Preetinderjit Singh Riar is a baker at Bread & Butter Bakery in Grey Lynn.
Preet shares the link for his love of baking with his childhood on farms in India and tells of the challenges his birth country now faces.
Preet’s journey to Bread & Butter Bakery began when he decided to come to New Zealand to study cooking. The reality of a commercial kitchen wasn’t quite what he expected, but once he learnt the joy of handling dough and baking bread, he was hooked. “Baking is full of life – sourdough is a living thing. You can sense that it is alive, you have to take great care of it and handle it gently like an animal. That inspires me.”
While he loves baking and enjoys our passion for high-quality ingredients at Bread & Butter Bakery, he says one of the biggest challenges in his career is getting people to understand how important it is to have good food. He says many people, even chefs and bakers, don’t ‘get’ the importance of good ingredients – it’s not given priority in training, and for many people in the industry cooking is just a job, not a passion.
But for Preet, growing up on a farm meant he could see the whole picture, from seed to table. “What people seem to forget,” Preet says, “is that whatever food you grow or make, it’s going to feed another living thing – to nourish and support life, and that’s a huge responsibility. So how can you make bad food?” I couldn’t agree more.
In India, the government controls agriculture, setting the price for grain, subsidising chemicals and ‘encouraging’ the use of hybrid seeds. People still plant a lot of the old crop varieties, but that’s only for their personal use “because they taste better,” says Preet. 90% of all rice and wheat in India is bought by the government, who then store and distribute it around the country – and the government only buys the hybrid varieties.
Anyone wanting to grow in a more sustainable way has huge barriers to overcome. According to Preet, this method of controlling agriculture was first started by the colonising British, who exported much of the wheat and rice grown. This allowed them to exert even greater control over their subjects, holding back food stocks and, in some cases, causing starvation. The system then simply continued on into modern times and allowed the large-scale roll out of the chemical farming system dubbed the ‘Green Revolution’.
Many factors contribute to poor nutrition in India and when the Green Revolution started to transform agriculture around the world from the 1960s onwards, India was a massive testing ground for the agrochemical industries. While some argue that the new way of farming in India’s massive commercial agriculture system has solved one problem – that of starvation – it created many more.
Farmers using hybrid seeds are paid a higher price for their crops, tying them into a vicious cycle of purchasing new seed every year, and growing crops that demand high levels of fertiliser, herbicide and fungicide – generally made by the same large corporations that sell the seed. Sound familiar?
Hybrid seeds may produce a larger crop in a shorter time, but it’s not without a price – Preet says in his state there are massive problems with pollution of the waterways and soil erosion where land has been abused rather than tended. Traditional farming used seed collected from previous seasons and farmers knew which seed suited their geography and climate. Crops took longer and were smaller, but the environmental impact was a lot less harmful, and farmers worked with nature, rather than against it. After all, farming has been practised on the same land in India for thousands of years.
Closer to (New Zealand) home, Preet is investigating the milling of flour to start a kind of co-operative. He dreams of one day being able to process the grains grown on his ancestral lands and thus produce a value-added product that can be sold direct to market. Read the full story at www.breadpolitics.com (ISABEL PASCH)
To read more about other urban farming initiatives in New Zealand and around the world visit www.breadpolitics.com
Isabel Pasch is the owner of Bread & Butter Bakery & Cafe and the author of the www.breadpolitics.com blog.
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