things,
Speaker 1: but in the end, if we don't know how to
Speaker 1: use the product, we're s O. L. Simon makes several
Speaker 1: critical points here. One is the erasure of knowledge surrounding grains.
Speaker 1: Whole wheat is actually flavorful and adds a depth and
Speaker 1: complexity too recipes, but we've pejoratively associated it as an
Speaker 1: unappealing healthful or as a bread with a brick like texture,
Speaker 1: which raises the question, once we've bought our grains, how
Speaker 1: do we know what to do with it? And how
Speaker 1: do we know what to bake? And I think that
Speaker 1: baking at home specifically is a one of the most
Speaker 1: tentative and doable answers to understanding and using and respecting
Speaker 1: the work that goes into agriculture, the work that goes
Speaker 1: into milling and the work that goes into providing food
Speaker 1: for people. Because baking at home is where most of
Speaker 1: us can learn how to use it. You can eat
Speaker 1: something from a professional baker and appreciate the work that
Speaker 1: goes into it because you're experiencing flavor. You're experiencing texture
Speaker 1: in a context you never perhaps understood or new. You
Speaker 1: could be even experiencing both of those things in completely
Speaker 1: new ways and in completely new cultural context Um, you're
Speaker 1: eating rye in a Scandinavie in uh, either a dry
Speaker 1: like cracker style bread or something super dense and moist,
Speaker 1: or you're experiencing buckwheat in a croissant. All of a
Speaker 1: sudden you're like, how did they do this? But more
Speaker 1: than anything where it's still about consumption and consumerism in
Speaker 1: that true way, not just consumption of eating but consumption
Speaker 1: of product. But that is the gateway to getting into
Speaker 1: understanding what is possible. Professionals can show you what is possible,
Speaker 1: but you at home, we're the ones who buy the
Speaker 1: flour and bake things at home for ourselves out of
Speaker 1: joy or out of necessity, and to be able to
Speaker 1: gain access to that. But let me to get back
Speaker 1: to that is the thing of like, how do we
Speaker 1: I think home bakers are the are the real way
Speaker 1: to get to this because home baker is the one
Speaker 1: who spends the money to feed themselves. The home baker
Speaker 1: is the one who's going to do the work and
Speaker 1: see the value in the work. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: the esoteric idea of work of what brought that to
Speaker 1: their table, the work of putting their hands in flour
Speaker 1: and playing with water and fats and flavors, and in
Speaker 1: doing that there is a greater appreciation and a greater
Speaker 1: um sense of satisfaction and being able to figure something
Speaker 1: out that you've never figured out before, even if it's
Speaker 1: something as simple as how much fat or how much
Speaker 1: water or how much sugar or whatever I need to
Speaker 1: add to this to make it taste the best possible way,
Speaker 1: so that I am being respectful of my time and
Speaker 1: at the time of everybody else down this food chain.
Speaker 1: Anytime we're disrupting or derailing the corporate food system, I
Speaker 1: think we're on the right track. So I'm with you there,
Speaker 1: But can you help us understand on a primary level,
Speaker 1: when wheat is grown industrially, what is that process like
Speaker 1: from grain to consumer? And can you just walk us
Speaker 1: down the two distinct journeys from industrial grain into the
Speaker 1: final value added product like flour or bread. So to
Speaker 1: do the t L d R version of great agriculture
Speaker 1: in North America, basically after the war, after World War two,
Speaker 1: agriculture change in North America in which we had a
Speaker 1: lot of people to feed, and we wanted to feed them,
Speaker 1: and we want to feed them in a way that
Speaker 1: again liberated workers to a certain degree to be able
Speaker 1: to make more money or to work a little bit
Speaker 1: less or what do we need? We well, we're going
Speaker 1: to put things into the ground. We're going to put
Speaker 1: um petro chemicals into the ground. And then now especially
Speaker 1: we're putting pesticides into the ground. Whether you agree with
Speaker 1: the use of those things or not, that's fine, that's
Speaker 1: not what I'm interested in. What I'm interested is what happens.
Speaker 1: And so for a farmer, let's talk about the both
Speaker 1: the agriculture and the economics at once. For a farmer
Speaker 1: to be able to make money, to grow grain, they
Speaker 1: have to plant lots of it. The question of scale
Speaker 1: and the maintenance of that scale is incredibly difficult and
Speaker 1: incredibly high. Why because you have to grow it or
Speaker 1: raise it or rear it in a certain way, and
Speaker 1: that's a big way. And to do that well, then
Speaker 1: you have a huge amount of land. Land is expensive,
Speaker 1: gas is expensive to run the tractor or the mill
Speaker 1: or whatever else you're going through all of this, and
Speaker 1: so that means that the inputs that go into your land.
Speaker 1: And when I say input, I mean time, I mean petrochemicals,
Speaker 1: I mean water, I mean whatever else is necessary to
Speaker 1: do this often denigrates and ruins the soil in and
Speaker 1: of itself. We are now at a point where the
Speaker 1: amount of soil that is used to grow our food,
Speaker 1: the top soil for that, is being destroyed. What's also
Speaker 1: being distorted the communities in which that these grains are
Speaker 1: being grown. And what was it that changed that necessitated
Speaker 1: those higher volumes of wheat production. Was it a growing
Speaker 1: demand from the government from the consumer or was it
Speaker 1: just because we had to fill grocery store shelves. Money
Speaker 1: necessitates volume, more money, more volume, more grain, more bread
Speaker 1: on the shelves, more people eating grain. In whatever way
Speaker 1: possible that we can. Where can I insert Like people
Speaker 1: always talk about corn being inserted everywhere. If you were
Speaker 1: someone who's glued, intolerant, or Celiac and you look for
Speaker 1: something that doesn't have grain in it, you're doing a
Speaker 1: lot of work um And also also because grain is
Speaker 1: a commodity, therefore it is traded in economic ways, and
Speaker 1: so for all of these things link into it. And
Speaker 1: yet the dividends are mostly economic and the losses are
Speaker 1: agricultural and um cultural as well in terms of how
Speaker 1: to grow these things, because we have become so used
Speaker 1: to growing things in this very specif of big way
Speaker 1: that we're constantly losing the information that could have been
Speaker 1: brought there. I don't know if it's the answer, but
Speaker 1: an answer that is constantly coming up within grains is
Speaker 1: a very grassroots kind of look towards greens. And I
Speaker 1: will be completely honest and say I don't know what
Speaker 1: is the right way yet. In Canada, for example, there's
Speaker 1: actually an organization, this really great group in Vancouver called
Speaker 1: Flowerist and what it is is they are the daughters
Speaker 1: of grain farmers, are of the daughters of people who
Speaker 1: grew up in grain regions, and they're like, we really
Speaker 1: want to highlight the work that these people are doing.
Speaker 1: And so they found specific farmers who are growing grain
Speaker 1: in very specific ways that are agriculturally sound and ecologically sound.
Speaker 1: They buy that grain whole, they send it the ship
Speaker 1: to Vancouver, and you, as a consumer can buy that flower,
Speaker 1: have an idea of where that came from, and have
Speaker 1: it shipped to you anywhere in North America. So is
Speaker 1: that the way to do it? I don't not entirely
Speaker 1: pretty sure, because that helps one farmer and it has
Speaker 1: the same It has the ethical Footbritain that I wanted
Speaker 1: to have or the but it doesn't necessarily always have
Speaker 1: the ecological one because shipping things cost money. And so
Speaker 1: it's a question of personal because all of this all
Speaker 1: comes back again to personal responsibility. And that's the thing
Speaker 1: with the small scale allows you to see it is
Speaker 1: your personal responsibility, while large scale it removes your responsibility
Speaker 1: from all of this. But also in terms of like
Speaker 1: um that small scale in the grassroot thing that also
Speaker 1: happens within all of this have been conferences popping up
Speaker 1: across North American and even across the world. Um. Like
Speaker 1: I said, there was the needing conference which happens in Maine,
Speaker 1: and there is the grain gathering which happens in Washington State.
Speaker 1: And then there is also um or a taste for
Speaker 1: grain in Montreal, and there are grain conferences happening in
Speaker 1: UH the UK, and people are looking all over North America,
Speaker 1: from small scale to large scale, into like what can
Speaker 1: we do to ensure that our food security is safe,
Speaker 1: but that we're still able to have a food experience
Speaker 1: that is worth our time from all points of view,
Speaker 1: from flavor to agriculture. I love to eat grain, cards
Speaker 1: all that stuff, but my body hated it. Um. It
Speaker 1: wasn't until I came to Europe and I started. I
Speaker 1: was in France and it was eating bread there, and
Speaker 1: then I came to Leo's farm and I was introduced
Speaker 1: to ancient grains. It wasn't so much the grain and
Speaker 1: the flower. It was as it is I think the
Speaker 1: quality of the grains that we eat nowadays, and it
Speaker 1: basically change my whole world. That's writer Mauricia Tiller talking
Speaker 1: about Leonardo Petrocelli from Zeletta de Brancia, a farm in Puglia, Italy.
Speaker 1: She came to me and she was not eating grain,
Speaker 1: past and so on, but you have to eat this stuff.
Speaker 1: Then she starts little bit, little bit, and then and
Speaker 1: now she and she don't feel enough. And yeah, Leo
Speaker 1: is a multi generational grain farmer, having received a master's
Speaker 1: degree in ecological farming. On his farm, he cultivates harvests
Speaker 1: and cells ancient grains like capelli, frasianetto, risciola, saragola, faro, monacoco, segalle,
Speaker 1: jumana or zomondo and majorca. While reviving these grains on
Speaker 1: his grandparents farms sounds romantic, this is by no means
Speaker 1: a popular endeavor in southern Italy. Eating the grains here,
Speaker 1: I've had no issues, so that it made me question, like,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not grains, it's the quality of the grains
Speaker 1: versus industrialized modern grains. So in a relatively short amount
Speaker 1: of time since the Green Revolution, almost all of Italy
Speaker 1: has gone on to this industrialized crop as you refer to.
Speaker 1: So how does your fellow country person and Italy feel
Speaker 1: about the work that you're doing to maintain or revive
Speaker 1: these ancient grains. Do they think it's kind of strange
Speaker 1: or patriotic or are they excited that you're bringing back
Speaker 1: some of the local history. Yeah, it's you may as
Speaker 1: a little bit too difficult because the people in the
Speaker 1: south of Italy commit with the clothes mind, their traditional
Speaker 1: thought to the start, the people the other farmer were
Speaker 1: watching me going got these big grains, because some of
Speaker 1: them they are tall, like two meters in front of
Speaker 1: the the new one. So they say, what are you doing, Leonardo.
Speaker 1: They produce so much, this is not good. But I
Speaker 1: continue in my way. I continue my way. The people
Speaker 1: start to taste my flower to see and they say
Speaker 1: to me, now, that Leonard you have there is on
Speaker 1: your flower is different than the flower that we buy
Speaker 1: in the supermarket. And the taste, the smell of the
Speaker 1: bread that is completely different. So yeah, the other farmers
Speaker 1: see me like a crazy person. Yeah, you know you're
Speaker 1: doing something good. Yeah, contain gene tech is. We need
Speaker 1: farmers and poets. We need people who know how to
Speaker 1: make bread, people who love trees and acknowledge a breeze.
Speaker 1: More than a year of growth, we need a year
Speaker 1: of attention. Attention to those who fall, Attention to the
Speaker 1: sun that rises and dies, to our kids as they grow,
Speaker 1: Attention to a simple street light, a chipped wall. Today,
Speaker 1: being revolutionary means reducing, rather than adding to, slowing down
Speaker 1: rather than speeding up. It means seeing the value of silence,
Speaker 1: of light, of fragility, of kind, Armenno. It was the
Speaker 1: gluten free air. I was seeing things from a dark
Speaker 1: side of oh Man gluten free one of my pedaling poison.
Speaker 1: I didn't get into baking for this, and it's a
Speaker 1: terrible career weeks. You know, it's just it's not good
Speaker 1: for people. That's Jonathan Bethany. Jonathan is the co owner
Speaker 1: and head baker of say Low Bakery in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: He's been on a journey of experimental grains and research,
Speaker 1: having worked at the Washington State University's Bread Lab with
Speaker 1: Dr Stephen Jones, where he learned about the importance of
Speaker 1: plant variety, farming practices, fresh milling, and long fermentation, all
Speaker 1: of which are essential to unlocking flavor and nutrition. In
Speaker 1: November two thousand seventeen, Jonathan opened Saalu with his wife,
Speaker 1: Jessica Disease. Salu is the first bakery in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: Operating its own mill. Well known at Salu are there
Speaker 1: whole week croissants and millet chocolate chip cookies, which are
Speaker 1: emblematic of his style of baking European bakery staples with
Speaker 1: freshly milled grains. Once I kind of shifted my internal
Speaker 1: world all of a sudden, I found myself mingling with
Speaker 1: folks that are like, oh, well, you don't have to
Speaker 1: bake like that. There's other ways to bake. You can
Speaker 1: use whole grains, you can use long fermentations. You know,
Speaker 1: wheat isn't bad, it's just how you've gone about it.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to take a fresh look at that.
Speaker 1: And then damn, all of a sudden, the bread Lab
Speaker 1: opens up and here I am as a resident baker
Speaker 1: in the Bread Lab and Washington State University and a
Speaker 1: cutting edge you know, breeding program under Dr Jones. As
Speaker 1: Jonathan explains, long fermentation is important for digestibility. Most bread
Speaker 1: in a plastic bag goes from flower to loaf in
Speaker 1: just a matter of hours, and in the process, the
Speaker 1: benefits of the pre digestive period, where enzymes and micro
Speaker 1: organisms break down the grains into a state in which
Speaker 1: it's easier to absorb, are all lost. The benefits of soaking, sprouting,
Speaker 1: and fermenting grains to maximize nutritive value is something many
Speaker 1: cultures around the world have long known and practiced, and
Speaker 1: so at my time in the bread Lab, um, you know,
Speaker 1: I really got into varietals, and I really got into
Speaker 1: whole grain baking. Dr. Jones made me only baked with
Speaker 1: whole grains. Working with Dan Barber, only whole grains. What
Speaker 1: are all the flavors we can get out of wheat?
Speaker 1: What are all the flavors we can get out of grains? Um?
Speaker 1: That turned me into a whole grain baker. I came
Speaker 1: to d C to the Mid Atlantic. I met some
Speaker 1: of the farmers I work with now that really convinced
Speaker 1: me to open salute because I'm like, these are farmers
Speaker 1: that can really work with and we can go through
Speaker 1: all the little changes together, we can take risks together. Um.
Speaker 1: That's when Heinz Tomas next step produce in southern Maryland
Speaker 1: towards me in his fields showed me buck wheat, millet, sorghum, beans, barley, rye,
Speaker 1: you know. Finally he takes me to the wheat and
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, cool, how much week can you sell
Speaker 1: me this year? And He's like, son, didn't you see
Speaker 1: everything that it took to get you this organic wheat?
Speaker 1: So what about all these other things? So I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh man, what about all these other things? I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about the flower boom from the spring
Speaker 1: of this year two thousand twenty, A lot of people
Speaker 1: were for the first time thinking about where their flower
Speaker 1: was coming from at a time when suddenly it was unavailable.
Speaker 1: I think many people were for the first time thinking
Speaker 1: differently about baking at home. Did you experience a different
Speaker 1: or ridden nude relationship to your customers in terms of
Speaker 1: their understanding and curiosity about the value of whole grain flower? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I ran out of rye, I ran out of many
Speaker 1: wheat varieties. UM. I struggled this year to keep up
Speaker 1: due to the boom. And it's what we wanted to happen,
Speaker 1: you know, I've wanted I mean, I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to come, you know, riding on COVID nineteen per say,
Speaker 1: But we we needed something to to to to bring
Speaker 1: this awareness and this desire to um seek healthier foods
Speaker 1: and to seek you know, cooking at home again. You know.
Speaker 1: I think there's the root cause that we can look too,
Speaker 1: which is unhealthy systems, uns animal systems and unhealthy eating,
Speaker 1: and these kind of tragedies bring all that to light.
Speaker 1: Before we end, I wanted to go back to Simon Are,
Speaker 1: esteemed journalist and amateur baker, and ask if he could
Speaker 1: share with us some advice to make the home baker
Speaker 1: in us all feel a little less intimidated and more
Speaker 1: empowered when baking with whole grains. I will say this,
Speaker 1: start small and be open. One two. Think about what
Speaker 1: happens when you're baking with something. Let's stick with wheat.
Speaker 1: We're not going to go into buck wheats and rise
Speaker 1: and embers and iron corn or even corn and of itself.
Speaker 1: Just regular wheats. Okay. So, like I said, you live
Speaker 1: in California, eat your hands in some Sonora and let's
Speaker 1: say you don't know how well this was meal. Do
Speaker 1: you put it in your hands and it feels like
Speaker 1: regular whole weed flour? What we know that brand is
Speaker 1: good for us? And what does brand new? It absorbs
Speaker 1: in your gut. It absorbs lots of liquid. So remember
Speaker 1: that when you're putting liquid into your batter or your dough,
Speaker 1: you're gonna need a little extra water. Try fifteen more
Speaker 1: water or less flour in whatever you're baking that you've
Speaker 1: baked before. That's a good way to start um whole grains.
Speaker 1: If you don't want to go at a hundred person
Speaker 1: all greens, add to something and see what happens to
Speaker 1: a recipe that you know super well, and a quick
Speaker 1: anecdote as I was one time I was making I
Speaker 1: had a friend over and I'm like, hey, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make a coffee cake. And I've made this coffee cake
Speaker 1: X number of times and I've done it whole green
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of times. And so I bake it
Speaker 1: and I'm talking to my friend and it comes out
Speaker 1: and I slice it up and go. I forgot to
Speaker 1: add the sugar to my bank. But I came to
Speaker 1: realize how much sugar do I actually need? Because it
Speaker 1: was still super flavorful. There was so much flavor and
Speaker 1: I was like, how much sugar do I actually need
Speaker 1: in this thing? And I was like, I could reduce
Speaker 1: my sugar easily and still have a super tasty cake.
Speaker 1: And there was lots of sugar in the strusol on top,
Speaker 1: so that's fine. But is this thing of like you
Speaker 1: start to have these moments of like what do I
Speaker 1: actually need? And that's the thing that happens in home baking,
Speaker 1: especially when you're playing with home grains, with whole grains,
Speaker 1: is you start to be like, what do I want?
Speaker 1: What do I want to play with? But I'm not
Speaker 1: depending so much on just the recipe. I'm using my senses,
Speaker 1: my hands, my taste buds, or even like I'll smell
Speaker 1: things in the kitchen. Like you become much more comfortable
Speaker 1: in your kitchen, and that kind of emancipation that comes,
Speaker 1: that kind of independence that comes and being able to
Speaker 1: feed yourself and feed yourself in more than just the ways.
Speaker 1: You know, that's the thing that really gets home. Baker
Speaker 1: is excited, and that's the thing that I think can
Speaker 1: really truly lead people to understanding and making whole grains
Speaker 1: accessible because you become your own teacher in that kind
Speaker 1: of way, in a way that industrial food systems don't
Speaker 1: want you to be independent, don't want you to have
Speaker 1: a certain of um brain trust or intelligence towards what
Speaker 1: you're putting in your own body. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot to take away from the episode, whether it's the
Speaker 1: role of gluten or gastronomy or the green revolution in
Speaker 1: what we eat today. But the benefits of whole grain
Speaker 1: eating are multifaceted, just as the negative impacts are of
Speaker 1: not eating whole grains. Our taste buds have been bleached,
Speaker 1: and so has our soil and our immunity. The whitewashing
Speaker 1: of our food is no more apparent in our industrial
Speaker 1: system than it is with wheat. And whether or not
Speaker 1: you believe the green revolution was a success, which probably
Speaker 1: depends on the metrics by which you define success, what
Speaker 1: it does allow is a fertile terrain of critique. What
Speaker 1: we do know is that any solution in feeding people
Speaker 1: that is rooted in agrochemical companies, consolidating power, and weakening
Speaker 1: biodiversity is not a long term solution. As always, we
Speaker 1: are advocates for reimagining new systems, the ones that predate
Speaker 1: industrial solutions, as those solutions are only designed to respond
Speaker 1: to industrial problems. Maybe the system is the problem, and
Speaker 1: in that context our solutions bring us closer to the
Speaker 1: outcomes rooted more in our imagination and less so in
Speaker 1: our limitations. I'd like to extend a tremendous thank you
Speaker 1: to all of our guests who helped make this episode possible.
Speaker 1: Martina Julietta Castaiano's Lopez and her daughter Carmen Reyes from
Speaker 1: Brencombe de la Grana Bakery in Wahaca, Mexico, to journalists
Speaker 1: and author Simon Tebow in Nova Scotia, Canada, Leonardo Petrocelli
Speaker 1: and writer Mauricia Tiller from Zeletta de Brancia and Pulia, Italy,
Speaker 1: and to Jonathan Bethany from Saylu Bakery in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about this episode and our guest
Speaker 1: at wet Stone Magazine dot com, Backslash podcast, or by
Speaker 1: following us on Instagram at wet Stone Magazine. We'll be
Speaker 1: back next week with more from the world of food
Speaker 1: from around the world. I'm your host, Steven Saderfield, Take
Speaker 1: it easy piece. We'd also like to thank our incredible
Speaker 1: podcast producer Selene Glazier. Selene, you are the best. To
Speaker 1: our editor and wet Stone part partner and director of
Speaker 1: video David Alexander in London. Appreciate you, Dave. Thanks to
Speaker 1: our wet Stone production intern Quentin le Beau, and last
Speaker 1: but not least, my business partner Mel she who makes
Speaker 1: all things at whet Stone possible. Thank you Mel. We'd
Speaker 1: also like to thank our partners and production at I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio to Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer and executive
Speaker 1: producer Christopher Haciotis. We'll be back next week with more
Speaker 1: from the world of food worldwide. Point of origin listeners.
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