This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hello, I'm Wendell Stevenson, and this is about a piece I wrote in 2019,

Flower Power, Meet the Breadheads, Baking a Better Loaf. So it's a story about bread, but it's really a story

about the infrastructure behind bread and how that bread gets into your basket.

So it's about the agronomists who develop the grain, the farmers who grow it, the millers who mill it and the bakers who bake it.

And how when you change that away from an industrialized system and you go back or you go forwards or sometimes

even sideways into how to produce a better product that's more socially and environmentally

responsible. You can really get something that's ultimately more nutritious, more delicious

and better for everybody. Bread is really fundamental and I love

writing about food and about how food describes and illustrates larger issues and themes in the

world. So for me, food is not a recipe or a restaurant or a dish. It's really about how it

connects to economics, to people, to society, to the way we

live. And bread is just a brilliant and extraordinary, rich and complex prism into a lot of those

different facets. So it's a story that touches on environmentalism, on industrialization, on the politics of bread more than anything,

and how we can change our orientation from a pilot-high, cheaper supermarket, centralised food

system to something that's more local, perhaps more sustainable, certainly more environmentally

responsible and I would argue very much more delicious. I think when I started doing this piece,

I knew that sourdough is more nutritious and more delicious and tastes better and is trendy,

but I think I had not really understood just how insidiously awful white flour is and how ubiquitous it has become.

White flour that's grown in great monocultures that's milled industrially is designed to be a sort of inert dust

that you can bake very effectively with, but which has

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