Real Bread bakers: consumed by their craft

Making Real Bread requires real skill. That’s a given. The ability to work with simple ingredients; to handle them, listen to them and understand them, can take decades to master. Like an expert potter pulling a bowl from a lump of rotating earth, it all looks so easy. From the outside perhaps, but the reality is illustrated by the bags underneath the baker’s eyes.

Dog hours

When we walk into a bakery at eight or nine in the morning, greeted there by wall-to-wall crispy carbs, how often do we consider the time and effort that went into crafting them? It’s not just the number hours but the fact that many of those hours will have been worked during the nighttime. BBC Radio 2 presenter OJ Borg calls them ‘dog hours’ because, by his calculation, each hour feels like seven. If true, it goes some way to account for the reduced life expectancy of nightworkers.

Consider the slow erosion over time that this profession, seemingly so soft and fluffy, can have on the human body. Decades lifting, twisting, pacing, hours spent staring into the haze of a deck oven, night after night after night. Worn down by the abrasive nature of the work, baker’s joints are not good currency. I have first-hand experience of this life. As a third-generation baker, I saw the negative impact it had on my parents and grandparents.

Yet we rarely talk about his investment when justifying the price of Real Bread. It’s ingredients that take centre stage, with (some) people understanding that better quality justifies a higher price. The price of equipment, rent, rates, power and so on might also jostle for attention, but what about the human cost? Perhaps it is time we had an honest chat about how bakers suffer for their craft and how we need to restore Real Bread to its place as monarch of the table.

Protecting our bakers

Real Bread bakers often miss out on many aspects of life that most ‘normal’ people have the chance to enjoy. A social life, a weekend off, time with family in the holidays, or simply reading a bedtime story. Added pressure comes from snatching naps in the daytime and being perpetually grouchy and exhausted. There’s that new wholesale customer who needs their bread baked, sliced and ready by 6am, so the work must be done and done well. 

When viewed through this lens, it’s easier to understand the slide of many craft bakers into the clutches of industrial manufacturers of potions and powders. Slimy reps slip in the back door, just as the floor is being swept, with promises of an easier life, a way out of the never-ending grind. As customers will have no way of knowing whether or not they are receiving the real deal, the temptation is so great. The Real Bread Campaign has repeated many times the need for legislation to prevent misuse of marketing terms such as ‘craft’, ‘artisan’, ‘sourdough’ and even ‘bread’. These arguments often centre around the need to protect shoppers from being misled and ripped off. How do make people aware of the positive impact it would have on honest bakers, who stay committed to their craft, if they receive the protection that they deserve?

One of the main reasons I wanted to write Breaking Bread: How Baking Shaped Our World, was to give a voice to bakers from one of their own. Not an anthropologist, historian or academic, but someone who has lived and toiled in the baking world. Someone whose whole life has been framed by the inevitability of a career in baking, and who understands the tragedy and trauma of failure from bitter, personal experience. I know so many bakers who have struggled with mental and physical ill health, directly related to their careers. If baking was a public sector profession, we’d be due some tasty payouts! 

The UK has a long history of protecting bread and its makers, whether via the Assisa Panis et Cervisiae (Assize of Bread and Ale) of 1266, or the Making of Bread Act of 1757. But where’s that protection now? I would argue that it was the collapse of price protection in the 1970s that helped to speed bread’s rapid decline into the malnutritious, enfeebled national embarrassment that many have come to hold so dear to their hearts.

I’m always amused by the person who brings up the Victorian adulteration of bread, as if it is unimaginable to think it could have happened. From an arsenal of additives, to a pharmacy of ‘fortificants’, and the insinuation of undeclared ‘processing aids’, I believe that industrial baked products have never been more adulterated than they are now. Along with all the other vacuous, ultra-processed foods that have been killing us for decades, manufacturers are allowed to hijack the good name of this staple of the human diet.

Restoration project

If craft bakers are still going to sweat through the night to provide Real Bread for their communities, bread that breeds life and togetherness, then I think the big industries should keep their hands off such words until they understand the human cost of them. Aside from the intentionally misleading dishonesty of the products, it just speaks of a class of person completely devoid of integrity and a lack of respect for humanity’s most treasured foodstuff.

There is a lot that is broken about our food systems in the UK and more generally across the world. If we are going to fix these issues, then the biggest win would come from revolutionising our attitude to Real Bread and its bakers. While researching my book, I interviewed dozens of experts in my attempt to discover solutions to this problem. There is no single answer, no shortcut or quick fix. If we are serious about restoring bread to its rightful pedestal, then we must put the work in - and that work must be valued and respected.

@thebreaducator

David is a former head bakery of Pump Street Bakery in Suffolk. He now coordinates, and teaches at, Pump Street Workshop.

Breaking Bread: How Baking Shaped the World is published by Aurum on 20 March 2025. David's book launch tour includes speaking at BATCH: Stroud on 18 March.