The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [7]
Until quite recently, this has been true for families as well as communities. Just about everything people ate, wore, slept under and sat on was produced at home. Everyone took part in the producing and everyone knew he or she was needed. It was in work carried out together that relationships deepened and values were handed on. Kitchens, gardens, woodshops—workplaces of any sort that aren’t dominated by machines too loud to talk over—are ideal places to exchange confidences as well as acquire skills. There’s no more effective situation to impart “the way we do things here” than in the throes of a specific job—no better place to show by example the patience to see out a task, or the good humor and ingenuity to set things right when they go awry.
In today’s world, the home tends not to be as productive a place as it once was. We take jobs elsewhere, earn money, buy things and bring them home to use. If we want our families to benefit from work undertaken together, we have deliberately to set up situations where that can happen. A great many families are doing just that today, in a variety of ways. Breadbaking maybe, or a vegetable garden, the tasks assigned by age and skill. One family of friends maintains a cottage-scale spinning and weaving industry using wool from their goats. The proceeds from what they sell go into a college savings fund.
Still another friend, a single mother and full-time librarian, missing the fine, fresh milk of her native Scotland and feeling vaguely that something was missing in her admittedly hectic life, decided that what she and her teenaged daughter needed more than anything … was a cow. Skeptical friends like me have been chastened to observe that she may have been right. Having the common, and thoroughly endearing focal point of a soft-eyed Jersey cow, knowing that she’s got to be milked no matter who’s overslept or who has a cold, having to arrange for grain, and hay, and visits from the vet, actually has not stressed the relationship of mother and daughter to the breaking point or sent either of them into exhaustion. Rather, it seems to have compelled them to stay in closer touch than they would have otherwise, and they both find the outdoor work, the contact with the animal herself, to be a perfect restorative. Not for everyone, a cow, but it does illustrate the principle and makes a twice-weekly baking seem small potatoes by comparison!
AS LONG AS we’ve known each other, Laurel, Bron, and I have shared with others at Nilgiri Press a strong interest in the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. (The first book we published, in fact—which Laurel helped design—was Gandhi the Man, by Eknath Easwaran.) That interest was rekindled last year by Richard Attenborough’s film masterpiece “Gandhi.” More and more of late, along with a great many other people, we have been looking to the man and his writings, seeming to find there solutions to the mounting problems of our day—solutions, or at least inspiration to go on looking for them.
The fact that Gandhi is always in the back of our minds now has led us to see in the baking of whole-grain bread even greater possible significance than I’ve already proposed. This might seem odd, if you think of Gandhi primarily as a political figure. Baking bread, after all, is a domestic and private preoccupation—far removed from political goings-on. But the fact is, overtly political activity took up a relatively small amount of time in Gandhi’s life.
For years and years at a time, throughout the nineteen thirties and forties, Gandhi virtually buried himself in village India, preoccupied exclusively with the daily minutiae of “rural uplift.” This was because his idea of revolution was “from the bottom upward.” He believed that the people of India, the vast majority of whom lived in the villages, would be in no position to take responsibility for governing