Microbakery – BBC Food Programme (2)

So what do I think having listened to it carefully twice? A whole 28 minutes of the esteemed BBC Food Programme devoted to microbakery!

When I started Bethesdabakers in 2007, the word microbakery wasn’t even in current use; I started to call it that on D. Lepard’s forum a few months later and wondered if it wasn’t just a bit pretentious.

And then I’ve spent several years promoting sourdough and encouraging people to bake and giving out advice and recipes and starter, running courses to help people decide if they want to go down the microbakery path. And then the phone starts ringing and txts beeping, “Hey, Mick, you were mentioned on the RADIO!”

So why am I still not happy?

Strangely enough Sunday morning I had Rick on the phone and I was saying to him about small scale bread production, “The accountants are moving in.” This was before he told me about the Food Programme broadcasting later in the day.

The actual programme was a radio version of the Real Bread Campaign’s application for charitable funding. Apart from a brief pitch from Ben Reynolds of Sustain (there’s a coincidence) and a plug for their book, there were four examples of people who had to some extent been saved by bread: the woman who burned out in the financial sector; the man with mental health problems, the young man whose behaviour was spiraling out of control; the guy getting young offenders involved in baking; i.e. in the words of the funding application “people at risk of social exclusion”.

Do not misunderstand me, in no way am I criticising any of these initiatives, and I’m not denying that baking bread can have therapeutic effects, but this is not the main purpose of microbakeries. Any creative activity can be therapeutic and I can’t imagine a programme about any other food production being presented in this way.

Mick’s cheery thoughts on the Accountants coming up.