Sleeping to Bake
Matching donations from January & a podcast that I was on π§
Good morning bread friends!
Iβm writing to you on a morning when my sleep schedule is particularly off. The details of why my sleep is off this morning arenβt as interesting as what this experience inspired me to share with you.
About a week ago I read this brilliant article written by food writer (and recent cookbook author) Emma Laperruque that was titled, While You Were Sleeping, Someone was Baking. Reflecting on bakers who work the early morning shift, she compares the experience to that of jet lag, saying:
A rule of thumb for recovering from jet lag is that for each hour between time zones, your body needs a day to adjust. Which means if youβre traveling from Los Angeles to New York (three hours), youβll need three days to feel normal again. And if youβre changing jobs from nine-to-fiver to baker (give or take eight hours), youβll need over a week.
But itβs more complicated than that. Because a baking schedule is likely five days per week or fewer and, depending on the business, those days of the week might fluctuate. So if you have to wake up at 2 a.m. on a workday, are you going to wake up at 2 a.m. on a day off, too?
Bakers who donβt want to, or simply canβt, keep consistent night-shift hours are left with something of a riddle: If you are in one time zone five days a week, and in another two days a week, can you ever adjust to one place? Or are you a pilot forever flying between London and Bangkok, never landing in either long enough to get off the plane?
I personally have always been a night owl. Donβt get me wrong, I enjoy the early morning hours. I delight in seeing the sunrise. I love getting a jump on the day when others are still sleeping. It is just that my body and mindβs natural tendency is to stay up late.
For 20 years, Iβve known that Iβm comfortable and productive in the late-night hours. So for the past year or so, Iβve been actively adjusting my schedule to be ideal for baking. This effectively means developing the discipline to turn my natural tendencies upside down. Since I built a cottage bakery business in my home, Iβve been trying to establish a rhythm of shaping my dough just after putting my kids to bed, and then going to sleep around 9:30 pm so that I can wake up at 4 am and start baking for my customers.
What Iβve found is that having a rhythm for sleep, and getting enough sleep are critical for my sanity while running this business. I think that is true for any early morning baker. Just as much as flour and waterβ¦ sleep is an essential ingredient to baking. That is why reading an article that explored the sleep culture of early morning bakers was so exciting to me. It was a reminder that there are a lot of us out there.
Certainly βa lot of usβ early morning workers include more than just bakers. As the article points out, many other professions include people who adapt to this early morning schedule. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on and be grateful for the nurses, paramedics, ER doctors, first responders, truck drivers, air traffic controllers, factory workers, taxi drivers, and everyone else who works through the night in order to make a living for their family and also make our society run the way that it does.
Anywayβ¦ I feel lucky that I get the chance to bake for my community. And I hope you get a great nightβs sleep while you think about buying bread :)
Tripling our Donations to the Brennan Center
As you know, Bread & Justice selected the Brennan Center for Justice to donate 100% of our profits to for the Month of January. After all of the loaves of bread that you bought, we were able to donate $406 to this important nonprofit with a long history of fighting to make elections fair, end mass incarceration, and preserve our liberties. The importance of their work was further underscored by yesterdayβs news that The U.S. Supreme Court further undercut the Voting Rights Act on Monday. In a 5-4 split, the conservatives on the Supreme Court sided w/ the GOP drawn maps that actively block the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Alabama for the 2022 election.
On the macro it sure seems that it isnβt a great time in our countryβs historyβ¦ but I believe that it is a great time to be a person who is trying to effect change by leveraging their own tiny sphere of influence. I know this because yet again we saw our donations to the Brennan Center be matched by two families within this Bread & Justice community. Thanks to the generous matching contributions of Britt & Adam Ryan, as well as Gracie & AndrewΒ Foxwell, this community contributed a total of $1,218 to the Brennan Center. So for today, Iβm going to let this community and the smell of bread be a source of hope for me.
Cheers,
Mo
the neighborhood baker
P.P.S - As I wrote todayβs newsletter about sleep, I kept thinking about this line that Mark Dyck says in his wonderful podcast Rise Up. In his intro, he says, βthis is the show about bakers, and bakeries, and bakery owners, and all the folks who work so hard βΒ often through the night βΒ to make the good stuff and share it with the people in their community.β This is a very wholesome podcast and it has been a huge source of inspiration to me ever since I started getting deep into baking. In his two most recent episodes, he had on fellow Tiptree World Bread Hero Award winners - Guy Frenkel and Shiri Reuveni-Ullrich. Those were great episodes that I highly recommend you check out.
It also reminds me that it has been almost a year since I was on the Rise Up podcast. It was a huge honor for meβ¦ but if Iβm honest I was dealing with a bit of imposter syndrome because at the time I had only been selling my bread for a few months. However Iβve been at it a while now, and it is fun to think back on how far Iβve come in the past couple of years. So if youβre interested - here is a link to that fun conversation that I had with Mark back in March or April of 2021.
