Friday Bread Basket 4/4/25
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.
Bread riot grrrls
This past Wednesday was the 162nd anniversary of a little-known but important event in American history, the Richmond Bread Riot of 1863, when some 5,000 women took to the streets of Richmond, VA to protest rising food costs, inflation, poor working conditions, housing shortages, and speculation in the early years of the Civil War:
The Bread Riot of 1863 was an act that some historians, like Mike Gorman, believe lit an early fuse in the movement toward women’s empowerment in America. "I think it is absolutely the genesis of women being political actors in a very public way,” Gorman said. On April 2, 1863, rioters made up of mostly poor women, ransacked warehouses along Cary and Main Streets. "A lot of the stores there were broken into and entirely wiped out,” Gorman said. “Basically if it was a store it got looted.”
Author and historian Meredith Henne Baker said the lawlessness was born out of sheer survival. "The kind of political tools available to women were pretty limited,” Henne Baker said. “So there are shortages in housing and inflation is rampant. Things cost ten times as much as they did a few years before.” The Bread Riot exploded while the Civil War raged on Richmond’s doorstep.
“This might be the kind of political action that might be used to today but back then for it to occur at all is revolutionary,” Gorman said. “I think it is important to remember the Richmond Bread Riot because the people at the time didn’t want it to be remembered,” Henne Baker added. A footnote in Virginia history, the Richmond Bread Riot lasted just two hours. But Meredith Henne Baker said this often overlooked chapter in women’s history still reverberates across the centuries.“Because it was a very bold statement by these women and their message was ‘If you’re not going to help us then we’re just going to help ourselves.”
1863 might seem like a long time ago, but the issues the women of Richmond were fighting for are still very much with us, and it might well be time to take to the streets again.
By: Greg McQuade
Kick me
Welp. The Sourdough Sidekick, a tabletop device for automatically feeding a sourdough starter—which I wrote about with deep skepticism a few weeks ago—launched its crowdfunding campaign last week, and it has already overshot its goal by some $450k, with more than 3400 backers. I guess I'm not surprised that so many think they would want a device like this. Even if it works as advertised, though, I suspect most of the Sidekicks will end up going the way of the instant pot, gathering dust on a shelf somewhere once their users discover that success with sourdough requires attention, not automation. Once they do, they'll either find the time to give it that, or give it up entirely.
Roll dem bones
I recently stumbled upon the work of Caitlin Hazell, an English artist, researcher and "clown college dropout," whose sculptures are made out of bread. I don't know much about them, but I love their work, which is whimsical and macabre, as this bread skeleton makes plain:
Source: I'm a caveman
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful, restful weekend. See you at the Hands Off! rally tomorrow, or next week.
—Andrew
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