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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Patrick2 August 2021 at 02:30

    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

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more