For various reasons—social isolation, quarantining, fear of food shortages, boredom, social media—the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a dramatic increase in sourdough breadmaking. While this is something to be celebrated, the phenomena also calls for closer scrutiny. Why bread? What do the popular celebrations of bread over the past year obscure about the broader history, culture, and political economy of bread? Who has been left out of these narratives, and why?
Topic: Bread in the Time of COVID-19
Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith (2020) By Bread Alone: Baking as Leisure, Performance, Sustenance, During the COVID-19 Crisis, Leisure Sciences, DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1773980
Topic: Bread and Canadian Nationalism / Colonialism
Varty, J. (2004). On protein, prairie wheat, and good bread: Rationalizing technologies and the Canadian state, 1912-1935. Canadian Historical Review, 85(4), 721-754. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.85.4.721
Robidoux, M. A., & Mason, C. W. (2017). Understanding the Legacy of Colonial Contact from a Physiological Perspective: Nutrition Transitions and the Rise of Dietary Disease in Northern Indigenous Peoples. In A land not forgotten: Indigenous food security and land-based practices in northern Ontario (pp. 34 - 51). Univ. of Manitoba Press.
James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of
Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2012)
Topic: Grains and White Supremacy, White Identity
Eddens, A. (2017). White science and Indigenous maize: The racial logics of the Green Revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46(3), 653-673. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1395857
Bobrow-Strain, A. (2008). White bread bio-politics: Purity, health, and the triumph of industrial baking. cultural geographies, 15(1), 19-40. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007085783
Topic: Bread, Class, Wellness and the Gluten Free Diet
Lewis, T. (2020). From culinary aesthetics to phatic food: Food photography on Instagram and Facebook. Digital Food, 15-42. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350055131.ch-002
Haeusermann, T. (2014). I can’t eat that: The sociology behind the rise in food allergies and intolerances. Current Sociology, 63(3), 369-386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392114559847
Diez-Sampedro, A., Olenick, M., Maltseva, T., & Flowers, M. (2019). A gluten-free diet, not an appropriate choice without a medical diagnosis. Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, 2019, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/2438934
Gustafsson, S., & Engstrand, A. (2012). Sourdough - The Stories Beyond Flour, Water and Salt [Master's thesis]. http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2835641&fileOId=2835668
Wallace, D. F. (2005). Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. Little, Brown.
Topic: Bread and Gender
Evans, D. (2018, November 19). Do you even bake, bro? How the Silicon Valley set fell in love with sourdough and decided to disrupt the 6,000-year-old craft of making bread, one crumbshot at a time. Eater. https://www.eater.com/2018/11/19/18099127/bread-silicon-valley-sourdough-tech-bros-tartine-chad-robertson
Kanafani‐Zahar, A. (1997). “Whoever eats you is no longer hungry, whoever sees you becomes humble”: Bread and identity in Lebanon. Food and Foodways, 7(1), 45-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.1997.9962051
Topic: Experimental Music (...)
Parsons, M., Nyman, M. (1999). Towards (a definition of ) experimental music. In Experimental music: Cage and beyond. Cambridge University Press.
