Racism is baked into the history of bread in the South. As baker, theologian, and writer, Kendall Vanderslice settled into life in Durham, North Carolina, where she was folded into the welcoming community of St. Titus’ Episcopal Church and found how bread can bring healing.
Essay by Kendall Vanderslice | Photos by KC Hysmith
Step One, Mise en place: Prepare your ingredients, your workspace, and your mind. How will this bread change you today?
I last interlocked hands with members of St. Titus’ Episcopal Church on the second Sunday in March 2020. Fingers intertwined, we stepped to the altar rail then placed palms up before the priest. With heads bowed, we received our bread, Mother Stephanie’s fingers pressing a bleached wafer into each set of hands. We ate together then sipped from the silver cup. Right finger to forehead, to chest, left shoulder then right, we flowed through our liturgical routine. Hold hands and bow, step down backward and bow once more, never facing away from the cross.
I first visited St. Titus’ three years before, a few days after moving to Durham, North Carolina. I sat down in a red cushioned seat to skim the bulletin in my hand. “Welcome Home,” the cover read. A young, white, single woman, transplanted from Boston, I wasn’t sure if I belonged in the historically Black Episcopal congregation. But those two words spoke to me.
I returned: Eager for the time when we would sing the Lord’s Prayer, holding hands and raising arms above our heads. Eager for the 10-minute passing of the peace, exchanging hugs and handshakes with every person in the room. Eager for the wafer pressed gently in my palm, “The body of Christ,” my priest would say. Until COVID-19 relegated us to worship from home, this Sunday morning service was the only time each week I knew I would experience the touch of another human.
Step Two, Mix: Once water touches wheat, the two elements become one. Changes begin that can never be undone.
When the Spanish first arrived in the Americas, they were bothered by the lack of wheat. In The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700, Rebecca Earle writes that Europeans at that time believed diet impacted both physical and personality characteristics, from skin color to general constitution. The Catholic Spanish culinary model paralleled the Greco-Roman approach, which understood bread and wine as the diet that made a person civilized, a human. It followed, in their minds, that introducing a Spanish diet would make those native to the Americas “more human,” too. While the Indigenous corn could be made into bread-like cakes, the Spanish believed it to be inferior to European wheat. They feared corn might turn Spanish bodies into Indigenous ones.
This connection between bread and the humanity of a body found resonance in Christianity, where a loaf transubstantiated into Christ’s physical body could graft its consumer into the spiritual body of Christ. The prevailing view of the past 200 years was that only wheat could become Christ’s body in the sacrament, so corn was also considered theologically inferior.
Wheat was soon successfully planted in Mexico, and anywhere else the climate allowed it to thrive — read by the settlers as a sign of divine favor over their claim to the land and proof of the superiority of their agricultural ways. The conversion of souls and soil were almost one and the same.
By the 19th century, wheat grew across the New World, including the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where I now live. While tobacco, the cash crop for which the region is known, was the purview of those who could take a market risk, wheat and corn were grown by households of every size.
Christianity endured major theological shifts over the course of those 300 years, including the split between Catholic and Protestant sects. The latter were less likely to hold explicitly to the view that communion required the use of wheat. Still, white men and women considered wheat to be the higher quality food, while corn was viewed as the diet of animals. Clinging to the idea that you are what you eat, slaveholders limited the amount of wheat they offered the enslaved. The wheat enslaved people did receive was the coarse remains after the finest parts were sifted out. Slaveholders upheld their sense of racial superiority through a hierarchy of grains, dehumanizing the very people who grew the grains by feeding them corn and bran.
Even so, Black cooks transformed the grains they had on hand. Learning from Native American traditions, these cooks developed cakes, muffins, dumplings, and breads. Some innovative women merged their West African cooking techniques with European baking practices they learned in the kitchen, many of their recipes now memorialized in Toni Tipton-Martin’s cookbooks like Jubilee and The Jemima Code. This culinary wisdom enabled these women to launch food businesses that provided their families economic freedom in the years following emancipation.
“Southern whites deplored when Blacks bucked the established norms and ate wheat bread,” writes culinary historian Adrian Miller. “Wheat bread [became] a metaphor for unwanted Black progress.”
Despite separation by centuries and church splits, both the Spanish and white Southern farmers operated within the same faulty logic: The white body is the superior body, and it’s formed by the eating of wheat. Another assumption fed by this view is that Christ’s body is therefore white and wheat, too.
Step Three, Autolyse: Let the mixture sit for a bit while water softens wheat and floods the grain.
St. Titus' was started in the 1880s when an African American member of a white congregation — Ms. A.L. Ledger — wanted to share the Episcopal tradition with Black descendants of enslaved people. Her status and education afforded her full communion in the white church, but by gathering a community to worship in homes and Black-owned businesses, she opened the Episcopal tradition to those who didn’t share her freedom to assimilate. In 1909, the community was given its first priest and its name.
For over more than a century, her members organized for civil rights, advocated on behalf of refugees, reached out to those with AIDS, and raised up local and national leaders. The sanctuary holds onto the voices of her most influential members, both living and dead: Pauli Murray, the first Black woman to receive a doctorate of jurisprudence from Yale Law School and to be ordained an Episcopal priest; Onyekwere Akwari, the first Black surgeon on faculty at Duke University; Brenda Armstrong, one of the first Black undergraduates at Duke and an associate dean who shaped over 20 cohorts of Duke Medical students. At St. Titus’, Dr. Armstrong was the beloved organist who played communion hymns every week up until the Sunday before she died in 2018. Architects and bankers, insurance brokers and teachers, the fingerprints of St. Titus’ members have shaped the city of Durham for more than a century.
After returning to the church every Sunday for a year, I was slowly grafted into her rhythms: added to the altar guild, then the usher’s guild, then the Episcopal Church Women group. I learned the history of the congregation, told through handouts and slideshows at various points throughout each year. I baked cakes for those who were baptized and confirmed on Easter Sunday. I celebrated the feast days of Pauli Murray and Absalom Jones. Listening to the stories shared over chicken biscuits and sweet tea, I was drawn into the spiritual lineage of this community.
Step Four, Stretch, and Fold: Grab a fistful of dough and stretch to see the transformation at hand. Proteins, once coiled tightly like secrets, have been unwound, turning slop into strong dough. Fold the fistful over, rotate your bowl, and repeat.
By the end of the 19th century, new technologies began shifting the commercial practice of baking bread. Up until this point, hearty brown loaves were typically made by women in their homes (or the homes in which they worked) using unstandardized techniques. Consumers were wary of the breads sold in bakeries and stores, unable to trust the flour had not been stretched with sawdust or chalk. Over the first two decades of the 20th century, industrial equipment exponentially increased the number of loaves that a commercial bakery could produce each day. To sell this growing stock, political food scholar Aaron Bobrow-Strain found that bakers capitalized on the longing for culinary purity. The ability to standardize the bread baking process with techno-scientific control allowed bakeries to produce loaves that were soft, uniform, sliced, and, most notably, white.
Post World War I white consumers felt increased anxiety over shifting racial and class demographics due to both Black progress and immigration. In the wake of the Spanish Flu of 1918, fears of bacterial contamination permeated society, too. From food and fashion to the emerging fields of home economics and public health, researchers of every industry hyper-focused on sanitization and control. The new bread resonated with this growing association between whiteness, cleanliness, and purity. Even the yeasts in the living dough were under scientific jurisdiction.
These fears of contamination found their way into sacramental practice as well, leading some pastors and congregants to argue against the use of a common loaf or a common cup. While some kept the dialogue limited to matters of hygiene, others proclaimed quite boldly their fear of intermingling with germs from those perceived as dirty or poor. Seeking theological defense for their fear, the argument arose that communion is not about the relationship of an individual to the corporate body but an individual relationship between the consumer and God.
Step Five, Bulk Fermentation: Let the dough sit for four hours, or six hours, or 12 hours or more. Dormant yeasts will come to life and eat their way through the dough, growing and burping and strengthening and building flavor during what looks like rest.
I arrived at church dusted in flour that last Sunday we interlocked hands. My bread bakery was floundering, and I spent every free hour attempting to get it up off the ground. I’d slipped away to worship while my loaves cooled, with small globs of wheat dough clinging to my arms.
Desperate to stay afloat despite the economic downturn, I pivoted my business model in the weeks to come. The pervading pandemic anxiety provided opportunities to grow, as well as a means of channeling my concerns. I began baking and delivering hundreds of loaves to homes, churches, and food banks all across town. While I came to know the history of Durham through my relationship to St. Titus’, I became intimately acquainted with her geography while building delivery maps for bread.
I tracked the weeks of lockdown in a spreadsheet. Every set of orders marked another week without a hug, another week without human touch, another week without the Body of Christ on my tongue. My desperation for communion bore itself out in these loaves: 60 loaves, 80 loaves, 120 in a day.
These loaves brought peace in the midst of anxiety, but they heightened my sadness. Like the theological unrest 100 years before, churches around the world debated the place of the sacrament in this pandemic age. My faith tradition held to the belief that the meal is only proper when our bodies stand together in person. Perhaps God is not held back in transforming the bread by a particular grain or the means by which we gather, but the mysterious shift from plain bread into Holy Body is not the only thing that matters when we eat. The relationship of our bodies to one another communicates something meaningful, too.
With every hundred loaves I baked and delivered, I longed all the more for a single bite: the bite that signified my sacred connection to the bodies of beloved friends.
Step Six, Shape: Gently guide the dough in the direction you think it ought to go. If it resists, pay attention, it will tell you what it needs.
What keeps drawing me back to bread, wheat bread, in particular, is its utter reliance on tension.
Each loaf is at once simple and complex, basic yet weighty with history. Even at the physical level, a wheaten loaf relies on tension in order to grow. As amino acids of two opposing qualities begin to interlock their hands, the tension of their differences creates the bond that captures carbon dioxide gas and enables the substance to expand.
The boundary between a baker and her bread is porous. North Carolina State University ecologist Rob Dunn conducted an experiment to study the microbial makeup of bakers and their sourdough starters from around the world. He found that the bacterias that defined the bakers and their bread were nearly the same. What’s less clear is whether the body changes bread or bread changes the body.
Spanish conquistadors were not wrong in their recognition that bread and body are deeply intertwined. But like the techno-science concerns of 20th-century consumers, their assumed superiority cut them off from witnessing the value that porous boundaries could bring. In the quest for safety and sanitization, the resulting product was nutritionally void. This sort of purity is not just hollow and bland, it is dangerous.
Without bacteria and microbes, dough bakes into a brick. Pure H2O kills those who consume it. The muddled space between bodies and bread, between grains and microbes, is not just beneficial, it enables us to live.
Step Seven, Proof: Once you’ve built enough tension that the dough can hold its shape, you must give it time to rest into its newfound strength. The yeasts present within the dough will prove that they’re alive, growing the dough once more as it relaxes for its final push.
The history of bread is kneaded together with the history of humanity and the history of Christianity: The same tools used to sustain life have been wielded to dehumanize. The fear of bodies and the fear of difference has been played out in the culinary sphere. It’s been codified in theology and reinforced by techno-science. It weaves through racist policies and policing systems. Is it possible to subvert the negative dominance of this fear so that bread might be a tool to heal?
My faith tradition provides a structure through which to understand this subversive power. We say that God became flesh and called himself the Bread of Life. Purity in much of Christian tradition, as I’ve come to understand, is not something to be preserved by avoiding contact with anything unclean. Rather, purity is gained through communion in Christ, through the shared cup and loaf. It’s a paradox that the mythology of whiteness cannot comprehend, and so it is lost in many American expressions of the faith today. But even as wheat and Christianity both were wielded to defend the oppression of Black Americans, many found within them the roots of freedom. To echo theologian Willie Jennings, the Bread of Life shows us all what it means to be truly human and thus truly free.
You don’t have to agree that God is in the bread in a mystical way to see its complex boundaries yet simple beauty. Both making and eating it alters our very bodies and the ways we exist in the world. It impacts the stories we tell about the places we live, the grains our soil grows, and the people with whom we eat. If white power gained strength through thousands of subtle fears about the boundaries of bodies, then it must be undone, in part, through thousands of subtle shifts in the ways our bodies operate in this world.
Perhaps this is the tension I feel most viscerally today: we must touch and feed and bake and eat in order to chart a path toward wholeness. And yet, for once, this fear of one another’s bodies is thoroughly grounded. In the wake of this pandemic, our bodies present a grave danger toward one another.
Step Eight, Bake: Once the dough is fully rested, subject it to the flame. Water immediately converts to steam guiding the loaf into the fullness of her beauty.
The risk is low that American bread culture will praise the factory model again in the coming years, but the fear of discomfort and difference that drove its success continues to prevail. Without careful attention to the patterns of generations past, our words and relationships mean as little as the nutritional value of industrial bread.
Not only do hollow words avoid the tensions present in this age, but the quest for purity in speech can also become its own form of violence. It hinders speakers and eaters of every race from wrestling through the tensions of fear and pain.
Perhaps we hide behind our sanitized words as a shield against deeper change, like the conquistadors, who hoped their bodies could encounter difference without being altered in any way. But the shift that is at once simple and complex, basic yet weighty with history, is committing ourselves to relationships that stretch and strengthen and transform. Participating in communities that shape our understanding of the places in which we live and the national or spiritual lineages of which we are a part.
Step Nine, Eat: As the loaf cools, its starches will tighten, and the crust will sing. Once the song has quieted down, the loaf is ready for you to tear it apart and feast.
Right now, I receive my small bite at church dropped into my palm by silver tongs. I slip it underneath my mask in the parking lot sanctuary, smiling and nodding at my fellow Titusians from 6 feet apart. My bakery folded at the end of last year, my body unable to keep up with the pressure of baking and delivering hundreds of loaves. But I found, in the process, that I was never only hungering for bread.
I still believe, even in this strange means of gathering, that God is at work transforming both bread and body in mysterious ways. But it's the relationship of my body to others that leaves me hollow these days. I long for the morning that, head bowed, I feel my priest press her fingers into my palm.
“This is Christ’s body, broken for you. Eat, and be thankful.”
Kendall Vanderslice is a baker, writer, and the founder of Edible Theology, a digital media project on food and faith. She is a graduate of Wheaton College (BA Anthropology), Boston University (MLA Gastronomy), and Duke Divinity School (Master of Theological Studies). She is the author of We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God, and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her big-eared beagle named Strudel.
KC Hysmith is a Texas-bred, North Carolina-based writer, food historian, recipe developer, and photographer. See more of her work here: kchysmith.com
