The Radical Pleasure in Eating Local Bread

From grain to flour to loaf to shopping line

Barrio Bread’s Tibetan Purple Barley Loaf

On a Tuesday this past December, I drove ten minutes to the Hayden Flour Mills warehouse to buy bread from Don Guerra of Barrio Bread and lunch from Sonoran Pasta Co. The bread and pasta were made with Hayden Flour Mills' Arizona-grown stone-milled flour. Nestled into an industrial part of town, next to an auto shop, a line snaked up to the folding tables covered with colorful blankets and baskets of bagels and focaccia. 

I was lucky enough to be chatting in line with Emma Zimmerman, who co-owns the mill with her dad, Jeff, about how happy it makes her to see the local food economy active in front of our eyes. After years of using her flour, Emma and I met through the world of newsletters – specifically through Andrew Janjigian, who writes Wordloaf (and in 2022 featured Emma after her cookbook The Miller's Daughter was published). 

The line gave us enough time for a whole conversation, which expanded to include others. The couple behind me had driven over forty minutes to be there and were grateful it was such a short distance – they were used to only getting Don's bread if they were down in Tucson at his original location. It was the happiest line I can remember standing in, and the feeling lingered long after I brought the bread home to share and eat.

A few days ago, I read Erin Boyle's latest newsletter, laborious gratification, about how "the process makes the pleasure." She wrote about making pillowcases rather than buying them, and while I don't own a sewing machine, I strongly connected to what she said: "I find that when I embrace the more laborious kind of gratification found in making something for myself, what I receive is not a single, fleeting hit of dopamine, but a slow drip of pleasure and satisfaction with long lingering side effects. There's pleasure in the process, from start to finish." 

Buying bread from the person who made it, standing outside where the flour was milled, brings a level of pleasure and satisfaction that a generic loaf at the grocery store can't touch. I want every loaf of bread to be this special, every instance of purchasing bread to be this interwoven with relationships, and every person able to afford and access their own local bread. Why does this feel like such a tall ask? Well, it's easier to buy the generic loaf, more convenient. But who does that convenience serve? 

Clare Michaud's recent essay, Questioning Lumps, came to me as part of an answer to these questions. Clare writes about family medical history, dealing with literal lumps in the body and connecting it to our world's obsession with seamlessness and "privileged ease." Clare writes, "This seamlessness, the smooth transactions that happen via clicks, taps, and swipes is a buffer. Such frictionless interactions encase us, protecting us from the dynamism of the world around us. We experience fewer obstacles as well as less spontaneity; an aspect of lumpiness is lost, I think for the worse."

Convenience (when we think about the industrialized food system) is always at someone else's expense, far away from where I sit, eating a slice of Kroger bread. I don't want to be a killjoy; I want more joy – but joy, in my experience, isn't found in endless convenient food options. Convenience and joy aren't synonyms. I felt more joy waiting in line for Don's bread than if I'd stayed home and ordered a grocery delivery service. So many things are advertised to me to reduce friction in my life. What if the friction being erased is human connection?

“Food with a serious feel-good factor.” UGH

Instagram sends me endless ads for meal 'solutions,' giving me even more reasons to be irritated. I've written before about false promises of miracle powders and meal kits. One ad recently showed two fridges side by side. On the left is an empty fridge with the caption "I Don'T HaVe TiMe to CoOk." On the right, problem solved, here's a fridge filled with thirteen rows of bottled smoothies and wellness shots, plus other containers of food, and the caption "Your fully stocked fridge of Factor." I went nosing around the company's website (no wonder I get the ads) and found some ridiculous promises. "Pick Your Meals: A new menu of 35+ dietitian-designed options every week." "Cooked to Perfection: Our gourmet chefs do the prep, so you can do you." "Heat, Eat & Enjoy: No prep. No mess. Our meals arrive ready to heat and eat in minutes." How North American – the ad tells me that my time is too important to be spent on something as silly as cooking. And at the same time, it places on my shoulders impossible standards for daily cooking and eating. Who needs a menu of 35+ dietitian-designed options? No one! 

Clare also quotes from the book Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives by René Boer as Boer connects with Richard Sennett's perspective on the modernizing city: "Or, as Sennett wrote half a century ago in The Uses of Disorder, it is important people 'grow to need the unknown, to feel incomplete without a certain anarchy in their lives, to learn (...) to love the 'otherness' around them."

These products which promise to make life more efficient are forced upon us at the same time that we see increased levels of loneliness and isolation. Other “inefficient” solutions seem necessary. For example, the Dutch supermarket that started a Kletskassa, or "chat checkout," for people who weren't in a rush and, perhaps, were lonely. From what I read, this checkout line was created for their elderly citizens, but I think many could benefit from something like it. What was I standing in, waiting to buy Barrio Bread beside a kletskassa?

A few nights ago, my husband read a passage from an early chapter in The Plague by Albert Camus. "Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, 'doing business.' Naturally they don't eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible." How eerily contemporary it sounds.

A reason buying bread from a local baker, who uses locally grown and milled flour, is considered generally inconvenient today is that 'getting rich' isn't the lodestar for anyone in the equation. Not the baker, the miller, or the people in line. If I feel somewhat exhausted at the idea of driving "out of my way" to buy bread, that discomfort tells me I'm slightly outside the mainstream loop of consumerism. Through 30+ years of media consumption, I'm trained to think of what's fastest, cheapest, or most efficient as best. That thinking keeps big business booming. Buying local bread is harder because the way my country works makes it harder. Those in power benefit from our isolation. So, let’s buy and share the bread that has a streak of anarchy in it. Thumbing my nose at conventional food systems by way of spending my time in the local food economy.

As I've mentioned, I'm re-reading Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson for Alicia Kennedy's book club and found some new favorite parts: "One's own difficult body, through which all pain and pleasure is transmitted, is one's own very alive-ness." Participating in my local food economy puts my difficult body through more pain/inconvenience and pleasure than going to the grocery store – this transmits and shapes my experience. I am reminded I am alive. To live in a semi-alive state makes it easier to forget (ignore, erase) all those who are dead near and far.

Back to Rebecca: "Refusing the recipe as a cook and at the table also expresses yearning to participate in world-making." She's writing about cooking, but the recipe can also mean a life. The recipe that is our minutes, days, weeks, months, and years. What is the recipe of our life given to us by where and when we were born and into what family, with what social, economic, gender, religious, and other markers? How does that recipe serve society more than it serves us? I want to participate in world-making by favoring my local food economy. 

I went back to Hayden Flour Mills for more bread in January. It rained that day, so the tables were tucked inside the warehouse. My kids played under a tree with other kids. We shared Sonoran Pasta Co.'s cannoli in the car before going home, which was a delight. In another view, the rain, the travel, and the (slight) change of where to pick up your bread could be seen as friction. But what I experienced there was expansive and humane. Many of us interested in liberation from capitalistic standards agree that we must unlearn that difficult equals bad.

While I spend my time writing about bread, 828 million people worldwide go to bed hungry. Why is it that people in the US are taught that bread should be easy to buy? Just make enough money, and then you're entitled to your convenient bread, the thinking goes. Bread is a right turned into a privilege that is a right.

I return to the same place I always do when I am reminded of how little control I have: Personal responsibility. What do I control? What options do I have? How do I resist the insidious lies (like bread isn't a universal right) that can be found everywhere? 

And—I buy bread from the person who made it, with flour grown and milled not far from where I live. I save some, share some, and repeat. Any supposed inconvenience of this arrangement is nothing compared to being connected with other people. "Participate in the local food economy" is not a homework assignment to cleanse my morals. Nor is it something to be swallowed reluctantly because it's "good for me." This bread tastes better than late-stage capitalist convenience feels. It's a more pleasurable and radical experience as a whole.

As I was finishing up this essay, I noticed in the screenshot of the Instagram ad the tagline for the company, “Food with a serious feel-good factor.” A sigh from the depths of my soul issued forth. I don’t want food to merely feel good. I want food to be good, and to do good — for me, for the local community, for the earth, for all people, everywhere.

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Thanks for being here <3 I’m excited for February (yours truly will be part of a local bake sale to raise money for Wasted Ink Zine Distro and I’m daydreaming about what to make. Will keep you posted.) Be here same (ish) time next week with reading and cooking links.