Bread & Justice

It’s not only that I advocate that people should eat more sourdough bread—although I certainly do have strong feelings about the benefits of naturally fermented bread. But perhaps what makes that title particularly appropriate for me is that in the past several years I have chosen sourdough bread as my vehicle for social activism. 

When I first started baking sourdough bread, I had no idea where this journey was going to take me. Over the years I have had a couple of failed attempts with breadmaking, but in January of 2020 I committed to learning how to get past the intimidation. 

Within a couple months the world shut down indefinitely as a result of COVID-19. Like so many others, I suddenly had the time on my hands to hone my craft of sourdough bread making.  

My wife captured this picture of me smiling with dough in my hands  in June of 2020. It was the first time that I was pushing myself to graduate from two loaves in a batch, to four loaves in a single batch.  I knew that bread baking was a fun and healthy distraction from the weight of things on my mind, but it wasn’t until I saw this photo of myself that I realized it was also my therapy. 

At the time, I had numerous sleepless nights reflecting on the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder. But in the midst of grief, fear, anger, and fatigue, here I was smiling ear to ear with more dough in my hands than I ever had before. This may have been the moment that I realized I had found a way to manifest joy through breadmaking. 

Later in the fall of 2020, when Chef Paola Velez’s #BakersAgainstRacism went viral on Instagram, it struck me: bread could be my medium for activism, not just joy. I participated in this fundraiser, and began to build a community of bread customers in my town of Madison, Wisconsin who cared about the same things as me. It was out of this that my cottage bakery, Bread & Justice, was born.

The vision for my cottage bakery was to continue to use bread as a vehicle for social impact. One organization that was a major inspiration for my business model was the popular food business called Newman’s Own, who for over 30 years has given 100% of their profits to charity. We take a similar approach. 

Each month, we select a new nonprofit organization that is working to advance social justice, and we donate 100% of our profits from bread sales to that organization. It might be a local group fighting food insecurity like Second Harvest Food Bank, a statewide organization like Family Health La Clinica who is providing health care and dental services to migrant workers and farmers workers across Wisconsin, or even a national organization like the NAACP working to dismantle systemic racism in our country. 

Choosing a nonprofit partner each month is a personal process. My wife, Melissa, and I talk about the issues that are on our hearts, the injustices we see happening in the world, and the organizations that are inspiring us. It’s a way for us to put our values into action, to leverage our little bakery to make a tangible difference.

With the bakery being such a personal endeavor, we also run the business quite differently. 

In a world of fleeting content, our newsletter is our anchor. Each week, it allows us to share reflections on justice, baking, and the nonprofits we support, creating a community of people who believe in good bread and real change.

I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate the community of customers who have found my bakery and nurtured its growth over the years. When referring to customers and newsletter readers, I most commonly call them “my bread friends.” I suppose because of how special it feels to be not only sharing bread that I’ve made by hand, but also to be sharing so many personal reflections in my weekly writings.  

When making bread for my community, we’re drawing thousands of years of tradition for our recipe. The ingredients in our classic rustic loaf are simply flour, water, and salt.

We prioritize using high-quality, locally sourced flour in our bread. We get most of our flour from Meadowlark Organics, a family farm in Wisconsin that’s committed to organic and sustainable farming practices. Supporting local farmers like Meadowlark matters to our business. It’s about building a more resilient and just food system, a system where everyone has access to good, healthy food.

For the first few years of the bakery, our family’s kitchen was the home for all of our production. It was also the bottleneck, as I could only crank out four loaves an hour in our home oven. After building out a dedicated bakery space in our basement last year, we’re now able to bake batches of 48 loaves in just a few hours because we have all the right equipment to make that scale possible. Looking back, I never imagined turning my home into a micro-bakery, let alone raising thousands of dollars for charity along the way. 

As I look forward to the year ahead, my plan is to remain focused on gratitude as I find opportunities to grow the business. I’m grateful to get to serve our community in this way. I’m grateful to all the customers who buy my bread and support my dreams. I’m grateful for all the people who read my newsletter even if they’re too far away to buy my bread. Perhaps most of all, I’m grateful that my kids get to witness the impact that we can make by mixing up a few simple ingredients with dedication,  passion and a community of people who share a commitment to building  a more beautiful world.