The Art and Science of Bread

A year ago, my sister sent me a book called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoe Francois, which I squeezed into our amply stocked shelf of cookbooks and promptly forgot. But recently, the idea of baking bread came as a logical conclusion to my growing interest in food-growing and cooking as comforting counterpoints to my witnessing the ongoing economic and political disaster unfolding around us. The fact that one consequence of the latter is severely escalating bread prices certainly contributed to my interest in doing my own baking.

Herzberg and Francois's book advocates mixing batches of dough sufficient for three or more loaves at a time, then storing it in the refrigerator until you're ready to bake a fresh loaf. At that time you divide off a portion of the refrigerated dough, form it into a loaf, and allow it to rise for an hour or two, depending on temperature. No kneading is necessary, and many of the recipes call for baking without a pan, on a baking stone, which is a slab of ceramic material that gets preheated in the oven before you slide the bread on top of it. There are a few details to attend to, such as scoring the top of the loaf previous to baking, and making provision for steam in the oven over the first few minutes of baking time to help develop the bread's crispy crust.

Not long after successfully baking my first loaf, I ran across a book in the library, 52 Loaves, A Half-Baked Adventure, by William Alexander. The author spent a year, baking one loaf of bread a week, in a quest to discover the perfect "peasant loaf," which is the bread style I'd just been experimenting with myself. This book proved to be a fascinating and entertaining read. The author includes considerable information on the history, chemistry, and custom of baking bread. At the end of the year he describes at length five days that he spent living in a French monastery, teaching the monks to do their own baking, in the process managing finally to attain his own "perfect" loaf.

I bring up bread in the context of Mindport since formal or informal science plays such a large part in enabling the baker to create an object conferring such aesthetic and gustatory delight. The authors of both the books I've mentioned here, plus another book on the subject of no-knead bread that's worth a look, My Bread, by Jim Lahey (with Rick Flaste), have done a tremendous amount of research and experimentation to develop their recipes, delving into the physics and chemistry of bread, which is doubly complex due to the fact it depends on yeast, a living organism, for many of its dynamic properties. William Alexander, for his part, sings the praise of the aesthetic and sensual pleasure of bread-making. A loaf of bread, hence, seems to me to be the perfect embodiment of art and science combined in one beautiful and tasty object, the ideal metaphor to express Mindport's avowed aim of integrating two ways of understanding the world that are frequently juxtaposed in opposition to one another.

Bread, serving as a ritual object or metaphorical idea, has a long history.  "Breaking bread" with someone signifies a form of personal communion in taking sustenance together; the Lord's Prayer uses bread as a metaphor, as in "Give us this day our daily bread." The wafer used in Christian communion, symbolizing the body of Christ, is a special bread. In the Jewish tradition "showbread" is a form of bread or cake presented as an offering to God. Grains, made into bread, have provided a basic food staple for millennia. It's no wonder that bread is so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness.

Perhaps the growing interest in good food and bread that I detect in the air might be serving as compensation for our excessive preoccupation with technology and the virtual world of cyberspace, which have alienated us from our roots in the physical earth and our own manual skills. That's a cause for hope. Our main reminders of our biological and physical origins nowadays seem to be birth, sex, and death. I would include eating and food with these basic connections, but many of us no longer prepare our own food, and we often distract ourselves during meals with TV and iGadgets, to the point that eating has become just another chore to hurry through. Personally, as a gesture of revolt against that, I've begun to experience growing, preparing, and eating food as reassuring activities affirming my fundamental rootedness in the soil of this planet. The ritual of creating a aesthetically beautiful and sensually delicious loaf of bread from the basic materials of flour, salt, water, and yeast is a satisfaction crowning the many other social and physical rewards that come with cultivating a more mindful connection to the food I eat.


Kevin Jones

Mail Art Workshop

The text on this image is a bit hard to read, so I'll spell it out for you!

Mindport is offering its second mail art workshop, Sunday, January 29th from 1 to 4 pm.  If you're tired of receiving bills and ads in an otherwise empty mailbox, this workshop's for you.  Learn to make postal art,  and turn your mailbox into a museum as you connect with a network of creative folks who enjoy a good mail day.  $10 fee includes all materials.  No experience needed.

To register, please contact Tallie@mindport.org or call (360) 441-7162.  Limited space, so sign up early!

Introducing Bella Stella!

Mindport's latest exhibit is on the floor.  Exhibit designer/builder John Ito has created another wonder - this time a giant windup toy inspired by the crosswalks of our fair city.

To celebrate, we'll be open until 8:00 tonight, January 6th.  Stop by to visit Bella and congratulate John.  We'll see you there!

New Gallery Window and Holiday Hours

Our Art Director, AnMorgan Curry has posted her latest editorial comment in the gallery window. Come have a look, and while you're at it, there's a few new photographs by Kevin Jones hanging in the gallery.

Meantime, John Ito is working away on an intriguing exhibit that he's hoping to have on the gallery floor sometime in January. Hint: His inspiration for this exhibit was found on the streets of Bellingham. It has certain features that might remind you of a vintage 1930 grandfather clock, writ large.

Holiday reminder: We'll be closed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, December 23, 24, and 25; also on January 31 we'll close at 3PM, and will be closed all day on January 1, New Years day.

What are we?

A  local media organization asked to interview us for a short video production. We requested that they send us some specific questions that they might care to have answered during their interview. Since we often have difficulty generating off-the-cuff answers to such questions, three of us sat down for a half hour to discuss the questions proffered, in the process discovering responses that might not otherwise have occurred to us.

1. What is Mindport?

This is one of the questions asked us frequently by people who haven't been here. We've never been comfortable calling ourselves a "museum" or "gallery," (though we do have a space we refer to as a "gallery") because these terms don't quite fit how we understand ourselves. Usually we tell people that it's best if they come and see what they think we are. In a sense, we're a "work in progress," because the work that appears here depends a lot on who happens to be on the staff at any given time. The majority of us have been here for quite awhile, so where we go creatively also depends on where our personal explorations are taking us at the moment. We assume that whatever interests us will likely interest our visitors, which has proven to be true nearly all the time.

2. What sets your "museum" apart from other history/art museums?

One important factor that distinguishes us from other "museums" is the fact that we're not a government-defined "non-profit" organization, hence we on the staff entirely set our own direction. We are not responsible to a board of directors or other outside forces. This gives us great freedom, not enjoyed by most other public organizations who display artistic work.

3. How many exhibits are built at Mindport?

Almost all exhibits at Mindport are built by staff members. Occasionally  we find something we like "out there" and either display it as-is, or incorporate it into exhibits we build. We've discovered that in-house exhibit-building is a rarity in the museum world, possibly because most such organizations have more money than time, whereas we have more time than money.

4. How long has Mindport been open?

Mindport opened in 1995 at our previous location at 111 Grand Avenue in Bellingham, right across from Henderson Books. In 2000 we acquired our present building and spent a year remodeling it before reopening in 2001.

5. What exhibits are most popular?

We avoid any measurement of exhibit popularity. Such measurements tend to force all exhibits to fit some average or standard, which eliminates the surprise factor and dampens a spirit of creative exploration. There's nearly always someone who likes any particular exhibit, and we believe that the average should not receive too much favor over the exceptional. Many people like many or our exhibits, and a few like even the ones that are less popular with the masses.

6. What kinds of reactions do you get from visitors?

Reactions run the gamut from those who stick their heads in then run the other way, to some who get hooked after a few minutes of exploration, stay for a couple hours, then write us a donation check for $50, telling us how much they appreciate what we're doing. Some visitors engage our docents in long conversations, others walk around checking out the exhibits, then leave without further ado. Some spend an hour here then tell us they'll be back with friends or family members.

7. What do you hope people take away from their experience here?

In answer to that, I'll respond by describing my own reaction when viewing the creative work of others: Creative work and beauty always raise my spirits and give me hope. They remind me, especially during an era when things are looking pretty grim in the world at large, that human beings are capable of doing wonderful things, and amidst ample examples of humanly created ugliness, there's also the possibility of beauty. We hope visitors leave Mindport with renewed curiosity, calmer minds, and greater optimism about human possibility.

Tools

My co-worker, John Ito, our exhibit designer/builder, sent me this link to a short video describing a shop in New England that sells used tools. Watching it set me to reflecting about tools and the part they've played in my life. It's an appropriate thing to be contemplating during this era of consumerism that has culminated in our being swamped with goods that are non-repairable and must be thrown away when they fail. When I was growing up in the fifties, a do-it-yourself (DIY) movement was in full flower. In the decades following the seventies DIY seemed to disappear into the woodwork, so to speak. You began to get the feeling that only nerds and losers bothered to fix anything, much less build anything from scratch.

The picture above was shot in my father's workshop. He's 94 years old now and doesn't spend much time there any longer, sad to say. But seeing those tools, some of them the same ones I used when he first started teaching me to use them, when I was age eight or ten, stirs my nostalgia. At the time he was very active with Do It Yourself projects. He always had a well-organized workbench in the house where he operated on ailing appliances and built various projects, some of them for my own entertainment. For that reason using tools, repairing and building things seemed an ordinary part of life, one which I completely took for granted and which skills I absorbed by osmosis.

Here's photo of my drawer of electronics tools and another of my woodworking tools, all of which were instrumental in building every exhibit I've contributed to Mindport's collection. With the woodworking tools you'll notice a certain father-son resemblance in the means of their organization, if you compare to the earlier photo of of my father's shop. Most of my tools visible in these photos have been with me for over 40 years and are as much a part of me as my own hands. I own one set of chisels that my mother gave to me. When I was about seven years old, she took a carving class from an old German woodcarver, and bought these chisels from him. It's pleasing to me to use tools that have a history of known human connections, as these do. These photos remind me of the contrast between the throw-away values of today, and the values of a time when many household objects, especially tools, served us well for years, during which time we grew increasingly attached to them, to the point where we'd only part with them regretfully.

During the past few decades, there's been a growing cultural tendency in the US to value abstract mental work over manual skills. If you were a machinist, carpenter, or practitioner of any other trade that involved using physical tools (outside of computers. . . which are only semi-physical) your pay rate betrayed the fact that your profession was valued less than that of someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling paper or bytes and thinking for a living. This despite the fact that your work was the last step in a chain of activities culminating in creations that were actually necessary and useful, in the physical sense of the word.

Now that the activities of an elite group of paper and byte shufflers has brought the world's economy to its knees, and the possibility of the collapse of industrial civilization has begun to hit the mainstream press as a distinct possibility, we're suddenly hearing that certain physical skills and the tools necessary to put them into action might be coming back in demand. Various groups around the country are beginning to ask what steps we might take to re-industrialize America and get us producing useful things again, not only useful, but repairable and recyclable. Hallelujah!

Having done an assortment of jobs as a self-employed person, that included both mental/paper-shuffling work and physical design and construction, I've increasingly come to appreciate the latter. For a long time, I've noticed that the best medicine for anxiety and unease is to build something with my hands. There's something deeply reassuring about seeing things that I've only imagined come together in the physical world, and that satisfaction serves to remind me of my deep appreciation for the tools that make that possible.

Kevin Jones

Occupy Yourself

This title is not to be construed as my being unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In truth, I'm at least 60% sympathetic to it. Not having yet seen a hard list of demands by the protesters, I can't tell you exactly what positions I completely agree with, but the point I intend to make is that Wall Street greed is not the only culprit behind this cascading economic collapse we're presently suffering. My title (suggested by my co-worker, AnMorgan Curry) speaks to the part the "99%" have played in creating this debacle. I bring this up because when revolutions occur, it's too frequently true that, because the revolutionaries have ignored the part they played in the dysfunctional system, the new system they install is as bad or worse than the one they replace. I'd hate to see that happen.

"Occupy Yourself" says it's important to put yourself into the driver's seat, pay attention, educate yourself, and don't waste all your energy blaming corrupt government, and corporate CEOs for what has happened. They're a large part of the problem and the culprits should have been prosecuted years ago, however, throwing them in jail and making new laws or reviving old ones that have been ignored will not deliver us from our current predicament.

We're in trouble because we've been attempting to defy the law energy conservation. This physical law is inviolable and cannot be countermanded by congress, the president, or anyone else. It states, in lay terms, that you can't get something for nothing.** Sadly, a large proportion of the American populace has been seduced into believing the opposite, via a storm of corporate advertising and the blandishments of self-serving politicians, not to speak of their own reluctance to face reality. A belief in the possibility of getting something for nothing shows up in many guises, including a reluctance to pay taxes, the embrace of a consumerist throw-away culture, and a general willingness to blame somebody else for whatever is wrong. This, in other words, means to  embody an attitude whereby I have permission to do whatever I want and, if there are unpleasant consequences, to blame it on something THEY did.

By the way, if you believe a bank officer who tells you can afford to buy a house worth a half-million dollars when your income is $20,000 per year, do the math, or get a disinterested party to do it for you. This is part of what I term, "educating yourself," or "putting yourself in the driver's seat."

The sad fact is, any system that defies the law of energy conservation must sooner or later collapse. Our system was brought to the edge more quickly by greed and ignorance, but it actually was doomed from the start. It worked well when there was plenty of low-cost energy available in the form of oil, plenty of other natural resources, such as minerals, vitamins (oops, I mean forests), fish in the sea, unpolluted water, air, etc. But we're to the point that the availability of low-cost hydrocarbons is on the wane, and this, beyond anything, means we're in big trouble. It means that our economic system, whose functioning has been predicated on growth, CANNOT continue in its present form. You can't grow without fuel, and the fuel supplies, along with other resources (water being of prime importance) are getting tight. And for numerous reasons, alternative energy sources are unlikely to be able to take up the slack as oil depletes. See This link.

"Occupy Yourself" also asks us to start getting in touch with our creativity. That's because it's going to require a huge amount of that human resource, along with other types of human energy to dream up a new and sustainable way of living on this earth. It will have to involve recycling materials 100%, for one thing. Take a look at this site:  for ideas about how that might be accomplished. The new system will not be based on consumption, unless it involves somehow funneling all our waste back into producing the next generation of stuff. Even then, it will be a much lower key style of living than what we're used to.

If the Wall Street protesters indeed have been vague or confused about their demands, it may be because they haven't quite yet discovered that much of what needs to be demanded is inside themselves, and not available from the empty husks personified by Bankers, Wall Street, corporate manipulators and their government lackeys. Protesters, and all of us, must begin to demand from ourselves the aforementioned creative energy to devise a whole new culture that is both kind to people and does not require infinite economic growth and continuously increasing energy input for its perpetuation.

Here's a film whose story is an exact allegory for the state in which we currently find ourselves, and which suggests symbolically, and possibly in actuality, a direction we might follow: "The Milagro Beanfield War." Even better, read john Nichol's book by the same title, along with its two sequels.

Kevin Jones

**
You might not immediately see how the law of energy conservation is equivalent to "you can't get something for nothing," Let's take unwillingness to pay taxes as an example of an attempt to defy the law of energy conservation:

First, you have to understand that money has no inherent value. It's paper that we've arbitrarily assigned value. Useful things like food, oil, clothes, a car, a bicycle have real value, and we assign an amount of money to the value of any of these things. Then we can trade the money instead of the things, which is very convenient, because it means you can buy a bag of groceries without dragging in a barrel of crude oil to pay for them.

Now the law of energy conservation says that you can't destroy energy or create it from nothing. You can only change its form. If you drag a weight up a hill, it takes energy to do the job. The energy you expend, say, riding your bike to the top of a hill is stored in the earth's gravitational field as "potential energy." When you coast back down the hill, it's the release of potential energy that keeps you moving. You don't have to put any more energy into pedaling because of that. A fraction of the energy you put into riding up and down the hill is not lost, but dissipated into space through heating your tires, heating your body, and warming the air that flows by you as you ride up and down the hill.

Roads are a necessity for the perpetuation of our present civilization. Creating and repairing them requires energy, lots of it, and materials such as gravel and asphalt, derived from crude oil. It takes energy to run the machinery, grow the food that feeds the workers who operate it, transport that food, keep the workers warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Someone digs the oil out of the ground that supplies that energy. The digging itself requires energy, usually supplied by oil. Oil is full of potential energy held in the chemical bonds of the oil's hydrocarbons, which were originally cemented together by the energy of sunlight. The same energy is conserved through the entire chain of its conversions from one form to another.

Much of the oil we burn today comes from foreign countries. We exchange dollars for it, which implies that the foreign country taking our dollars will eventually be able to get something of real physical value back by sending back the dollars we traded them for oil. If we've been printing a lot more dollars than we have valuable things for them to represent, then we can't very well pay back the oil-producing countries with material goods of value equivalent to the oil we got for the bucks in the first place. We don't have them. Hence, in the future, those countries are not likely to trust the value of or our dollars and are likely to want a lot more of them for the same amount of oil, which indeed has real, measurable value.

If you don't want to pay taxes, then the roads can't be built or fixed because to do so requires a finite and measurable amount of energy. We trade tax dollars for that energy. Because of the law of conservation of energy, we can't create the energy needed to build or fix the roads out of thin air. It has to be dug out of the ground, and we need to trade dollars that are still worth something for that energy, otherwise we won't get it.

Hence money, when a monetary system hasn't been abused, is equivalent to energy, in that it can't (or shouldn't be able to) be created or destroyed. Money is actually LENT into existence, and the money that is lent must be paid back to its creator, namely the government. If you aren't willing to pay for what you get, or pay with dollars that have been inflated by a government that has created more dollars than there is true value for them to stand for, then basically you're attempting to defy the energy conservation law. The consequence is systemic collapse, which is right were we are just now.