[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 46 (Tuesday, March 10, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1666-S1667]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   RECOGNIZING ELMORE MOUNTAIN BREAD

  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, I want to take a moment to recognize a 
Vermont gem, Elmore Mountain Bread, a small business founded by a wife 
and husband team. Blair Marvin is a native Vermonter, who met her 
husband, Andrew Heyn, in Seattle, where she attended culinary school 
and worked. Blair brought Andrew to Vermont, where after working in 
several local restaurants, they took over a small bakery. Their work 
has been recognized locally, regionally, and nationally, in 
publications including Kids VT, Yankee Magazine and over the airwaves 
on National Public Radio. An article by Amelia Nierenberg in the 
February 18, 2020, edition of the New York Times focuses on Blair and 
Andrew's development of soft, sliced organic loaves, inspired by 
Blair's effort to provide healthier bread to their son Phineas's 
classmates at a local one-room schoolhouse. Small businesses like 
Elmore Mountain Bread are the cornerstone of our local economies, are 
fixtures in our communities, and are at the very heart of the American 
dream. In recognition of Blair and Andrew's efforts, I ask that the 
article ``The Whole-Grain Grail: A Sandwich Bread With Mass Appeal,'' 
be printed in the Congressional Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Feb. 18, 2020]

        The Whole-Grain Grail: A Sandwich Bread With Mass Appeal

                         (By Amelia Nierenberg)

       Elmore, VT.--When Blair Marvin started making and selling 
     bread 15 years ago, she promised herself three things: She 
     would never preslice it. She would never bake it in a pan. 
     And she would certainly never sell it in plastic.
       But three years ago, as she was helping out in the one-room 
     schoolhouse where her son, Phineas, attended first grade, she 
     realized she had a problem. At lunch, his friends weren't 
     eating sandwiches made from the stone-ground, organic loaves 
     she and her husband baked at Elmore Mountain Bread, and sold 
     in local supermarkets. Sure, the students had Vermont-churned 
     cheese from Vermont-raised cows. But their bread often came 
     from a national bread company, made from white flour or laced 
     with preservatives.
       ``All of these preconceived notions and standards I set for 
     myself,'' said Ms. Marvin, 39. ``None of it mattered. If 
     Phineas's peers weren't eating our bread, then we were doing 
     something wrong.''
       So she broke her vow. Using mostly whole-wheat flour, 
     stone-ground in a mill made by New American Stone Mills, a 
     company owned by her husband, Andrew Heyn, she developed a 
     new loaf--soft, sliced and sealed in plastic.
       ``Everybody should have access to healthy food,'' she said. 
     ``We're trying to make something that is recognizable to the 
     general population. It's a way of getting real bread into 
     people's diets.'' Ms. Marvin and Mr. Heyn are part of a 
     collective of about 40 bakers, millers, teachers and wheat-
     breeders who work with the Bread Lab, a famed research center 
     affiliated with Washington State University that has long 
     focused on developing wheat varieties specific to regions of 
     the country. Since last April, using guidelines established 
     by the lab, the collective has pursued a common goal: making 
     a whole-grain loaf that's familiar-looking and affordable 
     enough to appeal to a mass audience.
       The Bread Lab calls it ``the approachable loaf,'' but each 
     bakery in the Bread Lab Collective makes a slightly different 
     version, informed by local tastes and local grains. Elmore 
     Mountain Bread calls its bread the Vermont Redeemer, after a 
     type of local wheat. Zingerman's Bakehouse, in Ann Arbor, 
     Mich., calls its loaf State St. Wheat. King Arthur Flour, an 
     employee-owned company in Norwich, Vt., christened its 
     version Just Bread and published a recipe for home bakers on 
     its website. It sells 350 of the loaves a week and donates 
     others to a food pantry, said Karen Colberg, a chief 
     executive at King Arthur Flour.
       Whatever the name, the approachable loaf is made in 20 
     states, from Kalispell, Mont., to New Haven, Conn., as well 
     as in England, Canada and Australia. For each loaf sold, 10 
     cents goes back to the Bread Lab to help fund grain research.
       The loaf is something of a Trojan horse, a way to sneak 
     healthy ingredients onto the taste buds of a younger 
     generation. Its disguise as a standard-issue sandwich bread 
     might be just the guerrilla tactic needed to get regional 
     whole grains integrated into the developed world's diet.
       ``If it's crusty, you're not going to get soccer moms 
     saying, `Hey, we need to make peanut butter and jelly 
     sandwiches out of this,' '' said Anthony Ambeliotis, a member 
     of the collective who sells a version of the approachable 
     loaf for $4.50 at Mediterra Bakehouse, his family bakery 
     outside Pittsburgh.
       Despite a growing interest in baking bread and declining 
     consumption of white bread, most loaves sold in America are 
     still less than ideal in nutrients and fiber. Even the whole-
     grain breads that have reached a national market sometimes 
     contain chemical preservatives or additives, like flavor 
     enhancers or sugars.
       ``Why is it that `affordable' has to be this hyper-
     centralized, hyper-processed product?'' said Stephen Jones, 
     the director of the Bread Lab, standing in its flour-covered 
     research kitchen in Burlington, Wash., about 70 miles north 
     of Seattle.
       Since he founded the lab in 2011, Dr. Jones has tried to 
     reinvent bread by promoting regional grain, breeding wheat 
     varieties that taste good, like heirloom strains, but have a 
     strong yield, like most modern hybrids. At the Grain 
     Gathering conference, an annual meeting he hosts at the lab, 
     enthusiasts and members of the collective come together to 
     discuss how to incorporate the lab's research into craft 
     baking.
       ``Once, if you said, `I want to put my bread in a plastic 
     bag and I want it sliced,' people would be like: `I think 
     you're at the wrong conference,' '' said Louie Prager, an 
     owner of Prager Brothers Artisan Breads in San Diego, which 
     sold 4,800 approachable loaves last year, at $5 apiece. ``But 
     now, it's fine to make a bread that works better for more 
     people.''
       In summer 2018, Dr. Jones laid out his new vision. Like Ms. 
     Marvin, he recognized that the collective needed to pivot and 
     work with, rather than against, an American palate shaped by 
     generations of white-bread sandwiches. To build the base 
     formula for the new bread, he turned to Jeff Yankellow, a 
     baker and the western region sales manager for King Arthur 
     Flour.

[[Page S1667]]

       ``It's not the bricks of whole wheat bread that you think 
     of from the hippie days,'' Mr. Yankellow said. ``We're making 
     really good stuff.''
       The Bread Lab has set three strict parameters for the 
     approachable loaf: More than 60 percent of the flour must be 
     whole wheat; it can't have more than seven ingredients, all 
     of which have to be real food, not chemical additives; and it 
     can't cost more than $6.
       ``It's local, and I know the people who make it,'' said 
     Elaina Lefevre, 27, who regularly buys Ms. Marvin's loaf for 
     her young daughter at the Hannaford supermarket in 
     Morrisville, Vt. ``Five ingredients or less on a label is 
     what I aim for.''
       Bread is among the simplest and most mundane things humans 
     eat. It's in our prayers: Give us this day our daily bread. 
     It's in our wallets: our bread and butter.
       But bread has also been a catalyst for change. In 1789, the 
     high price of bread brought angry protesters to the streets 
     of Paris. In 2011, it did again, in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
       ``There's nothing more revolutionary than bread,'' Dr. 
     Jones said. ``But there's also nothing more mundane or 
     pedestrian than bread. It's who we are.''
       Dr. Jones often works in an apron branded with a skull and 
     the words ``White Sliced Death,'' armor in his crusade for 
     whole grains. Still, his no-hostages approach to white flour 
     and regional grains has earned him the respect of many in the 
     local-food movement.
       ``I think what we're doing is radical,'' Mr. Prager said. 
     ``It's radical to make good, organic, clean food affordable 
     to more people.''
       The collective has a point. It is a curious quirk of 
     contemporary America that a 6-year-old from Burlington, Vt., 
     and a 6-year-old from Burlington, Wash., can eat entirely 
     identical sandwiches for lunch. Once, that would have been 
     impossible. Vermont bread was made with Vermont wheat, and 
     Washington bread was made with Washington wheat, made from 
     local grains ground in local mills.
       But in the late 19th century, a new technology arrived from 
     Europe, changing American flour: roller mills, which separate 
     the bran--the ``whole'' part of whole wheat--from the kernel. 
     Without the bran's oils and proteins, the chalky ``all-
     purpose flour'' that most Americans would recognize today is 
     inert and easier to preserve.
       Although it keeps longer, white flour is less nutritious, 
     as the bran holds most of the kernel's fiber. Dr. Jones also 
     thinks it is wasteful in an agricultural system struggling to 
     adapt to climate change.
       ``If you're a farmer and you grow 100 pounds of wheat, only 
     70 of it is going to be made into food,'' Dr. Jones said ``If 
     you wanted to raise the yield of wheat tomorrow, just eat the 
     whole kernel.''
       Without added chemicals to keep the bread soft and mold-
     free, the approachable loaf has a shelf life of about a week 
     before it goes stale. This requirement also helps ensure that 
     the bread stays local; any time spent traveling to a store 
     would waste precious freshness.
       ``There's no reason that bread should keep for this long,'' 
     said Dr. Jones, shaking a mass-produced loaf with a sell-by 
     date of June 2018 that is still soft. He keeps it in the lab 
     to help make his case.
       Today, after millenniums as a daily staple, good bread has 
     almost become a luxury item. Whole-wheat flour can be 
     expensive, especially if it's organic. Loaves baked by hand 
     cost more, as bakers need to be paid for their time and 
     labor.
       Even $6 for the approachable loaf can be a steep price for 
     many families. But though it's not as cheap as Wonder Bread, 
     the loaf is close in price to most other whole-wheat options 
     sold in supermarkets. Members of the collective hope that, 
     together, they get Americans to take bread more seriously.
       ``People care about their hops and their cheese and their 
     coffee and their dairy and their meat, but they don't even 
     think twice about their grains,'' Ms. Marvin said. ``But 
     bread is the most broken.''

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