My failure to secure funding for the educational awards & why I have made the botanical blend flour knowledge open source

WHY A COMMERCIAL DIVERSITY BREAD IS NOT HAPPENING

In many ways, I have failed in achieving what I set out to achieve, and today I have decided to give up on running The Sourdough School Scholarships as self funding systems change There will therefore not be any scholarship places this year.

Today’s post is about my failure to understand that people are not motivated by the same things that I am and I have written about some of my naivety and I am going try and explain why, after all most efforts that I am officially giving up on trying to fund the educational programme and why I will not be working with commercial mills and bakeries.

I WAS WRONG TO IMAGINE VALUE IN SUPPORTING CHANGE IN INDUSTRY

After over a decade of trying to officially change just one commercially produce bread you can take this, as me officially admitting that those of you who told me I couldn’t do it were right.

Unofficially I have brought about many changes, but I don’t have the resources or the strength to continue to teach the scholarship programme for free, and and so I am going to do something radical to correct my mistakes, and apologies to the people who had hoped to attend the school as a scholarship. I am heartbroken that I cannot offer the scholarship programmes this year. (but I will be honouring the ones that I have promised, and I will try and keep the bursaries in place.)

I want to add that I will be keeping in the bursaries in place, but for now I am going to explain more about why I am going to do something that will help the artisan bakers instead.

This evening, I am heading over to Grain and Hearth Bakery to share the knowledge of how to Bake with Botanical Blend flour with one of the most inspiring bakers I know Adam Pagor, and from there on you will be able to find the lessons as open source on The Sourdough School website.

I have been working for many years on getting diversity and fermentation into mainstream bread. My approach to bread has a framework, called Baking as Lifestyle Medicine (BALM), and this framework underpins the importance of flour and microbes as central to social justice and microbial equality, redefining how we approach bread as an evolutionary system. This protocol, which includes baking, delivers more fibre, diversity, and maximised nourishment through fermentation and this is the base blend of my flour. Monoculture is the antithesis of everything meaningful. During my Doctorate, the key finding was that diversity is beneficial for both the planet and our health, especially gut health. Why? Because our brains function with neurotransmitters produced mostly in our gut. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which are critical for the parasympathetic nervous system function, are created by our microbes in our guts using the fibre we consume. My dietary intervention studies, unsurprisingly, showed significant improvements in gut health and mental health due to increased levels of fibre, dietary diversity, and fermentation that optimises nourishment.

Milling the whole meadow into your bread and baked goods offers a fascinating way to bake. One of my students described it recently as “milling the landscape.” I am very much pleased that Hodmedods have created the first botanical blends to be sold commercially. The flour is amazing, and so are Hodmedods who mill the botanical blend flour and distribute it.

MY FAILURES

I wanted to licence the Botanical Blend flour or Diversity bread to fund the Scholarship Programme. For the past 4 years I have been funding it myself, but in all my attempts to get the licence secured and the programme funded I have failed. I think in the interest of understanding how challenging it has been I have shared the key attempts and and the organisation’s who I have been trying to make this work with an explanation of why each attempt has failed:

Fail 1

I have at times been really hopeful that something meaningful is about to happen. Three years ago The Bread Factory expressed a serious interest in creating Diversity Bread. I naively thought that they would. So I used a huge chunk of my budget to pay my team to provide information in the meetings with them, and I visited them, presented Diversity Bread and my research to the team in the factory, and I hosted the team here at The School. This kind of work takes a significant chunk of my resources, I have to pay my team, ( I don’t take any payment) and I loose teaching time and the chance to earn. These are heavy financial costs to a small business. I was so excited I didn’t stop to consider that they would simply not go ahead. The management changed and the words and promises evaporated. We are still chasing but nothing has ever come off form this the work.

The one win was they used the knowledge and applied much it to creating the main bread in their existing range of Richard Bertinet bread. But as the management team changed, my emails were ignored, and in the end, I realised too late that I should have asked for some remuneration. With my money spent, I had to teach more classes to make it up again. There is still some satisfaction in the fact that the diversity and nourishment levels in the bread are there. I will take this as a win, and I don’t hold a grudge, I love the company, but I do feel rinsed out and a little stupid for blindly believing that they meant what they said.

Fail 2

I also wrote to Jason’s Sourdough, as he asked, proposing that they invite me to help them create a more nourishing approach to their bread and review the overstated claims they were making about their bread. Libiana, my PA, wrote offering my consultancy services in exchange for sponsoring students on the educational program. They never replied either to acknowledge they had received the email.

Fail 3

In the meantime, Wild farmed flour has been is discussions over the past 18 months or so with my team. We had meetings and talked about adding diversity into the flour on a large scale. Last week, I got a text from one of the members of the team asking that I put all my research and knowledge into creating a formula for them, and then after I have produced a formula for them, they would consider it a viable product that they “would be proud of” and be willing to speak to me about remuneration. It was the same record over again. I do wonder if the lack of respect or willingness to support The educational program is something that would be different if I were male? or from a different industry? I mean can you imagine doing this to an architect, for example? “I know, please use all your knowledge and knowhow, and spend your time and effort designing the house, and creating the plans for what we want to build, and we are going to

a) use the plans to improve our existing house or

b) consider your work and see if it is worthy of being paid.”

I GIVE UP

What most people see is the gloss – of course we all want to show our best side. What you don’t see is my husband supporting me which allows me to invest the fees from teaching into educating and systems change. I don’t share that the 70+ hour weeks but after many years they caught up and resulted in a serious health scare in November, and on Saturday, my brother-in-law, who is a very astute chap, gently told me that often the people who invent things are not the ones who see any benefits from their work, citing various inventors as examples. It occurred o me as he was talking that it is not actually me who benefits from my work. It is the people who are nourished who benefit – my work is underpinned by social justice and environmentalism.

I run The School as a social enterprise, and the idea is that it was a self-funded systems change program. The problem is that the people who could fund the systems change program are by their very nature, corporates, and so what I have to come to terms with is that if I continue to hope that one of them will step up and create my work fairly, then I am a fool. They are not going to support what I do, and so my vision of the self-funding educational scholarships has to end.

SOCIAL

What I have noted over the past three years is that both millers and bakers who initially took to baking sourdough and pioneered a revolution in community bakeries and artisan flour with a dynamic and determined approach to social justice in bread making are now re-evaluating their methods. Diversity is the answer.

I’ve read several Instagram posts where bakers are questioning what they are really doing and asking how they can better nourish their communities and elevate their contributions. I have limited time and resources to read that bakers are willing to step up and reevaluate their baking to fit with such strong values, and yet despite years of advocating for diversity, a doctorate that has shone a light on the benefits of diversity to the gut microbiome and to the environment, part of my concern for the work that I have done is that bakers have been hesitant to embrace it. Cost is a significant factor, and challenging ingrained industrial agricultural flour production systems is incredibly difficult. We are running out f time to change our systems, and I believe that it is imperative to human and planetary health that we stop the ready acceptance of monoculture in our flour, which is at the core of why our bread doesn’t reach its full potential to nourish.

it’s important to understand that refined white flour isn’t the enemy; the problem lies in the systemic issues within our approach to bread making our most affordable and accessible food devoid of fibre, diversity, and fermentation.

BAKING AS LIFESTYLE MEDICINE IN PRACTICE

When put into action, the BALM protocol can be used in any bakery to improve both physical and mental health, and one of the things I am most proud of is the team at ADRU where BALM is used in the café bakery. If you have a few minutes, do listen to my latest podcast featuring psychiatrist David Veale. He discusses using the Baking as Lifestyle Medicine (BALM) protocol at the NHS Bethlem Royal Hospital anxiety ward to improve the mental health of residents with high anxiety levels.

THE NEED FOR A CULTURAL SHIFT IN BAKING

Most bakers still blindly accept monoculture as “the way.” If you are one of those bakers, then it’s time to step up to the next level and to move forward in the way you bake bread. Or are you content to remain a conventional baker, happy to look like you are doing something revolutionary whilst still baking according to the system that reduces our main food down to one grain, that needs a myriad of petrochemical-derived agrochemicals to be produced, and even then is often stripped of the main nourishing part, the bran? and whilst many students are pointing out the many industrial bread makers are using the knowledge to improve bread without any proper acknowledgement I think that this knowledge needs to be given. So to the people who refuse to credit my work here is the knowledge for free – because you can’t steal what is given – have my work, understand we must bring diversity to both flour and bread and by all means use the research and change your bread.

ARTISAN BREAD IS STILL LIMITED IN ITS CAPACITY TO NOURISH

In light of the artisan bakers who are still just accepting, without question, the way they approach flour because in being a monoculture baker, I cannot just ignore that they are missing a major opportunity to nourish their community and support the environment. It’s not difficult to step up to use diversity in your bread. So I am sharing all my lessons and resources for free with the world on how to mill and create diversity in flour, because it achieves my goal of systems change in another way. So whilst, the scholarship programme is to going ahead this year, I have now licensed small artisan bakeries to use the Diversity Bread trade mark and principles and I will take this as a win.

Cost of Diversity Bread Licence £1

Should any of my students be able to use Diversity Bread™, I will be happy to licence small artisan bakeries to use my trademark for £1.

I hope you will use the knowledge to share a more diverse, delicious, nourishing, ethical, and fun approach to baking. I believe that if we step up, then we can create positive change. By challenging the status quo and advocating for diversity, we can make meaningful change in both community nourishment and mental health. So despite being just a small voice in one of the largest and most competitive food industry sectors in the world, I will be continuing to push forward, challenging the millers and the bakers to embrace the evolutionary system approach to bread making and follow a vision that means that the bread we bake, eat, and share has an amazing impact on our communities, the environment, and the way we feel.

To apply for a Diversity Bread licence please email me bookings @sourdough.co.uk

OPEN SOURCE KNOWLEDGE

To access the botanical blend flour library open source information click here.

Kindest regards,

Dr Kimbell.