Bread-making can be a relief from all kinds of grief
With many people deciding to make bread during the pandemic, one Saskatchewan woman chose to analyze the phenomenon from a folklore perspective since bread has been a staple in times of change.
Kristin Catherwood, director of living heritage with Heritage Saskatchewan, wrote a blog post about how bread has had cultural significance over the centuries, including in this province. Catherwood had thought about writing about bread as living heritage for years, but it was only when she moved to the family farm recently and took a sourdough starter kit from her fridge that she had the time to write.
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“I hold onto the power of simple, everyday themes to serve as portals into our most deeply held cultural values. Bread is one such (aspect),” she wrote.
Besides being a tangible and indisputable foodstuff, bread is also a symbol of culture. Think “give us this day our daily bread” in The Lord’s Prayer; in Christianity and other major religions, bread takes on symbolic potency, Catherwood continued. One of the core tenets of Roman Catholicism is transubstantiation: the process whereby bread is actually transformed into the Body of Christ. The cultural connotations of bread are informed by historic realities; the flour and lard rations that the federal government provided to Aboriginal people in the 19th and 20th centuries were inadequate to stave off starvation. These ingredients were combined to make bannock, a traditional Scottish staple that has now become a culturally significant food for Plains Aboriginals. “… Without cultural context, bannock is just ingredients baked together. It is the weight of history and culture that imbues it with its meaning and significance, and thus it becomes an example of living heritage,” said Catherwood.
Folklore scholars examine the everyday items, practices and beliefs that inform people’s understanding of themselves and their belonging to place. Folklorist Diane Tye published a study on bread’s cultural significance in Newfoundland, arguing that bread touches all aspects of life and is a sensitive indicator of change. Catherwood discovered that in today’s current circumstances, bread making has become almost a hobby or recreational pursuit. In earlier generations, as Tye noted, the demand of bread-making filled women’s days and was the main core activity since it was essential to a family’s survival.
Tye also discussed ways parents encouraged their kids to
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A study by folklorist Barbara Rieti of Newfoundland fairy lore found it was common to carry bread in one’s pockets for protection from fairies or supernatural entities. Rieti argued that bread “provides a talisman of domesticity (and culture) against the perils of the wilderness.” If wilderness also means “the unknown,” Catherwood wrote, then it could be argued the use of bread is a comforting symbol of home and culture against today’s uncertainty. In her article, Tye spoke to the connection of bread with a nostalgic yearning to return to earlier times, particularly, to rural lifestyles that were self-sufficient and grounded in family closeness and connection to place.
“My perspective on our current bread frenzy is closely related to this. The act of baking bread is symbolic of … (how) most of our ancestors lived. They did not have the option of whether to eat our or cook at home, or even go to the grocery store for that matter …,” wrote Catherwood.
The panic buying seen in recent weeks might not be irrational after all. Rather, society is responding to fundamental human fears of survival, with these fears culturally informed, she continued. Bread represents food in general, while COVID-19 is revealing the fragility of our food systems and the complicated transport networks that get supplies to supermarkets.
We don’t normally consider this supply chain during “normal life,” but we are confronted with our vulnerability when a disruption occurs. The act of baking bread — of producing our own food — is perhaps an assertion of self-sufficiency and personal survival during uncertainty.
While bread hasn’t been scarce in stores, through instinct society acts upon cultural heritage embedded in our bones, said Catherwood. The very question of survival and essentials of life increases when our world is brought to a sudden halt. For her, nurturing her sourdough starter to life took two weeks.
“The symbolism was not lost on me even as I performed the daily ritual of feeding the starter until finally, it was ready to produce a loaf of bread,” she continued.
“… the pandemic is forcing us to be close to hearth and home, and bread is inextricably linked with that … we reach for something solid to hold onto. A daily food usually taken for granted, sometimes demonized because of its heavy carb load, and other times brought into the spotlight for religious or cultural ritual, bread is now returning to its place on our tables and in our collective cultural consciousness as the very stuff of life.”