Why I started this newsletter
Bread is the simplest food in the world. Flour, water, salt, time. And yet it has become one of the most hijacked.
The industrialisation of bread — the stripping out of fibre, the replacement of fermentation with additives, the normalisation of ultra-processed loaves on every supermarket shelf — didn’t happen by accident. It happened because cheap, fast bread is enormously profitable. And the systems that now control what information reaches you — social media algorithms, AI-generated content, platform ranking systems optimised for engagement rather than truth — are funded by the same economy that benefits from you not knowing how simple, how nourishing, and how transformative real bread can be.
I am a scientist and a baker. I have spent decades researching the relationship between bread, the gut microbiome, and human health. I hold the world’s first doctorate in Baking as Lifestyle Medicine. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that what most people are being told about bread — by manufacturers, by platforms, by algorithmically curated feeds — is incomplete at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
This newsletter is my answer to that.
It is not simply a collection of baking tips, though you will find those here. It is a thinking space — a place where we consider bread seriously, as science, as culture, as pleasure, and as a quiet form of activism. Every time you make a real loaf you are opting out of a system that would rather you didn’t know how.
This is thinking space. If that sounds like something you need, you are in the right place.