52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust by William Alexander

Author:William Alexander [Alexander, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Travel, food
ISBN: 9781565125834
Google: -Gw6kWP89dgC
Amazon: 1565125835
Barnesnoble: 1565125835
Goodreads: 7684354
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2010-05-04T10:00:00+00:00

WEEK

33

Miller’s Crossing

“You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men . . . Men have only little to do in the whole business.”

—Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901

What a bizarre and comical sight. This was a commercial, state-of-the-art roller mill? It looked like something straight out of an old Disney cartoon. Mike Dooley and I were the only human presence on this large factory floor among the rows of large square machines, a couple of dozen in all, each a little smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. These awkward steel contraptions were all shimmying — and I do mean shimmying—as if to a sound track only they could hear.

Standing on four robotic-looking legs that literally flexed at rubberized knees, they were swaying their metallic hips suggestively, bouncing up and down exuberantly, and just generally looking silly and weirdly animalistic. I could picture them late at night, when the mill was dark and empty,* switching on the lights and holding a surreptitious hoedown, then scurrying back into place the instant before the night watchman (with droopy mustache, of course) flipped on the light.

“What are they doing?” I yelled to Mike over the din.

“Look inside.” Bits of bran, flour, and grain were vibrating atop a wire screen, the smaller particles falling through. These were sift ers, and their gyrations seemed to do quite an effective job.

I’d found my way to this Clift on, New Jersey, mill, one of several owned by the Bay State Milling Company, by once again looking for the silos (shades of my trip to Bobolink Dairy). “They’re the only ones in Clift on,” Mike had told me. This old industrial city seemed an unlikely place to see twin silos rising above the factories and Office buildings.

Which goes to show how little I know about mills. The other landmark Mike had mentioned were railroad tracks, and as I pulled into the parking lot, it occurred to me that “near the silos and the railroad tracks” could probably suffice as directions to pretty much every wheat mill in the nation. Wheat, as it has for a century or more, still comes from the Midwest in railroad cars, is stored in silos until milled, and goes out in trucks as sacks of flour. The story of wheat is largely the story of transportation, whether the grain is floating down the Nile or riding the rails of the Southern Pacific.

On the verge of milling my backyard wheat, I thought an understanding of the process might be useful. This is partly how I’d ended up at this Bay State mill, which also happens to be one of the plants that produces the King Arthur flour I’d been baking with every week. I had another reason for being here as well. During the past nine months, I’d learned that every bag of flour sold in the United States since World War II was enriched, replacing the vitamins and minerals that milling removed. I’d found out why niacin

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