Skip to main content

Slow Rise - Robert Penn ****

There are two provisos here - first, this is primarily not a science book, but has enough science scattered through it to be worth covering. And second, I'm giving this book four stars because I enjoyed reading it despite its irritating flaws. It's a bit like a film I watched the other day in which an American actor did one of the worst Scottish accents I've ever heard. I still managed to enjoy the film, but I had to work at ignoring it.

In Slow Rise, Robert Penn provides a memoir of his attempt to produce a year's worth of bread for his family using traditional wheat varieties he has grown and converted into flour himself. This may sound a bit like one of those amusing self-challenge books that Tony Hawks does so well, and there certainly is an element of humour in Penn's self-deprecating comments when things go wrong. But here this is also combined with some really interesting material on the biology and nature of wheat and the technical details of the bread-making process.

Along the way, Penn visits various growers of ancient wheats (and factory-scale harvesters), talks with flour and bread fanatics and samples a whole range of exotic bread types before settling on his own wholemeal sourdough, made from a combination of emmer wheat, one of the main standards a couple of millennia ago, and a Welsh wheat variant that would have been popular in medieval times.

As well as finding a lot to like in Penn's storytelling and the occasional, cosmetic advert style 'now the science bit' (my label, not his), I was convinced by his argument that modern white bread is far more likely to be responsible for some of today's digestive problems than gluten, and that going for quality bread made with good wholemeal flour is well worth spending extra on. However, I can't entirely ignore the two main irritations.

The first is that Penn very much portrays a 'back to nature', caring for the environment ethos, taken sometimes to ridiculous extremes when, for example, he ploughs a field with a horse-drawn hand plough. Yet he's even worse than Brian Cox at jetting off all over the world to have a cameo appearance in the wheat fields of middle America or to search out an ancient grain in Turkey. I find a degree of hypocrisy in speaking up for thinking more of the environment (which is of genuine importance) while flying across the world. The other issue I have is Penn repeatedly refers to organic flour as if being organic makes any difference to the quality, rather than being a marketing tool to charge more. Where he makes a good case for the benefits of good quality wholemeal and lack of additives, he makes no case for organic (which is hard to do for a system so embedded with woo and lacking evidence of benefits), but simply assumes it's better.

Despite the genuine irritants (a bit like those additives in many loaves) this remains a book I'm glad I read and can happily recommend.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

  1. The several praising revs of this book don't mention its serious drawbacks. Although much based on historical claims and interpretations, it cites no sources for them: no fns, no biblio--just 'selected readings'. Despite introducing technical terms, it lacks an index, which could be made in minutes by word search. The publisher, Particular Books, seems not particular. Editing: e.g., having until then read of bread entirely in terms of the history of wheat, on p. 80 we have bold claims about its importance from medieval to early modern times, only to be told 18 pp. later that in that pd (& up to the late 19th C) it was mainly rye and barley.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...