A quote from the past

I’ve been thinking long and hard while we’ve been setting up the bakery about our motivations to do so and the possible effect it will have on the community.

Of course some of the motivations are selfish. I love making bread, so what a good way to earn a living! I want to work somewhere I can walk to instead of commuting for 3 hours a day. I want to do something that I can see the results of daily and that others will hopefully appreciate. It all makes sense.

But what about the community aspect of all this? What benefit will The Handmade Bakery have to everyone else? Well the obvious answer is good healthy bread locally produced! But if we talk about the bakery as part of something bigger, as part of what Transition Towns are trying to do. To make small communities like ours more resilient, more supportive of each other, then maybe we can play a very small part in the start of something really quite profound.

I was recently reading Bread, by renowned American artisan baker Jeffrey Hamelman, and came across a quote that seemed to sum up these loftier ambitions for the bakery and for Transition Towns beautifully. It seems like a manifesto for the important issues of our time even though it's thousands of years old.

No booksellers, no books
No books, no learning
No learning, no knowledge
No knowledge, no wisdom
No wisdom, no ethics
No ethics, no conscience
No conscience, no community
No community, no bread.
-    The Talmud