Step Eleven: Baking

It’s unlikely that the stalk of wheat, inclining sunward, bathed with breezes and light (and ravenous bugs and withering fungi and pummeling hail and frost), is merrily awaiting the day it will become a loaf of bread. And yet I can’t help but regard the baked loaf as the ultimate fulfillment of a grain’s long journey from the field to the oven. So much of human culture, civilization, and history are interwoven with the story of grain, for so many centuries humans have relied (often almost solely) on grain for their sustenance, and so much of the labor of lives has been directed toward the raising, procuring, and transforming of grain into edible nourishment that it is difficult to imagine life as we know it without this food. It is true that there are rice cultures and corn cultures and manioc cultures, but wheat culture runs as deep or deeper than any in the physical and psychic realms of humans. In any event, leaving aside culture, myth, and even the bare needs of sustenance, it is only when the baker has consigned his or her loaves to the vagaries of the oven that the final transformation occurs—behold, the baked loaf.