Scotland The Bread: taking Flour to the People

Scotland The Bread is a collaborative project to grow better grain and bake better bread with the common purposes of nourishment, sustainability and food sovereignty.

Based in the East Neuk of Fife, we have researched and selected grain varieties which are more nutritious, grow well in Scotland’s climate and most importantly, taste delicious! Our ‘Balcaskie Landrace’ is a mixture of different varieties of wheat, including a purple wheat from Scandinavia. This diversity ensures that our crop is more resilient than modern intensive monocultures, where all plants in a field are identical and equally vulnerable to the same threats of pests, disease or changing climate.

The mix that we have sown will be adapting over time to local conditions, harnessing the power of natural selection. They are grown organically, without the use of chemical fertilisers or pesticides, which importantly helps to increase biodiversity in the fields.

These grains are then processed on-farm with our innovative Zentrofan cyclone mill. This is a low-energy mill in which the grain is blown by a fan around the sides of a block of volcanic rock, eventually grinding itself down to produce a very fine flour. Normal stone mills can produce heat which damages the nutrients in the grain, but this cyclone mill keeps the flour relatively cool and therefore conserves more of the important vitamins and minerals. The flour produced is a fine and soft wholemeal, without the large flakes of bran normally present. By producing a flour which contains the whole of the grain, there is very little waste within the system and we are ensuring that all of the goodness of our specially selected grains are transferred into the final product.

As well as producing and selling this flour to home and professional bakers, Scotland The Bread runs community engagement projects aiming to create local resilience and inspire people to look with fresh eyes at their daily loaf.

Through the Flour to the People project we partner with community food hubs to host workshops and demonstrations sharing breadmaking skills and knowledge. We hope to empower local people with the confidence to bake delicious bread for themselves, their neighbours, food pantries and community meals. We have developed a number of resources to help them do so through both this and a sister project, The People’s Bread, which sets the standard for a bread that nourishes both people and planet.

Our third project, Soil to Slice, encourages and supports communities to learn all about where their bread comes from by growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking their own local grains. We are delighted that several members of Glasgow Community Food Network, including St Paul’s Youth Forum and the Wash House Garden, are members of this network of community grain growers! Over in Blackhill, SPYF have been growing grains since 2018, with an outdoor pizza oven ready to make the most of their harvest. At a recent ‘Seed to Bread’ session in the Wash House Garden, volunteer Jay proudly showed us the green shoots of their first crop of wheat. I am very much looking forward to returning for the harvest event!

At Scotland The Bread we believe that everyone has a right to access nourishing bread as well as the chance to get involved in a more healthy, equitable, locally-controlled and sustainable bread supply. By collaborating with community food hubs, gardens and other local organisations, we hope to bring these opportunities to more people across the country, particularly where this might not normally be the case. If you are interested in running a breadmaking workshop, using our local and nutritious flour in your community meals, growing grains in your community garden or partnering with us in another way, please get in touch ([email protected]) – we would love to work with you!

- Lyndsay Cochrane, Project Coordinator