Anything can become dogma

Bread, guilt and letting go

Photo by Daniel Salgado on Unsplash

Making bread can be dangerous for me. 

One of my kids dislikes mass-produced bread, possibly because of the preservatives in it. I mean, I assume that’s what’s going on. She’s not been able to describe it beyond saying it doesn’t taste right.

But the stuff she likes is SO expensive. Verging on £5 a loaf. With three hungry, growing people who don’t seem to ever stop eating when at home, that’s a lot of bread. So I go through phases of making it - and then realising that the time I’ve spent is probably worth more than what I think I’m saving. 

If I’m not careful I can get in my head about it and making bread soon becomes something I should do. Suddenly I’m thinking about more than money.

A thing that could be mindful, fun and just “nice to do” becomes a morality test in my very inexpert hands. It’s not surprising that breadmaking is a symbol of oppression in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Recently I noticed I’d slipped into feeling guilty about not making the time to make bread or berating myself for ending up buying it. I could see a pattern repeating itself.

Nine years ago, we spent a year living without the supermarket. Instead we had a food box for fruit, veg, meat and other fresh stuff (we mostly ate plant-based anyway) and I organised a small food-buying group for the rest. I made A LOT of stuff from scratch.

If I forgot to order something - which was frequently - I would only allow myself to go to organic indie shops.

So as you can imagine, this all got pricey, time consuming and worse, stressful. I found myself thinking about food all the time. Obsessively, not in a fun, foodie kinda way.

Food became a good versus evil topic in my mind. I resisted popping into nearby shops. I chose to do without or traipsed across Bristol to spend more than we could afford. 

As I passed convenience stores and supermarkets, I would literally visualise the foods on their shelves as poison, harming humans and the planet with intent. 

I love to laugh at Emily Morrow’s natural parenting humour on her @reallyverycrunchy Instagram but I’m also aware of how close to the bone it is for me. 

People often want to engage me in health food chat since I co-own an organic veg farm but, honestly, I have to consciously limit how much of that kind of attention I give food myself. I’ve learned that that’s the healthy thing for me.

Our year without the supermarket ended when I was heavily pregnant with baby number three, who’s now almost eight. I also had a four year old and a two year old at the time and Laurence was mostly working in London so we only saw him on the weekends. 

Letting myself off the hook and easing back into shopping wherever it made sense was a wrench. I had built up this very rigid value system, which is probably how the commitment lasted so long. 

On reflection, I was on my own a lot with small children and not feeling well supported so food became the thing I felt I could control.

Though the current bread thing isn’t verging on that level of preoccupation, it’s reminded that anything can become dogma. It’s taking something that could just be an option and imbuing it with too much moral meaning.

Maybe this is something we all navigate but I wonder if some of us are a bit more prone to it. 

With the kids going to school after always being home educated, I’ve had to consciously work to balance some of my beliefs about school.

I’ve had to allow myself to recognise the good things about it and notice where I might be reinforcing my own fears.

And looking at our financial challenges, I’ve had to stop equating “we’re having trouble” with “we made all the wrong choices”. 

The many parents I’ve supported as a breastfeeding counsellor or as a friend have shown me that people weigh things up in so many different ways and that the decisions we make are so complex and unique to each of us. 

We can’t pre-determine what the outcome is going to be an awful lot of the time. The idea that there’s always a right or a wrong choice to be made is a way of pretending that we can.