Who doesn’t have a soft spot for their local bakery? There’s nothing like the smell of bread baking as you decide between a cinnamon roll and a croissant. Watching breadmakers shape dough into loaves only increases the appeal, drawing you closer to the way your food is made.
But when it comes to products made with flour, the consumer connection usually ends with the baker. While your baguette might be baked locally, its main ingredient—the wheat flour itself—is likely to be of much more mysterious origin.
When commodity wheat enters the supply chain, a vast network of processing and distribution centers transform the grain kernels and take them far from the fields where they grew. Somewhere along the way, wheat stops being a raw ingredient from somewhere and becomes instead plain old flour—the finely ground, indistinct powder ready to be shipped anywhere in the world. This system was built with volume, price, and convenience in mind. For the most part, transparency has never been a priority—which means, for now, it’s an impossibility as well.
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