Kitchen Table Activism  (Fight not the harmful but feed the helpful)

Workshop with Nelli Makeeva in Artkitchen, Nikel, North Russia 18th of April 2015

On my journeys to North Russia over the last few years I have discovered, to my horror, that their deeply rooted bread traditions are vanishing at a rapid speed. Most people don’t bake their own bread any longer! They have replaced the good, old, sourdough rye loaf with tasteless and commercial white, wheat, yeast bread. It was time to bring the culture back and hope it would revitalize and revolutionize the vanishing bread culture in the motherland of the rye sourdough bread!

In this workshop 15 Russian ladies and one young boy befriended their microbes and learned how we can embrace them as our creative collaborators. I re-introduced an old bacterial bread culture that originally came from Russia. It was brought to England 30 years ago by Andrew Whitley, an ex BBC Russian correspondent. He fell in love with Russian bread culture and brought a jar of rye sourdough starter back home. That changed his life as well as revolutionising a desperately dying English bread culture with this Russian bacterial magic.