Rethinking Lifestyle

One of the objectives of the South Eastman Transition Initiative (the organization commonly known as SETI, that writes this ‘Rethinking Lifestyles’ column) is to encourage people to become more self-sufficient. Everywhere good quality agricultural land is being sub-divided for more and more housing and in a world with a fixed surface area and a rapidly growing population it doesn’t take an Einstein to see that trouble lies ahead. As the effects of global warming become progressively more severe, the lifestyle we now enjoy will become much more difficult. Global warming and climate change are like the hands of a clock: you can’t see them moving but if you go away and look again later you see they have moved. It is in 10 or 20 years that major climate changes will be upon us and that means our children and grandchildren’s lives. The constant cry of the politicians to ‘grow the economy’ is plainly unsustainable. What we need is a ‘steady state’ economy that provides a satisfactory lifestyle for all.

But, back to bread. In the old days every small town had its local bakery producing bread from locally grown and locally milled wheat. This made an excellent healthy flavourful loaf that was a delight to eat. Then industrial bread making took over and ever since we have largely been subjected to a tasteless cotton wool product. If the bread had any real flavour people wouldn’t want to layer it with slices of meat, cheese, pickles, mayo and more, such that the bread itself cannot be tasted. Supermarket bread contains all sorts of additives to increase loaf volume (to make it appear to be good value for money) and preservatives to make it last longer.

Bread is very easy to make though for some reason the thought of using yeast seems to frighten a lot of people. There are only three essential ingredients – flour, yeast and water: anything else is unnecessary, though a little salt makes a big difference. In the same way as there are hundreds of different types of cheese that also only use three ingredients, there are also hundreds of different breads. The standard bread can also be enhanced with a variety of different things such as sunflower seeds, herbs, garlic, raisins, cinnamon etc: the possibilities are only limited by ones imagination. Life would be rather boring if one had the same thing for dinner every day or, out of the thousands of recipes for cookies, one always had the same one. So why do people stick to the same bread day in and day out?  Possibly because they vary the taste by making a ham and cheese sandwich, or putting on jam, peanut butter, honey etc. instead of varying the bread itself.

SETI recently offered a workshop to teach how to make bread but only one person signed up so it was cancelled. This was a great pity because not only is bread so easy to make, it is a lot cheaper and more flavourful than buying it in the store. It takes about 15 – 20 minutes to make a batch of bread plus the rising and baking time, but something else can be done during that time – even watching TV!  Last year SETI members had a most enjoyable evening when about a dozen members brought a loaf of their home made bread for everyone to taste and compare. With just butter the differences were amazing and the general opinion was that the evening was much better than it would have been if we had had a variety of sweet cookies instead of delicious bread.