Sunday

Dear Bread Pals,

I’m making bread today, and my family is taking down an ash tree.

Mr. Flour Ambassador aka Jack Magai aka My Guy is a tree fellow. In his work he helps trees live with people, but this one has the ash borer and was starting to drop branches on our roof.

I marvel, as ever that the people Jack and I made are so tall (and have so much facial hair)! I should be amazed that they give up a day to help us, but Francis and Felix are so routinely available that I don’t have to be shocked. Just grateful.

The tree was 60 years old, just a touch younger than my husband. It’s been growing on the north side of our house, a brick building that’s two stories in the front and four stories in the back because it’s on a hill, for the whole time Jack grew up in Cleveland, gallivanted, and for the nearly 25 years we’ve been here.

The street where we live is a cut through between the city and the place in the country where I grew up, so I’m sure I passed it loads of times as a kid. Hearing it fall to the ground and seeing it on the slope is impressive. Do we grow as much as trees do?

Now Felix and Jack and Tomas, our (also helpful) roommate are winching lengths of trunk onto the trailer. They’ll go to our friend Michael Biddy’s house, where Jack will mill it with Michael — the man who taught Jack to climb trees.

Downstairs, the spelt, wheat and buckwheat flours are growing into bread. The starter was rye, and I can imagine the fields where everything grew, in Maine, and Newfield and Livingston New York. I can picture the work of the millers at Farmer Ground Flour, Rusted Rooster, and Sparrowbush.

Visualizing the routes that other foods take to my house is not as easy, but learning the steps of farming and milling grains made me aware of my blind spots. Working in the food pantry opened my eyes to other ways food flows — and the interruptions people face in feeding themselves.

Now that essential food money is being denied so many of my neighbors and fellow Americans, each piece of news about SNAP makes me livid about the chosen blindness warlike tactics of the Trump regime.

I am going to offer some baking classes here in Troy as fundraisers for Oakwood Food Pantry, one of the many strained emergency food channels in my city. Teaching others to make sourdough English muffins is such a joy — they are simple, and this is a way to get to know your starter before diving into bread.

In a few days I’ll be at Zingerman’s Bakehouse, talking about the Evolution of American Baking. I have a ticket to give away — tell me if you’re interested!

Yours, Amy