War in Iran, record-breaking heatwaves and water shortages are pushing up food costs and making crops harder to grow. Now a potentially extreme El Niño threatens the food imports upon which Britain relies.
This is exactly why Diversity Flour and Diversity Bread matter.
We have built a food system around an extraordinarily narrow range of crops. So that might be efficient when everything is working, but it is far less resilient when climate, water, energy or global supply chains are disrupted.
The answer to fragility is diversity.
Diversity Flour brings together a wide range of grains, pulses, seeds and other plants that support regenerative farming through the whole of the crop rotation system. Diversity Bread in turn them into something millions of us already eat every day. When we train bakers at The Sourdough School to Bake Diversity Bread, we cover how this supports soil systems and how diversity supports gut health.
I think is really important.to eat bread that supports farmers to grow more diverse crops, but those crops need somewhere to go. They need to become part of the food we actually buy and eat.
Bread can do that.
🌾 More diversity in what we grow.
🌱 More resilience in our fields.
🍞 More diversity in our bread.
🦠 More diverse fibres and plant compounds reaching our gut microbes.
And there is a beautiful symmetry here because the diversity that can help make our farming more resilient is also the diversity we need in our diets.
So this is why I don’t see Diversity Bread simply as a healthier loaf, rather a is a way of using our daily bread to connect soil health, farming, food security and human health.
And this week something rather wonderful happened. Our 30-ingredient Diversity Bread launched with Abel & Cole.
So now people can now choose this when they buy their weekly bread. That ability for people to make a choice and creates demand for what farmers grow is really important:. if we want more diversity in our fields, we need to eat more diversity too.
It seems obvious to me, that we have been looking for complicated answers to some of these problems when one of the things we can change is sitting on the table in front of us – our daily bread.