Yes.
Eating bread that nourishes you every day is one of the single most powerful decisions you can make towards long term health and wellness. Vanessa and the team have worked for the past decade on the premise that ‘The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new’ (Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior).
Vanessa believes that the true cost of cheap bread is a price no one should pay. It costs people their health – and its production takes a costly toll on the health of the planet.
Vanessa says: ‘Criticising bread is easy. Fast-leavened, industrially processed white bread, devoid of fibre, is an easy target. It literally ticks every negative box: it raises blood sugar; it often contains emulsifiers, preservatives or enzymes; it is likely to have been contaminated with weedkiller; it comes wrapped in plastic; and it starves your gut of the fibre needed to produce short-chain fatty acids, which support your immune system and sustain the microbes that produce the metabolites needed by your brain. I believe that consuming bread devoid of nutrients over a lifetime is a majority contributing factor to the epidemic lifestyle diseases and the mental health issues we are currently facing in society. It is time we address the nutritional value of our most basic of foods and count the true cost of cheap bread.’
The solution?
It is easy to just say ‘bread is bad’, but criticising is not the solution. Criticism elicits a defensive reaction – you simply make people feel bad for eating a sandwich. It is far more powerful to change by inspiring and educating.
How do we inspire change?
Activism
Cut to the core of Vanessa’s approach and she truly believes that, like fresh air and clean water, everyone should have access to bread that nourishes them. Changing the current system has to come first and foremost: encouraging people to explore, learn and apply knowledge to this most basic of foods. Vannesa believes that, given knowledge, encouragement and information, people will decide for themselves to eat good, nourishing, flavourful bread.
Encouraging change
The starting point for changing the way we look at bread has to be sharing knowledge, freely and openly. It’s one of the reasons that our basic recipe is free on The Sourdough School website, why the core knowledge of how to refresh a sourdough starter is also free, and why we make it a part of our routine to share information, and provide support and answers to our almost quarter of a million collective followers on social media. And we encourage others to share this knowledge, too, whether in their local community or online.
Share knowledge, recruit teachers: the Sourdough Sisters
Each year, the aim is to teach one to the power of ten, to the power of 1,000, and so on.
We have a programme for people working with charities and organisations. Although the programme is called Sourdough Sisters, it is entirely inclusive and open to anyone who meets the criteria, regardless of their gender identity.
The idea is to teach ten people how to bake sourdough, and about its nutritional benefits, particularly with regard to the gut microbiome and mental health. The ‘Sisters’ each then commit to teaching and passing on that knowledge to another hundred people, for free, and so on, to keep passing on the knowledge and skills, empowering more and more people to make their own truly healthy bread and to share it with those who are less privileged.
Some examples of the causes that last year’s Sourdough Sisters have been working on include:
- Supporting young people in deprived areas in Scotland – several youngsters have since gone on to get jobs baking
- Supporting children with special educational needs, especially autism
- Helping foster carers and their children
- Teaching ex-offenders who are rehabilitating
- Working with women who have been victims of sexual exploitation
- Teaching those who have been in treatment units for anxiety disorders and other mental health issues
- Baking with people who have recently come out of rehab
- Supporting those involved in food, arts and environmental-focused social enterprises
- Teaching and sharing specific recipes with adjusted flavour profiles for those living with cancer
Sourdough Sisters is also sponsored by several UK flour mills to enable the Sisters’ access to free flour – these were Marriages, Gilchesters Organic, Doves Farm and Sharpham Park. Our Sourdough Sisters are not just UK-based: we have international students, and the concept has spread to Hungary, America, etc.
We ensure the information we share about fermented food and gut health is passed on to all Sourdough Sisters.
Working with industry
We’ve been collaborating with wheat breeders and manufacturers for the past ten years, working towards new varieties of grain with higher levels of polyphenols. This is important because these grains have the potential to provide more nourishment to the gut and the beneficial microbes.
In addition, over the past five years, Vanessa has been bringing her extensive knowledge of sourdough to large, industrial companies. She wants to encourage all bakers to improve and bring about a change in the manufacturing process. Her aim is to make available an industrial sourdough bread which is nourishing and replaces the Chorleywood bread-making process.
Free tutorials through our website
The Sourdough School website is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to learn more about bread. We share all of our research openly through our study database. All of the studies we use in our work – and there are currently almost 400 of them – are available for people to reference. We are working hard to incorporate the references throughout the website in features, recipes and articles. We want people to delve deeper into the core research that we use here at the School and see how it applies to the bread they eat every day.
We regularly research and write articles and features that share baseline knowledge. Everything from the flour and how to improve the nutritional value of bread, to studies on the gut microbiome, our understanding of the gut, and probiotics and prebiotics.
It’s all about sharing the knowledge of how to make the bread, and understanding the key role this bread plays in our daily diet, as well as the impact it has over a lifetime.
Teaching the Sourdough Club
The school’s students get lifetime support after the course through the Sourdough Club. Membership is also available by subscription. There are regular updates, recipes, knowledge sharing, and a forum to discuss all sourdough issues.
Spreading the word
Several times a year, Vanessa is invited to be a keynote speaker at conferences. She uses these opportunities to discuss the transformation of grains through sourdough fermentation, the increased bio-availability of key nutrients and how that might benefit the gut.
She is also publishing the second Sourdough School book in September. Both books have been written with her core knowledge and research applied to the recipes.
The school is regularly contacted by newspapers and other media outlets. We were recently involved in a CNBC documentary, and have featured in Waitrose & Partners Food magazine, the Telegraph and on BBC Radio 4.
Courses
We’re constantly sharing our mission of creating fermented breads using a greater diversity of ingredients with our students. All the knowledge and research we have gathered suggests that diversity is beneficial to the gut microbiome and, in turn, to human health and wellness, both physical and mental. We’ve been teaching here for over ten years now, and hundreds of people have taken our courses.
Changing the paradigm of bread is at the very core of what we do: it’s our mission, and there are many ways in which we do this. We are working day by day, loaf by loaf, one bread at a time until we get it right.
