Resilient Bread Supply Chains
Bread is the UK's staple food, and the most iconic and resonant of all our foods. Yes our bread supply is amazingly fragile. Felicity Lawrence, in her book Not on the Label, reports that at the time of the fuel blockade in 2000 British supermarkets came within a few hours of having no bread on the shelves.
What would a resilient supply chain for bread look like? It would involve a baker close enough to the consumer that road transport is not needed to get bread from one to the other. The baker would be able to use British flour rather than relying on high-gluten imports. The flour would be milled very close to the baker (or possibly by the baker), so that an uninterrupted supply of flour could be guaranteed. The wheat used to make the flour would be stored in some quantity (and preferably a whole year's supply) sufficiently close to the mill (or baker) that, in the event of a transport breakdown, it could be brought in by barrow. And the techniques used to grow the wheat would be highly resilient techniques, perhaps based on the Composite Cross Populations being developed by the Organic Research Centre.
It will be noted that we are not arguing for on-farm milling of wheat (except perhaps where the farm is adjacent to the bakery). In general it is easier to move wheat than to move flour - wheat is more robust and can be moved by boat if necessary, but this is harder with flour. Similarly it is easier to store wheat than flour, so the best way to keep a supply in a town is to store a quantity of grain in the town and mill it as needed.
More obviously, this is an argument against bakeries which are distant from their customers. While it is easier to move grain than flour, it is easier to move either of those than bread, which is heavier and much bulkier than the flour from which it is made. Also bread has a very short shelf-life and needs to be delivered daily, whereas either wheat or flour can be stored for longer. Already we are seeing village shops starting to struggle to get supplies of fresh bread, because the costs of distributing bread to shops in small batches is becoming disproportionate to the value of the bread. For this reason we are investigating the potential for micro-bakeries at the village level.There are obvious synergies between this focus on Resilient Supply Chains and the aims of the Real Bread Campaign.