Introducing Stale Bread & Moonshine

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Lying in bed under the skylight in a vaulted cream shiplap room of a converted 1800s coach inn with the full moon shining on my face, I was warding off jet lag from my flight from Portland, Oregon to Bath, United Kingdom. Bath bathed me in an awareness of the mystical with the ancient healing streams that pass underneath the city. Before going to sleep, I asked to be given the title of what is to become my manual for living life well with consideration of our natural resources - Stale Bread and Moonshine popped into my head.

Room No.9, The Yard in Bath

Bread and grains were freshly harvested from nearby fields, hands were kneading the dough, the warmth of the fire was used to bake it, and it was shared with the community. The foundation that allowed civilizations to flourish. During the trip to Bath, I enjoyed several cardamom buns from Landrace Bakery made from such grains. 

Landrace Bakery, Bath, UK

Cardamom Bun and Oat Milk Latte, Landrace Bakery

Stale Bread provides an opportunity to be resourceful. Nothing is wasted - breathe new life into it. Revive it with heat, add water to make a soup, cut it into chunks for croutons, dredge through egg batter, grill for French Toast, and many more. 

Moonshine, was a stroke of ingenuity when times got tough. Thought to be no less necessary than bread to those who partake in it. Forget your troubles and take your awareness to new heights. I am not suggesting you drink moonshine. It was a valuable commodity and represented resourcefulness and entrepreneurial talent to run it during its heyday. 

I seek to bottle up the ingenuity of times gone by to help us transition to holistic ways of re-designing our everyday habits around food and drink. How can we take charge of our choices around nourishment for us and the planet?

Stale Bread and Moonshine exists to relieve eco-anxiety, turning energy into ways to re-envision and re-do our eating and drinking patterns. Let’s tap into the resourcefulness within us all.

Thanks for reading Stale Bread & Moonshine! For more posts, please subscribe to my Substack. https://alisonvery.substack.com/

The Fate of 18 Rabbits

My father never told us why the 18 rabbits all suddenly disappeared one summer evening in Farmers Branch, Texas. We would piece it together many years later - my brothers, sisters and me. My dad built a large cage four feet off the ground for the rabbits with plenty of room for the mom and her 16 bunnies to stretch out. Blackjack the 18th rabbit, the wild daddy, came to visit on occasion when the bunnies were hopping around the backyard and sipping water from the swimming pool.

Next door to our house lived a congenial turkey named George, a mean next door neighbor with a barrel shotgun, and an unruly German Shepherd who had the advantage of tall pines marking the boundary line so he could cross whenever he chose. When the sun had set late one summer night, the dog wrestled the rabbits out of the cage rendering them helpless and massacred them all.   

My father didn’t believe in guns only baseball bats. But the bat was kept in the back of the car and, one horror doesn’t mean another one needs to occur. The German Shepherd was hungry and following his natural instincts that hadn’t been curbed.

So what does this have to do with the fate of 18 Rabbits.  I can finally tell you. In 2017, we had a bar manufacturer Hearthside Food Solutions who despite every effort couldn’t produce our bars. They took our money and only produced a few of the half a million we paid them to make.  What they did produce was mostly hard and inedible. On what was to be the last production run with Hearthside Food Solutions, the samples we received could bruise your jaw and break your teeth the bars were so hard. The bar maker wouldn’t take responsibility or give our money back and in the end it crushed an already vulnerable 18 Rabbits.  

18 Rabbits was on a precipice.  With more stores and higher sales than ever before, we expanded quickly across the nation in grocery. There is only so long a store will allow their shelves to go bare.

For the ten years before then, we had sustained 18 Rabbits with investment and a smart customer mix that made money instead of draining it. Making organic granola bars is expensive. Getting them on the grocery shelves requires money to endure a couple of years of it draining the bank account before they take hold and start to fill it up again.  

So why now, 18 Rabbits sued the former bar maker Hearthside Food Solutions for breach of contract. The case took six years to get to trial. 18 Rabbits won. A jury of twelve found Hearthside Food Solutions guilty. It was a pyrrhic victory in that a bad actor supplier brought the company down but, there were not enough assets recovered from Hearthside Food Solutions to do anything more than pay the legal fees. Justice was served not in a wrapper but on record.

I am grateful for the time I had with the rabbits - both the real and the mascots. They brought me and my family much joy. The profound impact of 18 Rabbits still reverberates with its mission that everyone has the right to pure and simple food using organic and regenerative oats, fruit and nuts. 

I invite you to join me as I travel in a new direction. With over twenty years of baking experience, sourcing regenerative ingredients and traveling the globe, I share recipes for granola and other baked goods using regenerative flours, roots and sweeteners along with some writing on my website AlisonVery.com and Instagram @alison_very.

Thank you for being part of the 18 Rabbits journey. May your life be filled with treats and wonders of all kinds.  

Choose your pastry wisely

Enjoying your next baked good from an artisan bakery could help cool the planet.

With the opening of Krispy Kreme in Paris in December 2023 and a line of 500 people to get their first bite of an American donut, we have successfully outsourced our culture of pastries with empty carbohydrates and white refined sugar to even the French.

It could be a fad. It’s not that Krispy Kreme doughnuts are bad. It’s what they mean to propagating a food culture that has been a cause for the rise in diabetes and health issues for our youth. Enriched white flour bleached with benzoyl peroxide or chlorine dioxide with added synthetic nutrients and white sugar is the base for most of American baked goods. A host of preservatives and hydrogenated soybean oil are the icing on the cake to round out the naughty ingredients.

Enough complaining, let’s instead create a pop culture built on ensuring a future for our food supply and the wellness of our children. How do you ask?

Changing up the foundation of our baked goods is one way. America can once again be a frontier for discovery. Visit one of the many artisan bakeries across the country that either mill locally grown grains into flour or using regenerative flours. Over the last few decades, many mills have popped up to revitalize ancient grains.

Diversifying flours gives ancient grains a chance to reawaken and support regenerative agriculture.  Instead of toxic brown fields, the lush green fields yield the crops. Farming needs to respect and rejuvenate the soil, a term called regenerative agriculture. Carbon is kept in the ground where it is needed and not released into the atmosphere where it does damage. Carbon in soil provides nutrients where it also increases water storage in the ground.  The microbes created then get to work fluffing the soil and building a holistic environment for growing crops.

All purpose flour a product of industrial agriculture relies on inputs (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, insecticides) rather than the earth to regenerate itself, the carbon gets released into the atmosphere - erosion, tilling, mono crops and the use synthetic chemicals/pesticides have all led to the degradation of our food. Let’s take back our baked goods for good.

Here are a few bakeries using freshly milled or locally milled ancient grains for their pastries and breads. I have enjoyed pastries and bread at many of them.

Seylou Bakery - Washington, D.C.

Boulted Bread - Raleigh, North Carolina

Hole Doughnuts - Asheville, North Carolina

Abby Jane Bakeshop - Austin, Texas

The Mill - San Francisco, CA

Kantine SF - San Francisco, CA

Faria Bakery - Sacramento, CA

Mt. Tabor Breads - Portland, Oregon

Brewers Bread - Portland, Oregon

Babcia Bread (closes Jan 27, will re-open in own location)- Portland, Oregon

Top row: 1st picture Babcia Bread and the rest Seylou Bakery, middle row: Seylou Bakery and last pic Brewer’s Bread, last row: KantineSF, Babcia Bread and Gee Creek Mill (at the PSU Farmers’ Market)