06/05/2026
50 YEARS ON: our Honorary Chairman and Co-founder Andrew Whitley shares his 50-year-old baking 'origin story', inspired by giving a talk recently to the Fife Vintage Agricultural Machinery group in Markinch for which he dug out some pictures of his first harvest and threshing event in 1977.
"On Easter Thursday 1976, I baked 17 wholemeal loaves – and The Village Bakery began. Not in Melmerby, the village near Penrith in Cumbria with which its name was associated for the next couple of decades, but at The Watermill, Little Salkeld, four miles away.
For a year and a bit, I learned to bake in an 8-foot square cubby hole next to the mill, my only source of flour. In the autumn of 1977, we opened the bakery in a former pigsty in Melmerby.
That summer, we grew wheat and oats on the smallholding behind the bakery, cut them with a reaper and binder (no combine harvester could get through the narrow gateway), made a stack and then threshed it in a pre-war machine, powered by an equally venerable stationary engine.
And so began the first attempts to reimagine a fundamentally re-localised ‘soil to slice’ grain-flour-bread network – a place where everyone enjoying their daily bread knew where the grain had been grown and milled and who had helped turn the flour into bread. A place, in other words, where trust between farmers, millers, bakers and citizens might be painstakingly rebuilt.
Many years later, in Bread Matters, I revealed the ways (chemical, biological, socio-political) in which that trust had been sacrificed on the altar of ‘low price and convenience’. Taking bread into our own hands seemed a good place to begin the push-back. After 25 years or more of baking for a living, I at least knew that my recipes worked, even if my arguments were still a touch unpalatable.
Resuming my amateur researches into grain diversity following a move to Scotland in 2010, I was confronted by what looked to me like a public health outrage: almost all the million-or-so tons of wheat grown in Scotland every year was going for animal feed or, incredibly, to make cheap alcohol: 440 litres of pure spirit from a ton of wheat that could, with the right varieties, attentive agronomy, gentle milling and careful fermentation, be turned instead into 2,000 large loaves of nutritious high-fibre wholemeal bread – this in a community struggling with diet-related ill-health and other consequences of a commodity food system that enriched only ‘the few’.
Bread for Good Community Benefit Society (acting as Scotland The Bread), ten years old next month, has been an attempt to do something about this. In the words of the late Veronica Burke, who did so much to get it off the ground, in our original community share offer document in 2016:
Imagine if…
• farmers were able to grow wheat with more nutrients, while keeping our fields healthy and vibrant...
• millers were able to produce fresh and nutritious flour for local baking...
• home and community bakers had the skills to turn this flour into easily digestible bread that tasted great and was full of nutrients, and...
• people were able enjoy this bread knowing that everyone involved had been paid fairly.
Fifty years on, the idea of a healthy local bread economy seems both more elusive and more necessary. In uncertain times, it may be a home comfort we can enjoy only by sharing."
Scotland The Bread is a small charity, chronically underfunded. If you want to help us keep doing this work, please donate or join us as a community shareholder: https://scotlandthebread.org/get-involved/
