Bread connecting people

written by Akvile Balzekaite on Jun 16 2010 (15:24)

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Arad, Arad

Black bread with sun flower or caraway seeds, smelling like a good beer and tasting sweetsoursalty – this kind of bread volunteers from Austria, Estonia, Italy and, of course, Lithuania are looking for. Why I say of course? Because for me bread is more than food. I was raised with a belief that bread is alive and saint. If you‘re dropping even a little piece on the ground, you need to pick it up and kiss asking forgiveness. If the bread becomes old, you are still trying to cut of the bad pieces and eat it. Leftovers are given to the animals. I’m giving it to the birds – ducks in the river or sparrows and pigeons in the park. To throw bread away is a sin, God will punish you. I don’t know which God – in old Lithuanian religion we had more than a dozen of gods, responsible for harvest and crops. The bread was one of the main offerings to the gods. For Christians bread is a body of Jesus, which you take just after your sins are forgiven. So be careful, Gods are watching us.

Bread is the most important food for Lithuanians. If you have bread, you won’t starve. What is the beggar asking for? What does a poor serf take running away from the bad master in the fairytales? A piece of bread. For me is shocking to see so many bread (still packed!) lying on the ground here in Romania. I’m sure, it’s the same in Lithuania too, simply I can’t see it, because we don’t have so many rubbish on the streets. Here I usually see the packed bread in the nature – somewhere close to the lake, in the mountains. In the places, where Romanians are having picnics. It seems that unfinished bread is the only thing which is not worth taking back home like the coins, given as a change in the shop. Bread is just too cheap, taking too much place in the bag. I’m sure that people are throwing away a lot of other food too, just the bread is not only for stomach but also for the heart for me.

Have you ever tried to bake bread? Not with a bread baking machine, not with the yeast from the shop? To grow your own bacteria in a sourdough which will raise your bread, to wait for weeks, to knead for hours? I tried. Bread baking is a real alchemy; bread made by different person will taste differently. Old bakeries are having their own sourdough for more than a hundred years. Only if you will try to bake your own bread you will understand why it is alive for me. When you see first bubbles coming out of nothing (water and rye flour), how your sourdough is growing, how it likes warmth and touch of your fingers you will understand that bread is more than a food, it lives a life – from creation out of the flour dust till the aged, wrinkled bread baked in the oven.

I am trying to understand people who are throwing away the bread – if it comes so easy, it can go away easy. Man is overloaded with already made things, which mean nothing to him. When you dissociate person from his work, it doesn’t appreciate it anymore. Children don’t know where does the milk come from, men don’t know how to change a light bulb, woman don’t know how to sew socks. Everything had become too specific and narrow, we know only one thing we are working with and for all other things we need another specialist. Why so? Did our brain shrank comparing with a man only 200 years ago, who had self-supporting farm, with his own bakery, textile making, house building, food growing. I don’t want us to come back in those days; I understand that work specialization gave us free-time which led us to a real mind revolution in all the fields. I just want us to try Do It Yourself. After doing a bike, paper, cosmetics, clothes, jewelry, cheese or bread by yourself, you will understand how much effort it takes and before throwing something away you will think twice.

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