Breaking Bread with Neighbor Loaves

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(May 10, 2020) If breaking bread with others is your cup of tea, to mix metaphors, there’s trouble afood…er, afoot. Most of us never thought we’d live to see flour and yeast shortages. Unfortunately, it’s something the industry didn’t see coming, either. But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world in many ways.

Skip to a specific segment in this podcast.
6:21 Alyssa Hartman and Ellen King
56:08 Josh Engel, Sheryl DeVore and Pam Karlson
1:27:20 Meteorologist Rick DiMaio

As a result, baking staples can be hard to find at grocery stores these days as society finds comfort in carbohydrates. Sales of baking yeast were up 457% over last year for the week ending March 28, according to Nielsen data. Flour was up 155%, baking powder up 178%, butter up 73% and eggs up 48%.

Americans are “home baking more than ever before,” said Kelly Olson, a spokeswoman for Red Star Yeast. The company said the demand spike was unexpected and it’s doing all it can to replenish empty store shelves. “We hope to have availability at retailers back to normal within a few weeks,” Olson said.

Kathleen and I snapped up some yeast and organic flour just before the pandemic hit. Perhaps it’s because I work in the media, but we saw this coming. We didn’t over-buy, but we added some extra things to the cart the last few times that we shopped for groceries. And then we started reading posts from our friends about how they couldn’t get yeast. Yeast?

As with toilet paper and hand sanitizer and pasta, it’s tough for the dry yeast supply chain to accommodate an astronomical surge in demand. John Heilman, vice president of manufacturing for Fleischmann’s Yeast producer AB Mauri, roughly estimates that it’ll take a month or two until shoppers will see a consistent supply of dry yeast on shelves. “I’ve been with the company for five years, and this is by far the highest demand I’ve ever seen,” he said, noting that there’s been as much as a 600 percent increase year over year. In the past there have been demand spikes during large snowstorms, but those don’t even come close to what Heilman is seeing now.

Breaking bread is difficult when you don’t have bread. And the world gets weird when you’re sending yeast to your relatives in envelopes because they can’t track it down themselves. But that’s a minor convenience compared to the millions of people who are now experiencing food insecurity.

In the Survey of Mothers with Young Children, 17.4% of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported that since the pandemic started, “the children in my household were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.” Of those mothers, 3.4% reported that it was often the case that their children were not eating enough due to a lack of resources since the coronavirus pandemic began… The incidence of hardship among children as measured by responses to this question has increased 460%.

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The Survey of Mothers with Young Children found that 40.9% of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic… The share of mothers with children 12 and under reporting that the food that they bought did not last has increased 170%.

That leads us to an email I received recently from Anna Crofts, who recently began working at FamilyFarmed. She told me about a program that was just created by the Artisan Grain Collaborative. They are, in their own words, “a collective of bakers, chefs, nonprofits, farmers, millers, distributors, agriculture researchers, market developers, entrepreneurs, food system venture investors and school nutrition experts working together to promote a regenerative food system.”

The program is called Neighbor Loaves, and it’s a way for people in need to break bread. It also highlights the importance of regional food systems and supports area farmers, millers, bakers and, of course, eaters. Here’s how it works.

• You purchase Neighbor Loaves from participating bakeries.
• Bakers source grain from local sustainable farms and bake Neighbor Loaves which contain at least 50% locally grown stonemilled flour.
• Neighbor Loaves are distributed to community feeding organizations to support your neighbors in need.

But it’s not just about feeding people, which is something that we talked about on last week’s show.

This initiative secures the local grain chain during the pandemic. Right now, farmers are planting grain, and they need to know they’ll have a place to sell this year’s crop. Local mills need to keep busy grinding last year’s grain, while bakers are facing reduced revenue in this new environment.

Neighbor Loaves is also about keeping food local. This bread is made with at least 50% local flour, and that is paid for by donations that help bakers meet expenses but, at the same time, invest in local grain farms and mills.

You can see the list of Midwest bakeries that are involved in this program on the Neighbor Loaves page. The program is represented in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Indiana. In our own backyard, Hewn Bakery in Evanston offers a Neighbor Loaf for $6.50.

On today’s show, we welcome Alyssa Hartman, Executive Director of the Artisan Grain Collaborative, who started the Neighbor Loaves program. She is joined by Ellen King, co-owner and head baker of Hewn. By the way, AGC has a terrific list of grain, flour, bread and other resources that just might come in handy, and it’s right here.

 

Celebrating birds

Bird watchers were out today, Saturday, May 9, 2020. It might have been one of the coldest May mornings in Chicago history, but that doesn’t bother birders. In fact, even while they’re confined to quarters during the COVID-19 pandemic, birders can always find a way to keep tabs on their feathered friends.

Saturday was the Cornell Lab or Ornithology’s Global Big Day, an annual celebration of birds, which coincides with International Migratory Bird Day. Global Big Day is a way for citizen scientists (yes, you!) to count birds. In fact, the numbers are already in! In fact, if you just clicked on that link, you became a witness to eBird, the world’s largest citizen-science project.

Earlier this year, we welcomed birder and film director Bob Dolgan to the show. His film, Monty & Rose, was part of this year’s One Earth Film Festival. He is also the founder of the marketing firm Turnstone Strategies LLC and, more recently, a website called Nature Loves Chicago. NLC is in the midst of a campaign called 50 Days of Chicago Nature, April 22, 2020 through June 10, 2020.

He wrote to me that a “Big Day” is when an individual or group devotes an entire day to finding and identifying as many birds as possible. And he suggested that, the day after Global Big Day, we get some local birders on the show. And so we have.

Josh Engel grew up in the Chicago area and he’s been birding here for more than 25 years. A former ornithologist at the Field Museum, he started his own company, Red Hill Birding, in 2016. Red Hill Birding organizes birding and wildlife tours in the Chicago area, across the US, and around the world. Along with the aforementioned Bob Dolgan, he hosts a weekly web series on birding, focusing on the Chicago area, called This Week in Birding.

Sheryl DeVore is founding editor of the Illinois Ornithological Society’s quarterly magazine, “Meadowlark.” In addition, she is a writer for Natural Awakenings Chicago, an outdoor columnist and news writer for the Lake County News-Sun/Chicago Tribune, and a contributing writer to Birds & Blooms. She is also the author of a number of books about birds.

Pam Karlson is a career artist, avid gardener and birder who was on our show last year. A long time volunteer with Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, she has been rescuing migratory birds for over 15 years. She converted her Chicago backyard into a bird habitat, and, as of our last contact, had recorded 115 bird species in her garden. We’re sure it’s higher now, but we’ll be sure to ask.