What is Regenerative Baking?

A conversation with Dressler Parsons, creator of the Regenerative Baking podcast

A 100+ year old clay oven I saw at a flour water mill in Quebec this summer. Dressler talks about looking to baking’s past to imagine its future

“I was feeling anxious about the future, which has not really stopped, and thinking about climate change and all of the systems upon which our world is built that are very unwieldy. I was thinking about what resources might become more scarce and what the world would look like.

Then when I started working in professional kitchens, I was seeing the level at which we were going through ingredients and wondering, Where is this coming from? I don’t actually know what these farms look like. I don’t know where they’re located. In early 2020, when no one could get ahold of flour, I realized, Oh, our supply chains are actually pretty delicate. What does this look like in a future with climate change, more natural disasters — what is the next logical step of this?”

Dressler Parsons is the creator and voice of Regenerative Baking, a podcast I came across last year by literally typing “regenerative baking” into Google because it’s a topic and phrase that had been knocking around in my brain. Finding her work, which she describes “enlist[ing] the help of food, farming, and sustainability experts to design a climate-friendly bakery of the future,” I felt like I was seeing my own thoughts reflected back to me, and started to realize that the ideas I share here might be part of a larger conversation. When we spoke at the end of last year, I was excited to dig into what made her start the project and how she was feeling three years into it about the future of regenerative baking.

The word regenerative typically refers to agriculture that rebuilds soil and ecosystem as part of its process. This climate reference formed the initial framing of her project, which was to imagine a theoretical bakery that grew all the ingredients it used. Over its three seasons, the project evolved to examine other interpretations of regenerative in baking, from labor to supply chains to the communities that form around bakeries.

“If we think of regenerative agriculture as creating a full working system of crops that benefit each other, the soil, the atmosphere, etc., I think mapping that onto a bakery would look like getting all your ingredients from a network of local farms, and having a zero-waste workflow, where everything gets recycled or composted,” said Dressler when I asked her to describe a truly regenerative bakery. “I also imagine that regenerative ethos extending to the people working in the bakery; maybe it’s a worker co-op with very transparent leadership committed to letting people play to their strengths… Current food industry management styles tend towards treating and molding people to be as interchangeable as possible, whereas I think a regenerative bakery worker structure would look more like asking, what role does each person play in the ecosystem of the bakery?”

Across all of these dimensions, most conventional bakeries fall woefully short. It’s such a tough business with razor thin margins that local ingredient sourcing, worker well-being, and any sort of food-system related mission are usually chucked under the bus in favor of pure survival. That’s true of the consumer food industry at large, of course. But what’s interesting about bakeries — perhaps because they’re already such a terrible idea financially or because they can operate at a smaller scale than restaurants — is that a small number of bakers stand out for doing things differently, pushing our understanding of what a food business can be.

These are the people and organizations that Dressler focuses on in her interviews: Don Guerra, who has made his bakery Barrio Bread an integral part of the local grain chain supporting small farmers and millers, and led the effort to revive an ancient grain White Sonora Wheat. Colleen Orlando, whose queer and trans vegan bakery Little Loaf Bakeshop in New Paltz makes the most incredible pretzel croissants that regularly fuel this newsletter. My favorite episode recently was the one with writer and baker Jim Franks, who uses bread as his tool to interrogate capitalist modes of food production (I’m reading his book Existential Bread right now). Like many other episodes of Regenerative Baking, the conversation isn’t just about his own life and work, but about how he tries to imagine a better, more sustainable world.

Dressler, who is both a pastry chef and an artist, came to her subject matter through the lens of pastry anthropology. She had an internship early in her career with culinary historian Sarah Lohman and then volunteered at the Museum of Food and Drink. “I started thinking about pastry traditions across the globe. I was like, why is it that everybody thinks of France when there are 200 other countries. And it turns out, yes, the Ottoman Empire had a very rich dessert tradition centuries before Europe was doing anything of the sort. I was also interested in looking into the past when technology and refrigeration did not exist, and seeing what sweets were made.”

“I think about how history repeats itself, and about the devastating amount of Indigenous knowledge that’s been lost and intentionally suppressed. I also think about biomimicry, where rather than trying to solve a design or engineering problem from scratch, you would look to nature to see where that problem’s already been solved in some kind of organism. Modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years, and we’ve been making bread for at least 5,000 years, and the Ottoman Empire was making very fancy pastries maybe 700 years ago… Our current world is a total blip in the history of humanity, so I see history as a very useful place to gather information about ways people have solved problems throughout time.”

Early in my vegan baking journey, I remember looking back through dessert recipes made under WWII rationing (a little more contemporary than the Ottoman Empire), which was a pretty major and quick adaptation in a tradition that relied so heavily on eggs and dairy. Home bakers found new ways to use pantry ingredients like oil, molasses, potatoes, old bread, or vinegar (I contributed a Salt & Vinegar Pie to the Humble Pie issue of Cake Zine) to completely reinvent cakes, pies, and cookies in a handful of years. People have been innovating and evolving desserts forever, which I find helpful to remember when it feels like nothing will ever change in people’s eating or consumption patterns.

Though I sometimes describe the baking I do as “future-proof” it’s impossible to know what forms of reinvention will really be necessary in the future. Maybe we’ll transform our monocrop agricultural fields into food forests grazed by goats, so we’ll have plenty of chestnuts and pawpaws and goat butter but less cheap wheat flour. Maybe climate change will change our growing regions, so arid crops like sorghum or mesquite will be more accessible than corn. It’s easy to label all effects of the eco crisis as “bad” (for obvious reasons) and feel nothing but fear or grief about them, but for an inventive baker, new constraints and ingredients can also be sites of creation. Not only grief, but curiosity and delight must be allowed into how we imagine the future.

“At my core, I believe that desserts are important to human society because they are a mark of having something beyond what you strictly need to survive…If we were ever to be in a world where we didn’t have small luxuries, we might able to survive, but we would not be thriving.”