Hi everyone,
Big week. Thank you to everyone recently subscribed, I’m so happy to have you here. Huge thank you to the seven people who made donations to my GoFundMe campaign in the first 48 hours. Thank you, as well, to everyone who shared the campaign on their socials or amongst your friends and family. As supportive of a community as this is, I know to be successful, we will have to canvass outside of our baking network. Please continue to share widely.
Today I wanted to talk about small-scale milling, the responsibility that comes along with it, and the concerns I have.
I don’t support conventional commodity grains being made into white flour. Industrialized agriculture prioritizes uniformity and yield over flavour and soil health. This has been well-outlined in Famerama’s Cereal, listen here. However, commercial milling is still a regulated industry. So, despite their lack of integrity for making sound choices to improve human and environmental health, there are still teeth insuring the product they bring to market contains the building-blocks to support human life. That’s why white flour is enriched. Because for over a hundred years, our civilization has been aware of the harm that would be caused by extracting all the nutrients from our food without enriching it with some of what was taken away. That’s why iron, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin and folic acid are synthetically enriched in commercial flours.
Grain regulation goes back as early as 1516. For hundreds of years, humans have been aware of the widespread harm that would take place if we mismanage our staple crops.
In today’s market, there is a loophole. We are seeing small-scale mills and bakeries, making their own unenriched white flour. These are artisanal brands mimicking industrialized practices, and greenwashing the final product. I’ve talked about the realities of the behind-the-scenes of our food system before, and sometimes the worst actors are the ones you would expect the least.
Organic stone-milled white flour contains no real nutrition. It is a pile of starch with small amounts of germ and bran. All the valuable, nutrient-rich components were discarded in the sifting process, and possibly ended up in the waste bin. It’s why grain advocates, like Dr. Monica Spiller, have long been calling for bakers and eaters to cease and desist in eating and supporting unenriched flours and their producers. You can read her 2018 open letter here.
I won’t take the fiber out of my baking, out of my communities diets. I won’t be the one to take out 20 micronutrients of the mouths of my neighbours. These nutrients include some of the most commonly supplemented nutrients to support reproductive and prenatal health. How could I do that? And what would motivate me to go to the extra effort and cost to remove this from our flour and baking? I don’t believe people are as scared of whole grains as some people make it seem. And I believe in my ability of baking, and the quality work the farmers I work with are doing, that we can offer the most delicious product, with the greatest nutritional content, and the lowest environmental impact. As I said in my GoFundMe campaign, this isn’t just about reducing food waste, this is about making sure the most valuable part of our grain crops aren’t being lost to archaic industrialized practices.
Greenwashing sucks. It sucks because it misinforms and manipulates eaters who are just trying to make informed decisions. It sucks because it interferes with the work passionate people are doing to make actual positive change in our food system. How is the average person supposed to tell the difference between the actual #grainchangers and the imposters? I’m tired of seeing brands make claims that aren’t backed up in their work. Calling out industrial practices doesn’t mean anything if you are mimicking them on a small-scale. Our food system lacks transparency, despite brands using that exact word in the hashtags. They might point the finger at commercial mills and say “they did what to our flour?”. We should know what is taking place, but in both industrial and artisanal operations. Because if the only priority is telling the story of your premium product, instead of having a strong conviction for the practices behind it, there is no accountability for the consequences of poor practices.
Small-scale food producers have as much onus on them as commercial producers do to respect our environment, value the workers behind their product, and create healthy food. And everyone, as eaters, has a responsibility to educate ourselves the best we can and hold companies accountable.
Have you heard that it’s residential households that are responsible for much of the glysophate run-off into our waterways? This is because even on a small-scale, with a bottle of pesticide in your hands, it’s easy to apply twice the amount suggested. Small-scale food producers have to be aware that poor practices that create large amounts of food waste are as harmful to the community they are trying to feed as that being done to them by the corporate giants.
Switch to whole grains. Eat well.
Thank you for reading and listening to me rant. Please let me know below if you have any comments, I would love to hear from you.
Dearest Tommy,
Thank you for this newsletter, and for all of the letters you send, and take the time to write. Thank you especially, for the huge wealth of information that you shared in this letter; as well as your heart and soul and deep truthfulness and belief in your practice, as always. The facts you have share here will really inform my practice and the information I share, so I really appreciate this letter a lot. THANK YOU!
Sending so much love and luck and strength and energy with the next steps of your beautiful whole grain whole hearted bakery. Keep on being you and speaking your truth. Hen <3
Tommy - Which small-scale millers are making white flour? It's not something I am aware of happening widely, at least not here in the US. If you mean they are *sifting* flour to various levels of extraction, that's not something I have a problem with, and it isn't the same as "making white flour". Stone-milled flours, even of relatively low extraction rates, are more nutritious than commodity white flours, and in any case, most small scale millers sell sifted flours of very high extraction rates.