Alexander Strecker (ed). Bread for the LIving, Bread for the Dead. Tavros Press, Athens 2025. 137 pp. ISBN 978-618-87697-0-0
David Sutton (Southern Illinois University)
Bread for the Living, Bread for the Dead is a timely collection of short essays, stories and reflections organized around experiences of bread in the Mediterranean Basin and the Black Sea areas, stretching to include Palestine and Eastern Turkey. Edited by Alexander Strecker, it is the first publication of Tavros Press, part of Athens-based Tavros, named after the neighborhood where many Asia Minor refugees settled in Greece after the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922. The book brings together academics and artists of various stripes in eight overlapping contributions, along with a brief foreword, prologue and introduction. Given the overlaps, I organize my review around themes, noting the varying contributions to each theme.
Key themes include:
Bread as ritual and storytelling. Perhaps the standout contribution here comes from anthropologist Juliet du Boulay, who binds together several excerpts from her ethnography of Greek traditional village religious practices centered around bread. She argues that wheat, in drawing together everyday bread, the Eucharist and funeral food, “pre-eminently unites the physical and spiritual world” (58). Everyday bread, then, has a sacramental character, noted also in 3 contributions: by anthropologist Neni Panourgia,[i] art historian and sociologist Pelin Tan, and artist and polymath Vivien Sansour who all describe similar traditions in different places of kissing bread that was old or had fallen to the ground, and eating it, or feeding it to animals—never throwing it away (31; 91; 117).
The magical fertility of bread is captured in a short story by Jumana Emil Abboud titled “The Magic Loaf” which stitches fertility to storytelling and memory, as the magic loaf is planted while the main character recounts “’I remember, deep in my heart, my childhood—playing by our oven where the women gathered to bake collectively. Those were happy days, immersed in the pleasant aroma of fresh-baked bread. Immersed in the folk stories preserved from our ancient past” (111). The “ancient past” shows up in a number of the contributions, spanning as they do long durée timescales.
- Bread as a central aspect of historical struggle. Panourgia’s contribution details, among other things, the struggles for bread during the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War II, when many were forced to eat bobota, a bread substitute that led to wasting disease, and the long memories left by these experiences. In two short essays under the shared title “The Homesick Breadmakers,” Lia Dostlieva and Emine Ziyatdin describe experiences of Ukrainian refugees during recent and more distant times and Crimean Tatar experiences of genocide during World War II. Dostlieva describes bread as representing a sense of “home and comfort” (80) during constant displacement. She notes that “In memories of those hungry years, a whole loaf of bread was an unimaginable luxury. Most often slices, and even crumbs are recalled with amazing vividness” (ibid). Ziyatdin emphasizes the centrality of women’s acts of “humanity and care” amidst historical turmoil, and the small gestures of bread baking and its rituals. She mentions also her grandmother’s ritual in which she moved a slice around the author’s head and rubbed it on her lips before feeding it to the dog as a way to “absorb the troubles” (82), echoing for me the idea of a sin-eater. The hunger of war and the desperate acts that it can lead to is also captured in a short story by Palavos on the first Balkan War in Northern Greece.
- Ecologies of Bread. Most of the contributions, in one way or another, detail the losses entailed in the industrialization of agriculture and/or of bread baking itself. Panourgia describes, in the aftermath of WWII, the stripping of nutrition of wheat and barley flour through changing the landscape of farming brought by the Marshall Plan to Greece: “Mechanization and chemical fertilization replaced the immediate, affective connectivity between the wheat and barley farmers and the soil and seed” (36). In a truly longue-durée contribution Tan describes the “ecocide” of landscapes throughout the Mediterranean through development projects, forced migration and other catastrophes, tracing these both in recent times and in the ancient past, as told in the story of Gilgamesh. And Guibert provides a personal account of her attempts to create alternatives to “industrial bread, often produced from readymade mixes, always using terrible white flour and blasted with chemicals and other accompanying ‘beauties’ the prevailing food system feeds us” (67). Panourgia provides a personal alternative in the story of her father’s seeking for a particular type of ritual bread (“prosforo”) and her own bread baking for friends and in honor of the dead. Tan and Guibert also point toward collective alternatives, what Guibert calls “margin bread” in the self-organizing anti-capitalist cooperatives in which she has found “cum-panis.” Tan highlights a more generalized sense of “survival-through” in the face of ecocide’s “slow violence” (95), involving “collective female labor,” “commoning” and “the process of sustaining livestock and crops using land-specific knowledge that ensures the flourishing of humans and non-humans alike” (91). Finally, Sansour’s contribution, titled “Bread: An Obituary,” ties together the death of the author’s father with the processes of killing good bread in Palestine. Sansour notes, in tying together some of the different topographies of the volume, how the price of bread in Palestine “skyrocketed” in the wake of the Russian war on Ukraine. This because industrial wheat has come to replace the micro-terroirs that existed in which “Every community, and in many cases every family, had their own unique wheat, selected by generations of farmers and therefore perfectly adapted to the unique circumstances and conditions of each field or terrace” (118).
Bread for the Living, Bread for the Dead, thus does not end on a hopeful note. But the different contributions do provide a sense that people may find ways of “survival through,” and the volume as a whole is a fine companion for bakers and scholars who seek to understand the centrality of bread in so many of our lives.
[i] Panourgia’s piece, “On Bread Alone” first appeared on the SAFN weblog, and can be accessed here: https://foodanthro.com/2024/03/13/on-bread-alone/.
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