Loaf

An engrossing and entertaining tour of the astonishing global effort required to bring home one loaf of bread, in the tradition of John McPhee.

How many people does it take to make a loaf of bread? Proud “breadhead” and environmental science professor Eric Pallant, whose previous book, Sourdough Culture, detailed how baking sourdough bread has been integral to human history for six thousand years, is uniquely equipped to try to answer this dizzying question.

In Loaf, Pallant traces the path of a single loaf of bread, from the wheat fields of Pennsylvania to you and your sandwich. The journey stops in surprising places: agriculture scientists studying wheat varieties in a Sugar Cookie Test lab in Ohio; yeast strains meticulously selected and raised in France and flown to Iowa on dry ice; phosphate that travels from mines in the Western Sahara to the eastern Atlantic coast via the world’s longest conveyor belt.

Rigorous, ambitious, and charming, this book reveals the vast but hidden web of people, places, and processes that support all of modern consumption. It’s about bread, but it’s also about everything else—the costs and benefits of globalization, the impact of every product on our climate, and whose work should be tallied when we all depend on one another to survive. As Pallant readily admits, “there are just too many people to count” involved in a loaf (or an orange, or a Q-tip, or a cell phone). But someone has to try.