Our Daily Bread

Bread is, of course, the staff of life. And bread, the sort of bread we eat, is peculiar to a country. Many Europeans, for example, find British bread soft and fluffy. Many Britons like French bread and there is an increasing taste for artisan bread. Perhaps, after decades of quickly produced manufactured bread, bread is back.

Bread also means things to us. As a basic component of a meal, breaking bread, eating together, is a major social event. One of the things that people want to do after Covid lockdowns is eating together, and often that will include bread. Bread also is a major component of religious events, such as Holy Communion. We share bread, consecrated for us, broken for us as the body of Christ was.

Bread has been a major consideration since it was discovered, an event now unknown. Some roasted grain to eat, but others must have ground it and, perhaps, wild yeasts landed on it and the bread rose. Baking bread is a fascinating and consuming business – how can a few grains of yeast create such transformation?

The constituents of bread are fairly basic: flour, water, yeast and salt. You can, I think, do without the salt, but that does not improve the flavour. Salt is also an inhibitor of the yeast; the aim is balance between the two. The flour gives the gluten which provides the food for the yeast to grow. It also provides most of the flavour.

Without yeast the bread is unleavened. This too is famous and well known: the Israelites took unleavened bread in the Exodus. Allowing bread to rise takes time. Modern methods add sugar to speed the process, but this does not permit the flavour to develop as much. A rising can take up to three hours; the yeast growth is exponential and so is faster in the latter stages. With sugar, the rise can be limited to about fifteen minutes.

But bread is so much more than just food:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through you goodness we have received the bread we offer you; fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

The Earth, from which the wheat comes, is God’s. The human hands which make the bread are also God’s.

This relates back to a sort of joke about God and humanity. Man challenges God to a contest to create life. They toss a coin to see who goes first and Man wins. He stoops and picks up some soil. ‘Ah,’ says God, ‘No, make your own earth.’

‘All things come from God, and of His own do we give Him.’

Bread means things to us beyond food. Fellowship and sharing for one thing. This has been a problem during lock-down of course. The availability of the Eucharist has been limited (much more so for wine when shared in a common cup, of course). The fellowship meal is much less available than it was. On the other hand, the making of bread may have become more popular. Bread making takes time, and some people have had time because of the Covid virus and lockdowns.

The sorts of bread people ate meant things as well. The nobility ate wheat bread, the most expensive and hardest to grow grain. Indeed, some argue that the Norman nobility refused to take land in highland England because they would have to eat oat or rye bread. In the Bible the boy has barley loaves – the food of the Middle Eastern poor at the time. Jesus takes and breaks it, and all eat and are satisfied. The hungry have no space of the niceties of what sort of bread it is.

If bread, if eating simply becomes a mechanical occupation - we eat because we have to – then bread becomes a poor substitute for itself. As a child, I read a book called, I think, Fattipuffs and Thinifers. The Fattipuffs were gourmands, for whom eating was a pleasure and a meal took half a day. Thinifers had a motto: ‘We eat to live not live to eat’. Eventually, for reasons I do not recall, they went to war over the matter. Perhaps both sides learnt that food is both eating to live and living to eat.

The Thinifers ate standing up, in a hurry. But nice food is to be taken slowly, and the nicest food takes time to prepare. Bread can take from fifteen minutes to three hours to rise, and the flavour depends on the time. There is a movement towards ‘slow food’ as opposed to fast food. Food that is made carefully, to allow flavour, and which is savoured with friends or family. Fast food is stuffed down at your desk between meetings. Perhaps we have to decide which we prefer and try it out.

Similar reflections apply to other things, of course. When we consider God, or pray, do we just mutter a quick petition and rush on, or do we slow down and reflect. How much thought do we put in to considering God and what he does for us? Do we just think that the bread before us is the work of human hands and forget the rest?