MEMPHIS OR KANSAS? Yes please!

BREAKFAST: boule bread, whole-wheat and walnuts. orange juice

LUNCH: granny smith apple. carrots and baba ghanouj.  a bunch of raisins

DINNER: pizza. whole wheat crust, mushrooms, olives, fresh garlic, stewed tomatoes, and frozen mustard greens (Walgreens was out of frozen spinach....). popcorn. Lots of chocolate chips!!

ORIGIN OF ONE ITEM: Boule Bread, a type of french bread baked in earthenware pots so the crust is crunchy and layered.This was from Crumb, a local bakery that you can find at several summer and winter farmers’ markets in and around Chicago. Anne is the baker, and she’s fabulous. She also does loaves like spicy cheddar and grilled onion.

THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION:  I  confess. I picked the boule bread because it’d be an easy one. No googling random transnational companies.  No dead-ends--or worse, no incriminating discoveries on the previous whereabouts of my California raisins (shudder). I happened to already know the ingredients of the bread are from the Midwest and Kansas: I could trace them all pretty easily. I could even do that with the earthenware jar it was baked in. I’d just have to ask the owner, whom I’d met at summer markets.

But when I chew on my toasted slice of boule, I mostly think about Ann, the owner of Crumb. The wheat, the walnuts, the organicy-ness doesn’t really ooze out of it the way it can with other foods. I just think about how Ann is short, spunky and from Memphis.

Bread, as a human invention, is maybe then just as much about where Ann is from as the wheat she uses. Where she’s been has lead her to be committed to being an organic, independent baker.

So to go to the source of my bread I’d also have to go back to the source of this woman. In the same way I thought there was a quick answer to the source of my bread, I usually have a quick answer to who I am. We all have things we call ourselves, whether they are political, social, gendered, racial, educational, familial, or theological terms. I tend to identify as a progressive-feminist-Lutheran-woman-sibling-daughter-grad-student-friend-foodie-runner. But perhaps we can learn something new about ourselves by a pilgrimage through the past of others in our lives. Then the question becomes: who else are we? Who else is that person that has given me so much in my life? Then I become a Southern Baptist-rural housewife, among many other things. Whoa, now that’s different one for me!

So my bread has two homes: Kansas and Memphis. They are really different places. One is vast and dry, the other humid and undulating. But both made my breakfast. So pick a place that you’re from. Then remember that’s not the whole map. Reach back (or left or right) and find the place of someone else who’s made your food, today or any day. Trace the path from them and their place. How does that path get to you and then that place become a part of you? Where are you also from now?? Bon Appetit!