Baker's Notes

There is a good deal of camaraderie between bakers. Regional gatherings and now online chat lists host bakers from bakeries of all sizes from all over the world. In general there is little confrontation and people are happy to contribute advice about everything from bread formulas to business planning. Even bakers who sell in the same market get along well. Last week on a web list of bakers that I participate in, a difference of opinion led to quite a heated dialogue about etiquette, opinion and attitude. I’ll describe the basic disagreement, but the real reason I bring this up is that it encapsulates an important human conflict.

Baking is truly an international craft. The lineage of baking techniques goes back centuries in several countries, and each tradition has both unique and shared practices. Because of this international heritage, baking terms that describe the same thing, have English, Italian, French, German and probably several other national versions. No baker would claim that the terms from one country are superior to that of another country, but having so many terms to describe basically the same thing, makes for a lot of confusion. For example, the term sourdough has the following counterparts in English and French alone: starter, mother, leaven culture, levain, chef and sponge. It is obvious how one baker’s sponge could be another’s “chef”, but without standardization, who’s to know? Before I go on, let me just say that bakers are not the hopeless bunch of idiots that this mess makes us out to be. When it comes to calculating bread formulas, we use an almost universally accepted mathematical system referred to as “baker’s math”. Since the ingredients are expressed in percentages rather than volume or weight measurements in baker’s math, anyone from any country can compare two formula’s side by side and get meaningful information very quickly. There are only two or three different ways that bakers use “baker’s math”, so compared to the mess in the baking lexicon described above, that’s nothing.

Now back to our story. A home baker asked on the breadbaker’s web list last week if anyone had ever come up with an accepted glossary of definitions for the many baking terms bandied about in such groups. A couple matter of fact responses came back stating one source or another, and then a long post came in from a baker in Australia that addressed the issue in a somewhat sarcastic, a little crude, but to many of us, hilarious way. There was a little profanity, a few anatomical terms, and some remarks about religion so a PG-13 to R rating was advisable, but as far as I know, no children follow the latest flour price trends on the breadbaker’s list. Several of us thanked him for the comic relief given the current state of the baking trade, and then those who were offended chimed in. Accusations came in about everything from his crude language, to sexism, and religious intolerance. In his defense, his american wife posted a comment about how incredibly dangerous it has become in the U.S. to say much of anything potentially controversial without someone howling. After the moderator of the group posted the group rules, it was made clear that several of the posts broke policy, but the whole affair got me thinking about more than just this case, and that is where my larger point lies.

As a group of adults, it seems to me that the a member of the breadbaker’s group aught to be able to say a few swears, mention human anatomy, and even be a little offensive from time to time and not have people jumping up and down in disgust. What fun is it to be ruled over by a set of laws that one is likely to find in an elementary school? This is the argument of one half of my brain at least. The other half can’t help but bring up the long history of thinly veiled, and not so thinly veiled hate speech that was and is still used as a method of oppression, and abuse all over the world. Whether racist, sexist, homophobic or any other form of discrimination, I think most people agree that such speech can be genuinely hurtful and ought to be controlled in some way especially in public spaces.

In my opinion our Australian baker was not speaking hatefully about Christians, women or French people, but obviously others felt differently. To take another case that people reading probably remember, I had mixed feelings about the Don Imus debacle last year around this time. I personally never much liked his show, I thought he made a very stupid comment when he referred to an entire basketball team as a bunch of “nappy headed -----“, but in my opinion the public outrage shamed him as he deserved, the issue was brought into the light and aired out, and he apologized. What followed was a tangential, polarized nationwide shouting match that perhaps revealed underlying tensions about race in America, but the discussion was carried out in a dysfunctional way which was destined to not really address much of anything. Having the whole thing end with him being taken off the air because sponsors were pulling out rather than listeners voting with their "feet", to me illustrated that Mr. Imus had been turned into a symbol rather than a flawed individual like the rest of us, and whether he was sorry or not was no longer relevant. I could bring up a half dozen more similar examples from this political season alone, but instead I’ll let you think a moment about how the dilemma plays out on all levels, from the personal to the international. I challenge anyone to come up with a workable solution that can be applied objectively. Thanks for the orders, have a good week. Noah