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In Memory of Bread: A Memoir, by Paul Graham
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The funny, poignant memoir of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his celiac diagnosis, forcing him to reexamine his relationship with food.
When Paul Graham was suddenly diagnosed with celiac disease at the age of thirty-six, he was forced to say goodbye to traditional pasta, pizza, sandwiches, and more. Gone, too, were some of his favorite hobbies, including brewing beer with a buddy and gorging on his wife’s homemade breads. Struggling to understand why he and so many others had become allergic to wheat, barley, rye, oats, and other dietary staples, Graham researched the production of modern wheat and learned that not only has the grain been altered from ancestral varieties but it’s also commonly added to thousands of processed foods.
In writing that is effortless and engaging, Paul explores why incidence of the disease is on the rise while also grappling with an identity crisis—given that all his favorite pastimes involved wheat in some form. His honest, unflinching, and at times humorous journey towards health and acceptance makes an inspiring read.
- Sales Rank: #457077 in Books
- Published on: 2016-06-07
- Released on: 2016-06-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.49" h x 1.00" w x 6.37" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
“The basic structure of Graham’s new memoir, In Memory of Bread, is the sometimes funny, sometimes poignant chronology of how he cured himself… His story is broadened and made far more interesting with a wide-ranging, well-researched dissertation on wheat, involving history, culture, chemistry and agriculture.”
—The Washington Post
“I highly recommend for anyone who's a foodie. I saw another review that said, ‘Oh, this is for anyone who is gluten-free.’ No. This is for anyone who has interest in food, in cooking, and how we eat today.”
—Roughly Speaking podcast for The Baltimore Sun
“Paul Graham has written an account of saying farewell to a familiar pleasure that manages to combine an intelligent survey of modern agriculture with a touching story of a small but all-too-real grief. His book is an essay that does what essays should: combine a useful idea with a poignant moral.”
—Adam Gopnik
“A medical-culinary adventure story, by turns harrowing, enlightening, and thrillingly honest, In Memory of Bread is an elegy for the most elemental, essential food there is. Diagnosed with celiac disease and forced to rethink everything he's ever known about cooking and eating, Paul Graham has written a brilliant examination of the very meaning of food, memory, and desire.”
—Luke Barr, author of Provence, 1970
“Paul Graham's adventures into the world of gluten-free eating are every bit as fascinating as those of A.J. Liebling and Julia Child into the gastronomy of Paris.”
—Melissa Coleman, author of This Life Is in Your Hands
“Paul Graham's ability to transform his relationship with food and eating and the acceptance he's had to cultivate along the way are truly inspiring. I love how open and honest he is about his journey and know others will, too.”
—Andie Mitchell, author of It Was Me All Along
“This book is a must read! This moving and beautifully written account of giving up the foods you love in order to heal and flourish is one of the best I have ever read.”
—Anna Sobaski, founder and president of Breads from Anna
“In detailed and thoughtful prose, balancing the lyrical with the scientific, Graham illustrates how his deep connection to bread was challenged, and how his body was gravely poisoned by his glutinous true love.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
PAUL GRAHAM is an associate professor of English at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York and his essays have appeared twice in the Best Food Writing anthology (2012 and 2013). Graham lives with his wife and their German shepherd in rural New York on the Canadian border.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter 1.
Last Meals
A winter several years ago will forever be the time when I discovered the intense yet simple pleasures of great homemade bread.
As with most transformative experiences, the timing was everything. My wife started baking in January, after one of our friends introduced her to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Its basic recipe, as Artisan devotees know, makes baking bread with a chewy crumb and shattering crust tantalizingly easy: you mix up a mess of dough, let it age in the fridge, and pull out handfuls to shape, let rise, and bake whenever the urge for a fresh loaf strikes. I often stepped inside—from walking the dog or carrying firewood, leaving behind a blanched sky and snow that literally blew sideways—to hot bread waiting on the wire rack. The windows were steamed over; the whole house bloomed with heat. What I felt was beyond anticipation or joy—it was a sense of wealth and gratitude that humans have known for a long, long time. I couldn’t have contrived this feeling if I tried, and it had everything to do with the smell and taste of baked grains against northern New York’s cold, sparse background.
As she explored the cookbook, Bec made whole-wheat loaves, white loaves, cheddar cheese bread, dinner rolls, cinnamon buns, and my favorite, limpa, a Swedish rye seasoned with orange peel, star anise, cumin, and sugar. At first she baked one or two a week. I tore off chunks while they still steamed from the oven. In the afternoons, I made a cup of tea with toast and chose a jar from “The Vault,” a hutch in our dining room stacked with homemade preserves like brandied melon jam and crab-apple jelly. Every summer and into the fall, Bec puts up seasonal fruits and vegetables she gets from the market and our farm share, and (in the case of the crab apples, anyway) that we forage on the college campus where I teach English. By most estimates, you only have a year or two to eat that stuff. I was doing my part in the race against spoilage.
Sometimes, I ate a loaf in a day.
Once or twice, I may have eaten almost two loaves in a day—most of ours, and then most of our friends’ when we went over to their place for dinner, where the talk, which always turned to food, inevitably gravitated to our helplessness around this bread.
Geography was a factor in our raptures. We live in a rural place, and at the time the sole good nearby bakery was attached to our local food co-op. We had been enjoying the co-op’s loaves for years, but the Artisan bread was even better, and more fun. We loved the ingenious substitution for the steam jets in professional ovens, which involved pouring a cup of boiling water into a preheated sauté pan, creating a dramatic hiss. When we took the bread out and it hit the cooler air, we bent close to the counter and listened as the crust tightened with a series of crackles. But most of all, we loved the sweet, comforting smell of bread baking away as the temperature dropped and we turned local root vegetables into soups and stews.
If we and our friends were conscious of the symbolism of “breaking bread” at these meals, nobody ever mentioned it. And yet, I think if you’d asked any of us whether the experience would have been diminished without my friend David’s triumphant soda bread, or without my friends Sarah and Mere’s perfect airy, white loaves, or without whatever fifty-times-better-than-supermarket bread anyone else had made, we would have said, Yes, of course. Now I know that to be the truth. You can have fellowship over any meal, but sharing bread seems to deliver an especially high emotional return for a simple food. Bread has always inspired such excitement, even reverence, in those who have so much as stood near a fresh loaf.
In those days I had no reason to feel guilty or wary about my bread consumption. I did not obsess over calories or carbs, preferring to believe that if you’re eating good food, whole food, and frequently moving your body, the math all works out in the end. I’ll immediately add, however, that until genetics came calling, I had been one of those annoying types who never had to think about what they ate—or did not eat. In retrospect I see that I was consuming a ton of gluten. But I didn’t know then that gluten could be a problem for me. I didn’t think that gluten could be a problem for anyone, actually, until one day when I heard someone, a student of mine or a colleague, mention her dietary restrictions. I registered this person’s pain distantly. (As a friend would later say to me, “All I know is that I’m glad I don’t have what you’ve got.”) I certainly did not yet understand that those who cannot tolerate wheat struggle against a tradition so long and so deep that some anthropologists believe that by now, the desire for grain in general, and bread in particular, is all but “hardwired” into people of European and Middle Eastern ancestry.
Bec registered the staggering speed at which I was consuming her bread. It took her time to make, she said, and it’d be nice if now and then a loaf could hang around the house longer than a day and a half. In response, I might have pointed out that ancient Egyptian temple officials, instead of being paid in cash, received a share of 900 fine wheat breads, 36,000 flatbreads roasted in coals, and 900 jugs of beer per year, if the archaeological records are to be believed. (That’s 3,000 flatbreads a month, and you haven’t even drunk the beer yet.) Surely these officials were feeding their huge families, servants, and slaves. But they still had a few flatbreads left over for themselves. Against such impressive consumption, my own looked modest, even pitiful.
Speaking of 900 jugs of beer: At about the same time as the Artisan Bread discoveries, my friend David and I began brewing beer. In this way, our homes were not unlike those of the ancients, who baked their bread and brewed their beer in adjacent rooms, often using the yeast in the beer scum (known in some places as “barm”) to inoculate their bread dough.
That’s not how our beer project came about, though. David is a volcanologist, schooled in the geology of small-scale environmental apocalypses, and thus concerned with living in a way that is as gentle on the environment as possible. He believed that home-brewed beer could be as good as most commercial brews, and also more ecologically sound: less gasoline used in transport, less refrigeration at the store, less packaging in the recycling bin. We set out to start our own school of sustainability—green hedonism. Our goal was to become completely self-sufficient in the beer department. The challenge was that David could drink a lot of beer. I had a lower tolerance but still put in a respectable effort.
We started in March by putting up five gallons of American-style amber ale from a kit. We boiled the wort and added hops, cooled it, pitched our yeast, and left our beer to ferment in a sterile and air-locked five-gallon bucket. After a week we added two ounces of Cascade hops, a common American varietal, and let it continue to ferment. Then we bottled our ale and waited for it to age. Finally, in May, we sat on David’s “deck”—the flat roof of the porch below his second-story duplex, which we accessed by climbing through a window—and watched the sun set over the trees as we emptied the bottles over two or three weekends. Quite often we accompanied our beer with some cheese and, naturally, a fresh loaf of bread.
By midsummer, we had twenty-five gallons of beer—a couple hundred bottles—in some stage of the brewing process. The five-gallon carboys burped and fizzed with a new pale ale in fermentation, while bottles of stout and porter hibernated like black bears in the back of my walk-in pantry. We felt giddy with beer-wealth. The ATF had probably begun watching us. We could see the day coming when we would possess a mix of seasonally appropriate beers that we’d need only to go into the cellar or the pantry or the garage or the upstairs closet to retrieve.
Any home brewer will tell you that it’s tradition, and good karma, to drink beer while you make beer. For us, it was also a practical necessity; every time we bottled a batch, we needed to empty some bottles. Ordering additional bottles from the home brew company, we thought, would just be stupid. Carbon would be generated in shipping them to us, killing the ethos of our project. If we were short six bottles for the new beer, we drank beer until we had the room. If one twenty-two-ounce tallboy would get the job done, we split it. It was important to check up on the previous batches, too, measure their progress, see how much longer they had to age.
When I woke up one morning in September following one of these brew-fests feeling a little off—not hungover exactly, but slightly food-poisoned—I first thought, We didn’t sanitize those bottles right. It can get tricky, brewing when you’re a little crocked. But David’s good health suggested that the beer was not the problem. I did not know it yet, but I’d been paying attention to ABV (alcohol by volume) and IBUs (international bitterness units) when I should have been paying attention to PPM (parts per million)—of gluten.
I was in the early stages of a massive flare-up of celiac disease, an inherited autoimmune syndrome that leads the body’s innate immune response to destroy healthy tissue in the small intestine when the person ingests gluten protein (which is technically two proteins, gliadin and glutenin). We most commonly consume gluten in the form of wheat and barley, though rye and spelt also contain gluten, as can oats, via cross-contamination in processing. The bread and the beer, though delicious, constituted a carpet-bombing of my gastrointestinal tract. Estimating my gluten consumption around that time is difficult, but some days I was probably taking in 50,000 PPM. A person with celiac disease should preferably have an intake of zero PPM gluten, though the definition of “gluten-free” has for a long time been 20 PPM because that was the lowest concentration the available technology could measure. More sensitive tests now exist, but 20 PPM remains the threshold of toxicity in the FDA’s 2014 ruling on the definition of “gluten-free foods.” Recent studies have found that level to be safe for people with celiac disease.
My GI symptoms—the bloating, gurgling, and diarrhea—came and went without any pattern until Thanksgiving, when they came to stay, and became uncontrollable. I felt as if something were rotting inside me, just below my navel. I was grateful that the university was on Thanksgiving break so I could focus on recuperating from what I thought was a stomach flu. I was feverish, my temples throbbed, and at times my blood pressure seemed to be so high that I could hear a whirring in my ears. One day I remembered that I had experienced the same symptoms a few years earlier, and a course of antibiotics had cleared it up. My doctor couldn’t see me until after Thanksgiving, though. Until then, I would try to stay hydrated, eat gentle foods like toast and saltines, scale back on my activities, and ride out the infection.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I ate what I now think of as the first of my last meals. It’s probably more accurate to call them “meals of lasts,” but that phrasing is awkward, and it undercuts what was to come—which, for a person who loves food, was a type of death.
With our family obligations for the holiday over, Bec, my co-brewer David, his wife Mere, and I sat down to a dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers and special cheese—Rogue Creamery’s Caveman Blue—that David and Mere had brought back from a recent trip. I did not feel well at all, but the spread was too fabulous to pass up. Bec made a loaf of limpa, and there was a white loaf and table water crackers to go with the cheese, and plenty of homemade cranberry chutney, applesauce, turkey, dressing, roasted Brussels sprouts, and pumpkin pie. I also seem to remember some cinnamon rolls left over from breakfast. The best part of this feast was that we didn’t eat in the traditional order. We just put all of the dishes in the middle of the table and took whatever we wanted as the Stones blared from the kitchen and the smell of wood smoke wafted from the stove in the living room. We accompanied it with some ales David and I had recently brewed. For me, this was the real Thanksgiving: a casual meal of good food with friends, no traditional holiday script or menu to follow, and no stress. My gut was enraged, but I tried to ignore it.
Later in the evening, David and I took down two tallboys of Irish stout. When we pulled the cap off, we received our first good sign, that fsst which means the priming sugar took and the beer isn’t flat. I needed only one sniff to know we’d nailed the brewing and the aging. The body was rich and malty, the head looked creamy and thick, and there wasn’t a trace of greenness in the finish. We passed the tallboys around and everyone poured a glass, admiring our greatest brewing triumph yet.
I struggled through half of mine, then pushed the glass aside.
“Stomach’s a little farked,” I said to David, borrowing one of his Australianisms.
The stout was the last I ever drank. The bread stuffing, the crackers, the salty, pungent blue cheese (which often contains gluten because the inoculation of bacteria comes from moldy bread that is grated into a fine powder and then sprinkled on or injected into the cheese)—these, too, were lasts.
I had one more crack at piecrust and bread a few days later, because our friends Sarah and Cory had been away from town and missed the feed; so we did Thanksgiving a third time, as brunch at Sarah’s house. Even though by that point my body seemed to be in a full-scale revolt—I’d stopped running and working out, stopped cooking, and had to struggle through my work and chores—the food on Sarah’s table forced me, once again, to rise to the occasion. I also didn’t want anyone to think anything was seriously wrong, though two weeks of GI trouble were beginning to show on my face as a combination of pallor and a blank stare. I tried to enjoy the quiche Lorraine, frittata, crêpes filled with preserves and cheese, and what must have been about three pounds of bacon and sausage from our friends at 8 O’clock Ranch, who supplied our meat. I shared in the mimosas and coffee. I avoided the bacon and the sausage because I was wary of the meat on my delicate stomach. Instead, I ate more bread.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
The author of this book has celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disease (NOT an allergy)
By Jess
I have celiac disease and I truly appreciate the time and effort that Mr. Graham has put into researching, educating, and teaching about celiac disease via his book. I am sure that many will be helped by his story. Celiac disease is poorly understood by the general population and the rates of diagnosis are dismally low (although 1 in 100 people have celiac disease in the U.S., only 20% have been diagnosed).
I was disappointed to see that Amazon has replaced the words celiac disease with "wheat allergy" in their overview of this book, because celiac disease and "wheat allergy" are two totally different medical disorders. Celiac disease is NOT an allergy, it's an autoimmune disease that effects just about every system of the body and can lead to serious problems such as nerve damage, arthritis, infertility, headaches, thyroid dysfunction, anemia, dental enamel defects, etc. People with untreated celiac disease are also have much higher risks of gastrointestinal cancer.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging, Informative and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny
By saj
“Give us this day our daily bread.” In the Our Father, “bread” becomes the representative not only of all nourishment on earth, but our surpassing nourishment in the Eucharist. Unless we eat this bread, we will not only go hungry, we will “not have life” (see John 6: 53). For a while, 16th and 17th century missionaries in Asia translated this petition of the Lord's prayer as “give us this day our daily rice.” That didn't go over well with Church authorities. It may have communicated the aspect of earthly nourishment accurately enough, but it lost the Eucharistic connection with the Bread of Eternal Life. And so the Church still prays three times every day (Morning Prayer, Mass and Evening Prayer) for “daily bread.”
Yet by now all of us know someone for whom bread, whether the limp white sandwich bread of our childhood PBJs or the crusty artisanal loaves in a high-end bakery, is not nourishing at all. Bread, the simplest of culinary delights is for persons with celiac disease, not food but life-sapping poison. Those who are “merely” gluten intolerant may not suffer the same degree of physical damage from eating grain-based foods, but they know there is a price to pay if they indulge in a bagel or a cupcake.
Paul Graham knows what that is like, and in his memoir he shares the experience of being cut off not only from bread as food, but from the culture of bread (and of beer!). There is a special poignancy to Graham's narrative of coming back, literally, from death's door only to discover that he had to give up two of his favorite hobbies, two crafts that had brought him immense pleasure not only in the eating (or imbibing, as the case may be) but in the fellowship built around the products of grain: home bread making and beer brewing.
With Graham's book those of us whose daily bread can be, in fact, bread learn what it is like to suddenly be deprived of such a common and seemingly harmless food. Graham's struggle to find food that was (a) like bread and (b) still worth eating highlights an important dimension of culture: the common table. To lose bread is to be cut off from your fellows, as well as f a vital connection with 10,000 years of tradition.
When something as basic as bread (and in Graham's case, even the generally-tolerated oats) is off the table, relationships—and not just menus—have to be renegotiated, rediscovered, relearned. But the first of the relationships affected by Graham's sudden illness (and its almost equally drastic “cure”) was his relationship with his wife, Bec. From the very first, Bec decided that she and Paul would bear this burden together. Paul's inability to tolerate ordinary grains (and products made with grain) would not create a division at their common table with the “haves” (Bec) and the “have nots” (Paul). She would scrutinize labels and clear the house of anything unsafe for Paul to eat. She would experience the same loss, and the same, almost desperate search for bread that was at the same time gluten-free and real, as in real, identifiable bread. She would adopt a gluten-free diet with him.
Graham found that relearning his life after celiac disease included finding a tolerable gluten-free beer that he could drink with his softball buddies after a game. It meant neighbors and friends going out of their way to provide gluten-free canapes at cocktail parties, and the disappointment of many imitations of bread (the saddest of all: imitation pizza). The Grahams had long adopted a “locavore” ethos, supporting local farms and limiting their food choices to produce, meats and cheeses that had been raised in the vicinity. Until Paul's diagnosis, this included local wheat with which to bake the fragrant loaves which were now out of the picture. Now it became necessary to purchase items that could not be produced locally: psyllium, xantham gum, tapioca starch.
With so few restaurants in their rural New York town offering gluten-free options at the time, he had to rely more and more on the exotic. As wonderful as those Asian (hold the soy sauce, please) or African or Latino meals were, they were not the food he grew up with: they did not satisfy his human hunger. They were not bread.
Accompanying Graham and his wife on their search for satisfying bread, we learn about grain production and the culture that took root when grains were first domesticated. With him, we learn the forms of bread in various parts of the world. I had no idea that buckwheat (not really “wheat”) blini are a traditional (and gluten-free) French crepe, or that chickpea flatbread is a (gluten-free) tradition in Nice as well as in India.
Did the Grahams finally find a bread that was both safe to eat and a real connection to the memories and cultures that were woven into their lives? Would they ever be able to bake real bread at home again? Did Paul find a decent beer for his ballgames? No spoilers here.
In Memory of Bread: A Memoir In Memory of Bread was an engaging read, from first to last, with some laugh-out-loud lines in just about every chapter. It disabuses the reader of any notion of a fashionable gluten-free “lifestyle” while giving us a little clue about just what we are asking for, simply on the level of this good earth, when we pray “give us this day our daily bread.”
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Well written and good research
By Kindle Customer
I was diagnosed in late 1997 and the overwhelming feeling of life never going to be the same is well stated in this book. Learning to provide the basics of sustenance is well described by Mr Graham. He has anecdotes that were so close to what our family suffered through. I felt hi is confusion and despair. It does get better and we do adjust and carry on, but in our area there is no real substitute for that raised, glazed maple covered long John, although there are those who are making serious efforts. It is an ongoing learning process and I did enjoy this well written, intelligent "memoir".
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