Suhrkamp Insel

Bread smells of coming home, of family and love. Bread creates religions and revolutions – and causes coeliac disease and a fear of wheat-bloated bellies. Bread is a basic foodstuff – and an edible longing. Bread is a metaphor. Bread is universal. What does bread say about the people who eat it and about the circumstances in which it is baked? What do you find when you follow the smell of bread?

Journalist Walter Mayer sets out to find out what is behind universal bread: He writes about gluten and greedy grain corporations, about lovingly cherished sour dough cultures and the miracle of the loaves in the New Testament. He lets T.V. chef Sarah Wiener show him the fundamentals of craft baking, talks to the Minister for Nutrition and interviews a bread billionaire. He visits bakers in the mountains in Albania, in the Medina of Marrakesh, in the moorlands of Edinburgh and in the Austrian Alps. And in the end his voyage of discovery leads him to his mother’s kitchen, a baker’s daughter – always seeking the aroma of life.

This wonderfully illustrated gift book is a carefully measured mixture of reports, cultural history and family memoires and a declaration of love to bread. Oh, that smells good!