My thought funnel
It’s been a long year for everyone, and it’s only halfway through.
Covid 19 seems to have turned most people’s world around - certainly in the cities. We’ve learned that the disease is transmitted by the air - it’s in the wind, so to speak. It’s everywhere around the world, quick as a flash.
While country folk missed out on the brunt of the pandemic, rural Australia has had to deal directly with other issues.
Here in the land down under, Covid come hot on the heels of the worst bushfires we’ve had in many years. These bushfires were the result of the worst drought in living memory. The country around us just turned to dust. It was hard to watch.
Then La Nina kicked in, and the weather did an about face. We have had widespread floods on the eastern side of the country. Where I live in Gloucester NSW, for example, was flooded for the first time in 42 years back in March. As I write this, rural Victoria is in flood. Intense rain has replaced intense heat.
So we have pestilence, fire and flood. Did I mention plague?
Here in NSW, we currently have plague of mice. This is an even bigger issue than Covid for country people, as crops are lost, and years of hard work are destroyed. If the plague isn’t under control soon, we will soon have famine, because the mice are eating all the grain. Grain feeds humans and animals - it’s the basis of modern society, when you think about it.
Anyway, there has been plenty of ‘biblical proportioning’ going on here in the land down under. The cliche of fire, flood, plague and pestilence is without a doubt top of mind for many. And quite obviously there has been pretty much the same level of intensity everywhere else on the planet. No matter how you look at it, people (and some would say the planet itself) are in some way at breaking point.
This bit of the big picture feeds into my small picture, which I will attempt to unfold for you today. Grab yourself a cuppa and I’ll continue along my thought funnel.
Our western society is built upon the idea of endless growth. To this end, we have ignored science, which has been telling us for over fifty years that climate change is accelerating, and that it’s to do with too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They told us that if we continued causing more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, the planet would heat up and the oceans would rise.
Our response for the past five decades? We just keep pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Why have we done this? Because our economic system ignores the lessons of nature by relying on growth as its primary metric. Nature, at its finest, is a balanced system. There is a cycle of growth balanced by a cycle of decay. Decay itself becomes a life force, as it creates food for growth. It’s a process in constant motion.
We have all been waiting for a significant breakthrough which will solve the issue we’ve created. We place hope in this ever advancing technology; that it will, one day, solve every problem. By betting on our technological future, we can go on buying more and more stuff; it’s business as usual. In short, we need not change our consumption addiction because technology will save us. That is the subtext, and it’s kind of paradoxical.
This is really ‘magical thinking’. And it ignores decay as the balancing element. Decay is inherent in every natural system. Are we witnessing, through all this breakdown, actual change?
I’ve always thought that change is in the individual, which then flows into the collective. Change has to happen, no matter what - we must evolve or perish. It seems to me we need to evolve the way we think - everything from capitalism to environmentalism; everything needs to be re imagined, right down to a community level. It boils down to two things - the continued willful ignorance of the dramatic changes in the weather we are all experiencing, and the social changes which have been exacerbated by the ‘pandemic’, but which really have been occurring very slowly for a long time now, as we have all migrated from the physical world to the virtual one. These social changes are significant too. We are now remote global citizens, connected by the internet. For most of us, the computer screen has become the portal to everything else in our lives. Including each other.
Consider this as a ‘big picture’ background to the small picture I want to unfold.
I have been quite fortunate with regard to this worldwide smorgasbord of cataclysms. I live and work in a small rural community. It has been directly affected by the weather, and indirectly by the flow on effects of our responses as a nation to the pandemic. Lockdowns in the cities, border controls and quarantine restrictions have altered things here in some ways. Nonetheless, life goes on for us without huge change. The pandemic has actually boosted tourism in our region. It has also caused the cost of living here to skyrocket, as city dwellers escape to the country, forcing rents and house prices up. So a mixed bag; some good things and some not so good.
I’ve been trying to stay on top of an entirely different set of circumstances. Back in November I had a fire here at my partially completed ‘new’ site in Gloucester. The details of that event are here if you are interested. In that fire, I lost my beloved bakery trailer, the little one I called the Gypsy. That trailer started life as a mobile bakery shop to sell bread at markets. After I stopped doing markets, it was repurposed to become a tiny bakery and mobile classroom on the Tour Down South a few years back. When I returned, it became a part of my Community Supported Bakery, doing the proofing for the bread. Since moving to Gloucester I refitted it to carry the prototype small oven mentioned in the article linked above. That’s when it became part of the fire which engulfed pretty much my whole enterprise. Now it’s a pile of twisted metal, charred wood and ashes.
Growth and (rapid) decay, you might say.
And just to make matters more, well, interesting, I’ve managed to revisit an old ankle injury from my motorcycle riding days. It started as a minor issue, but it grew to the point where I was laid up for months, with twice weekly visits to the local health centre. No commercial baking was possible during this time. Nor any physical work. Not much of anything, really. I had plenty of time to think things though.
Probably too much.
I’m slowly mending now. Still a way from good health, but things are beginning to take shape. My body is healing, and the thoughts in my head are resolving.
I came very close to calling it a day, baking wise. When you add up all the trials and tribulations I’ve had in my long three decades as a professional baker, the case against continuing in this profession is pretty strong.
It’s worth noting that my body has kept me baking for over thirty years, and walking on the planet for sixty or so. Thus, I’ve given just over half of my body’s useful life to the ‘trade’. You only get one body. Baking, like any other physical trade, is tough on the body.
I didn’t start my first bakery to become a baker. I did it to find a substantive use for organic grain. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t cover it here. I made my naturally fermented bread, the bread that made the bakery, to answer a need (no pun intended). This was for decent, nutritious and tasty bread. Bread that made a meal. Bread that satisfied something deeper.
Back when I started out, organic wheat farmers had no manufacturers to help them get their grain into volume production. They could grow it, but they needed volume users like bakeries to justify the expense of going organic.
I decided to create the first (to my knowledge) ‘organic’ bakery, without the faintest idea of how to do it. I just followed my feet. I ended up loving the act of baking, of being a baker.
I believed in what I was doing then, even though I wasn’t actually a baker and had, prior to this, no pressing desire to become one. But that’s what I became anyway, just doing what I thought was needed. Over many years, I baked thousands upon thousands of loaves. Demand always outstripped supply, so I started to pay people to help, and to buy machines to help me make thousands more. I kept growing my bakery, with nothing but belief in what I was doing. There were some good years, and then there were some grindingly bad ones. I made some bad investments, some bad decisions. I lost my way, and then I lost everything else.
I learned the true meaning of capitalism the hard way. It’s a blood sport, and there are winners and losers. I’ve been on both sides.
But still, I found ways to bake. People told me the bread I made was an essential part of their diet, just as it was for me. Other artisan style bakeries sprang up, and they began making more (and better) bread than mine. Other bakeries began using organic grain too; totally organic milling companies sprung up, and established flour mills started to source organic grain as well. Organic flour was on its way. Organic grain was commercially viable and nutritious bread was now available.
Along the way to this successful outcome, I taught many small baking teams, and learned from them as well; bakers and bakeries sprung from my enterprise; many are still baking to this day. If my objective was to get organic grain into production, then my job was well and truly done. But then the life of a sourdough baker began to work its way into me.
It is a different way of baking, making naturally fermented bread, and the skillset required is something that takes many years to really master. You can’t create satisfying sourdough by adding ingredients and out pops a loaf. It’s like a culture, and inoculation begins in many small bakeries, like mine, all around the world. These bakeries have either rejected the chemically enhanced baking practices of the mainstream bakeries, or they just fell into it through the process of discovery. The trade has shifted, with proper artisan bakers being in demand now. They get decent pay and are treated with a degree of respect which didn’t exist when I started out. Bakeries were already mechanised then, and a baker was pretty much a process worker in a large machine.
I had replicated the machine through my own enterprise, and I came to think that I had unwittingly joined the enemy. It took me a while to rethink my position, and even longer to build the kind of bakery I wanted - one where nobody was enslaved. I had been enslaved by the need for capital but I didn’t see it until it destroyed my business.
Fifteen years ago, I started to think about how one could simplify things in the baking business so that ‘capital’ was not part of it at all. This started with the use of wood fired ovens, and then developed into things like community supported bakeries, co ops, social enterprises, and then teaching people about naturally leavened bread.
I figured that If enough people knew how to do this stuff themselves, I wouldn’t be required to do so much baking - it would let me off the hook! I shared my knowledge very freely, until I had to charge for it - another paradox. This past fifteen years or so, on average I have taught about a dozen people a month the basics of sourdough. Very roughly, that’s a couple of thousand peeps directly learning the fundamentals of sourdough and naturally leavened bread making. And through my website SourdoughBaker.com.au, I taught many thousands more.
Sometimes I feel all ‘baked out’, though, and I try to have as little to do with the world of sourdough bread as I can, beyond simply eating it.
Yet I still want to bake! And it seems people still want the bread I bake. Baking offers me connection, a rhythm of life, and cashflow, though if I was hard nosed enough to work out the hourly rate for what I bake, I’m pretty sure I would be looking for alternative ways to earn a living. Nowadays I just bake for subscribers, using the Community Supported Bakery (CSB) principle so that there is no one person carrying all the debt. There is a community of interest sharing in resources for their mutual wellbeing. The baker gets to bake and be loved by his customers, and the customers get the love which the financially unencumbered baker can provide through their bread.
Often people don’t appreciate that those expensive loaves are not actually making the baker rich - they are part of the bakery’s debt structure, because baking equipment is generally pretty expensive. Thus, a Community Supported Bakery spreads the debt among all the customers, and removes the bank from the equation.
So here I am again. My Community Supported Bakery continues to be a work in progress. It’s like the phoenix, rising from the ashes of itself so many times. Now, however, I’m interested in returning what I have learned to the wider community. I want to help bring possibility to fruition. I see a place in the scheme of things for ‘tree change’ bakeries and other food based enterprises to really make a difference in this very confusing world. People who come to the baking business for the right reasons, people who want to have a small footprint but a big legacy, people who want to work with less and who want to minimise waste and create something meaningful for others with their own lives and enterprises- you are my kindred spirits, and I hope I can help you to do the thing you want to do.
So where does this thought funnel lead me now? I want to concentrate on the things which disrupt the corporate mess we have are now mired in. To this end, I would like to do what I can to influence our course of action so that we don’t destroy this beautiful organism we live in. If we can get back to meeting each other, learning about our local communities while attending to their needs; if we can see the process of enterprise not as an exercise of applying capital, but as a creative act, akin to art; if we can reinvent technologies which aspire to self sufficiency and simplicity; if we can consume less; if we can make quality stuff which lasts long after we are gone; if we can learn to waste nothing; these things matter and I want to get behind them in any way I can.
So i’ve decided to carry on for a few more years. I’m going to bake for my people and advance the CSB model locally. I’ll continue to teach people of all levels how to bake, but in a different way. It’s going to be more immersive, and more focused on low tech, hands on baking. I’ve been consulting to the trade for many years already, but now my focus will be on helping what I call ‘tree change’ bakers get themselves up and running without becoming enslaved to the capital cycle. I’ll be showing various ways of running micro bakeries which have the baker themselves at the center, so that families can prosper rather than just businesses.
To this end, I’ve designed two ‘low capital’, wood fired commercial ovens which people can build themselves, with a minimum of capital outlay. These ovens will do an excellent job of baking, while keeping the baker out of debt. The designs are based on my past ovens, but without all the complex fabrication my previous ovens have required. These are truly ‘third world simple’ pieces of kit. I hope to have the process of building them well documented so that anyone can get in touch and be able to get started on their own. I’m offering virtual backup on the build process too, so that each oven built works as it should, for a very long time. Yes, I’ll be charging for the design and support, but it will be a one off fee which won’t have a time limit attached.
I’m currently building the first one - the Barrel Oven Mk2 - here in Gloucester. It can be built as a DIY project from mostly reclaimed and repurposed materials, and when I’ve finished building it (any day now!) I’ll have a lot of documentation completed so that more can be built in this DIY format. I’ve also designed a larger, Commercial Oven, which can also be constructed in a DIY manner from mostly repurposed materials. There are two of them being built as I write this - one in Far North Queensland and the other in Western Australia. God knows how I’ll get to see them in action when they are completed, but I’m sure I’ll get to experience them when they are finished.
If you would like to have a chat about your own tree change bakery, or your own wood fired oven, or almost anything else that’s bakery related, ring me on the number below. I’ll be happy to help wherever I can. It would be great to see some more Community Supported Bakeries springing up around the country too, so I’m up for a chat about that as well.
In fact, it would be great to see other types of community supported enterprises finding their way into the world. I see this type of enterprise as being one of the few remaining ways to fight increasing corporate control of every aspect of our lives. These have to be grass roots, and they have to be local, so that physical connection rather than virtual connection becomes the norm. It’s been shown time and time again that communities can be very effective at doing things, especially when the common good is at the heart of the initiative, and people can take ownership of these initiatives in some way..
Thanks for hanging in on this rather long thought funnel, and I do hope you’ve been inspired to act. We need to be moving ourselves away from this ‘magical thinking’, and towards practical thinking again. Please do what you can, whether it’s supporting initiatives in your community, or creating an enterprise that’s human centered, rather than profit driven.
Happy to chat more on