What Flour Wants

In this paper I ask what else is consumed when we eat bread. I explore the behaviours and structures in grain to loaf systems which deepen or reduce our human and more than-human relationships, and I examine how an ancient staple food is recognised today.
This paper reports, from an insider perspective, on grain to loaf production in the UK and explores the culinary landscapes of small-scale bakers running their own bakery businesses, using UK grown stoneground flour. The decision to use UK grown stoneground flour is described as a decision to favour diversity, nutrition, ecological farming and localised food systems. However these choices create compromise by directly resulting in more work and less profit; technical, logistical and conceptual challenges and a smaller, more expensive niche product to sell.
Drawing on a range of interviews and collecting empirical data from key-actors and bakers in the UK-grain movement, this holistic research maps supplies, consumption, relationships and compromises. In an exploration of how the unique circumstances of each baker shape their supply chains, this work pulls together many worlds. Outside the bakeries are trust-based relationships; between suppliers, peers and customers who support this values-driven, artisanal work. Inside the bakery, the more-than human world takes centre-stage, with bakers repeatedly and explicitly asking, “What does the flour want?”