Why are so many of us baking bread? On lockdown loneliness and the rituals of everyday life
Britain is a nation of bread-makers. Or so it seems. In the midst of a pandemic, the grocery shelves are bare of flour and yeast. Instagram is filled with slow-motion bread rising, with the slick surfaces of seeded loaves.
Across social media, people are obsessed with the perfect bake, just as they were apparently fixated, one short month ago, with scoring toilet roll. In real life, they are swapping recipes, giving tips on where to find ingredients, and delivering bread to friends and neighbours. Last week, I came home from my early morning dog walk to find freshly baked hot cross buns on my doorstep, courtesy of BlueBird Bakery in York.
Despite the growing popularity of all things Keto, the clues to Britain’s bread fixation have been there some time: in the Great British Bake Off, with its cheerful resilience and multicoloured bunting, and the popularity of baking competitions and programmes. But the rise of dough is not just a British trend. All around the world, people are baking bread.
My friend and fellow writer Noga Arikha posted from Paris to share the details of a much-needed shopping trip: ‘the foodie paradise of rue de Nil…the best vegetables, cheeses, fish, bread’. She shared images of her ‘first ever focaccia’. And she asked a question that has been circulating in social media: ’Why is everyone making bread suddenly, anyway?’
As a historian of emotions, I have some ideas. Yes, there have been bread shortages, but breadmaking is also embedded in our sensory and material worlds. It has meanings that extend beyond the functional into the historical and symbolic, as I wrote in a recent essay for Time magazine. Lockdown loneliness — or its avoidance — and the proliferation of bread-making, might have something in common.
Historically, bread is life, physical and spiritual. Give us this day our daily bread says the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew, 6:9), which has been around in one form or another since 650 CE. This plea for physical preservation by God links to a time of uncertain harvests and ‘bread hunger’ — which still affects nearly 800 million people worldwide.
The right to one’s daily bread was highlighted in the 19th century, when the Corn Laws placed restrictions on imported food and grain, resulting in riots, starvation and executions. The price of bread remains a historically emotive issue, and one of the foods included on the UK government’s Consumer Prices Index (CPI).
In most of the post-industrial world, people with stable incomes are normally protected from food shortages thanks to a complex history of supply chains. Due to inequalities, and austerity, this hasn’t been the case for rising numbers of people in the UK living in food poverty. During the pandemic, however, food shortages, and a lack of delivery availability for the most vulnerable, has highlighted the fragility of the food system.
There are class-based elements to this of course. Like the slow-cooking movement, it is the time- and cash-poor who tend to rely on sliced bread and shop-bought loaves. But many are baking bread for the first time, and getting significant emotional pleasure from the process.
What is this resurgence of bread making about? At one level, it’s hunger and a breakdown in supply chains, meaning that people are returning to traditional ‘heritage’ practices, with all the food snobbery that might entail. At another level, it is about something more, which is closely linked to the spiritual and emotional connections that bread has in every life.
If the absence of toilet roll seemed to spark global fears that “civilization” itself was under threat, a rise in baking seems similarly connected to the global sense of civility that is associated in the West with getting enough food. Or getting the right kind of food. And food has important symbolic functions in shaping identity and connecting people to their sense of family, belief system and traditions. Bread is key to these traditions, from Polish Povitica to Jewish Cholla.
When I told Noga I was writing about bread, I discovered she was too, with a poem that invokes the enduring legacy of breadmaking as a practice, a way of being (a ‘starter’) that roots us all in our pasts: ‘I started it but it started long before me/Within walls, within the ancestry/Of home and hearth and grains transformed/by human hands in open lands, upon living soil’.
Bread connects us to the past and invokes our heritage, for good and ill. This is important for understanding loneliness during Covid-19, and what it is to be alone, or to live in solitude, at any time. It is not physical separateness from others that makes us feel lonely, but our sense of emotional distancing. Which is why we can be loneliest of all in a crowd, or being in an abusive marriage might be a double whammy: bringing desperate loneliness and alienation from others through shame and social judgement.
Baking bread is one of the ways we might prevent and deal with loneliness. It is an emotional and pragmatic reminder of the ways we belong in the world: our imaginative connections with others and sometimes nostalgic sense of belonging in families, friendship networks, even nations. And it does so in a way that is significant: it embeds us in the reality of our senses. From the tactility of a good knead, with all its attached sensorial language (the dough should feel ‘like a nursing breast’, my father informed a perplexed 11-year-old me), to the rituals of rising and the pervasive scent of baking and the taste and mouth-feel of a chewy crust, bread ticks all the sensory boxes.
During lockdown this is particularly important. We are deprived of many forms of sensory connections to others. The absence of touch is lamented by others in the limited world of Zoom. But our engagements with others is not only about touch; it is about how the people we love smell, the warmth of their bodies, the memories of times spent together in the world and around other people.
In baking and eating bread, we are returned to this connectedness with others, via the sociability of ‘breaking bread’, of being together. In my book A Biography of Loneliness, I talk about the physicality of loneliness and its avoidance, of the ways material culture, from childhood objects to family recipes, and from honking geese to a favourite perfume, can generate or prevent feelings of loneliness.
Baking bread is a timely reminder that we inhabit a sensorial, practical and emotional world shared by others; a world where in the midst of grief and fear and death there is also life and hope. There are filled bellies, floury hands, and the (sometimes relentless, gendered) rituals of cooking and eating and starting again that connect us to our physical bodies, to our relationships, and an idea of ‘community’ that is bigger than ourselves. Is there anything more comforting during a pandemic?
