[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 46 (Tuesday, March 10, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1667-S1668]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RECOGNIZING KING ARTHUR FLOUR
Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, Vermont's King Arthur Flour has long been
a worldwide leader in culinary circles. Today, I would like to
recognize the company's effort to produce a healthier bread, called
Just Bread. King Arthur Flour, which is an employee-owned company in
Norwich, VT, sells 350 loaves of Just Bread each week and also donates
loaves to a local food shelf, in the true tradition of Vermonters
reaching out to help others. In recognition of these efforts, I ask
that the February 18, 2020, article ``The Whole-Grain Grail: A Sandwich
Bread With Mass Appeal,'' by Amelia Nierenberg from the New York Times,
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.
``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.
[[Page S1668]]
``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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