A love letter to gluten

+a reflection on false enemies

I fully understand that gluten- and dairy-intolerance can be genuine physiological conditions and not simply dietary fads or ideologies. These conditions are not the object of my critique. Please read this piece in its entirety to avoid misunderstanding.

Stretching fillo pastry

Gluten had a bad rep when I was coming of age. Veganism was rearing its head as the latest lifestyle-panacea and those it failed to convince became some other iteration of “free” — dairy-free, sugar-free, gluten-free. In the space of five years, it became difficult to find a supermarket without its own gluten-free section, or a cafe that didn’t accommodate, quite loudly, for these “-free” folk.

In some very special instances, one would become both vegan and gluten-free. Enter, my 16-year-old self.

If I could go back and speak to this well-meaning but utterly lost version of myself, I would have advised her against such radical diet changes (they wrecked havoc on my body, still fragile in the throes of pubescence, and made me the least pleasant dinner-table guest). But my sojourn into the plant-based and gluten-free diets did not lapse without some positive lessons. It was the first time that I thought seriously about where my food came from, and about what I was putting into my body. It was also one of my first opportunities to express, through lifestyle choices, my amorphous sense that something was wrong with the world and that something was wrong with our relationship to ‘nature’ (and to ourselves, as part of nature).

Sure, my solution was knee-jerk and my advocacy, misguided. Some genuine truths were being bandied about — like the importance of whole foods, animal welfare and minimising environmental burden. But overall, these dietary movements seemed too embroiled in identity politics, and too intent on over-simplifying the ecological picture, to keep me engaged for much longer than a single confused, brooding year of teenage-hood.

I developed the feeling, quite quickly, that milk and wheat were becoming scapegoats for much bigger, much more complicated issues. I also realised that these dietary ideologies (that is, when they exceeded someone’s humble right to avoid certain foods, and became ideological movements), rested on several logical fallacies, for example:

Intensively-farmed meat and dairy is inhumane and unsustainable, therefore all kinds of meat and dairy are bad.

Mass-produced, genetically-modified wheat is bad for the environment and for human health, therefore all kinds of gluten-containing produce are bad.

An argument equivalent in structure, but pared back for clarity, might go something like this:

Fast-food is bad, therefore food is bad.

All of us would agree, I’m sure, that the latter makes no sense. It’s the ‘fast’ that compromises the food. Food itself is not inherently bad. I’d suggest that the same logical blunder inheres in the former two statements.

It sounds a bit childish when laid out this way. No doubt the shrewder advocates of veganism, for example, would present their cases in more sophisticated ways — and with some genuine points of consideration. And yet most converts, often young and impressionable (my teenage-self included), have less concern for logical coherence when what is at stake is a sense of being lost and a desperate need to ground oneself again through some allegiance of one’s own choosing. In such a state, we don’t have an appetite for nuance. We want an anchor. One of the easiest ways to do this is to demonise. Demonisation is quite easy, as is idolisation. Deep, well-considered and balanced appreciation is a little more difficult.

Preparing dough for fillo pastry

For my 16-year-old self, wheat and milk became demons, to be purged from the kitchen and from my body. They became the cause of all my ills — an insecure relationship with my body; difficulties navigating the social landscape; my existential confusion — in short, the very common but very challenging identity crisis most teenagers face at one point or another.

A compensation for a perceived loss of control was no doubt involved. When we guard the gates of consumption — dietary, intellectual, energetic, inter-personal — the interfaces between our body and the environment, it can seem a little easier to inhabit the world and maintain a sense of self, especially when that world is so intent on distracting us from ourselves by filling our bellies and minds and homes with more and more stuff.

This young self of mine knew, in some real sense, that this ‘guarding’ was necessary. But milk and wheat were false enemies.

The real enemies are a lot more difficult to articulate, because they are not single words or ‘things’ but rather processes, systems, ways of relating. The real enemy is compromised quality — lack of quality, at multiple levels. Because poor-quality meat, dairy and bread — the kinds that might bring inflammation to the body — are the products of mismanaged soil, mistreated animals, imbalanced ecosystems, industrial expedience, exploited profit-margins, you get the gist… They are the products of flawed systems, corrupted ways of relating to nature and to each other, whose negative effects spiral downwards. These myopic systems of production are what need to be avoided, not wheat and milk themselves.

On the flip side, good quality meat, dairy and bread is good all the way through — from restored soils in bio-diverse farmlands, to healthy pasture-fed animals, organic rotational wheat cropping and stone-milled flours, artisanal dairy production and whole-animal butchery; to the home-baker that goes the extra mile to make properly leavened dough with their own levain, and the home-cook that utilises every part of the animal — bones, offal, and all. Good inspires good.

‘Kotopita’ Greek chicken pie with homemade fillo pastry

You’re probably wondering by now, wasn’t this supposed to be a love letter to gluten?

The answer is yes — but love is complicated.

Proper appreciation is something that is earned. Love is something that is earned.

I thought it was important to share the history of my ignorance; of my false demons and misattributions. In a sense, this is an apology to gluten, on behalf of my teenage-self. A chance to make amends. It is also a chance to express my appreciation for the thing I once demonised without good reason. Having worked so closely with sourdough bread and fillo pastry this year, I’ve seen first-hand the totally uncanny power of this otherwise commonplace protein.

Bread is, after all, biblical. How could we be so presumptuous as to neglect the swathes of human history that were either dependent on, or otherwise deemed culturally and spiritually significant, grains and their byproducts? The renaissance of leavened breads and sourdough baking seems to me to be, at least in part, a cultural redemption of the unbalanced demonisation of gluten.

Anyone who makes sourdough bread understands this too — the singular sense of awe that the process inspires. There is deep alchemy involved in the metamorphosis of flour and water into a finished loaf. ‘Gluten’ is among the main agents of this alchemy.

Seeing a ragged sticky mess come together, at the friction of the hands, into a cohesive ball of dough is satisfying enough. Seeing that dough then expand and fill with air and life is even more enthralling — we feel our spirits inflate too, with excitement and anticipation. Shaping the dough and stitching it up in the banneton, hyper-aware of its fragility and of our own determining influence on its fate, puts us into direct interface with the present moment, a rare state of being for many of us these days, and totally refreshing. It is just us and the dough, and a shot at perfection.

Shaping sourdough bread

But the process is only as thrilling as it is utterly vulnerable.

Sourdough, when properly tended to, can result in a perfect rise and a beautiful crumb structure. But that same batch of dough — under-worked, or left a little too long, or shaped with a slightly too heavy-hand — can also result in a weak gluten network, collapsed crumb structure and flat loaf.

Fillo pastry, with a gentle touch and some patience, can be stretched exceptionally thin, so thin it becomes transparent, while still maintaining its unity. But a sudden jolt of the hand, or a slightly too ambitious pull, can give way to a big, gaping tear right through the sheet of pastry.

The joy of working with something so alive rests on its inherent capacity for ruin. Nick Cave said recently in an interview that joy is another form of suffering. He meant that joy is only possible for things, and in things, that are broken. I take ‘brokenness’ to mean the capacity to break, the vulnerability inherent in all things that are truly alive.

It is this potential for ruin which makes sourdough’s equal potential for perfection so intriguing. It is precisely because the dough is vulnerable — exposed to the air and environment, and to the whims of our microbe friends — that it has the capacity to create something magical.

Similarly, fillo pastry is such a thrill to stretch because we are intensely aware, as we pull the dough ever wider, that it might reach its limit any second and give way to a tear — but also that we might, with the right degree of gentleness and discernment, be able to prevent this.

Stretching fillo pastry

Strength, beauty and greatness are only properly achievable for things, and in things, that are alive. And being alive means being exposed to the world and its variables, contingencies and limitations.

Compare sourdough bread and yeast bread: the first is far more vulnerable, far less predictable, than the latter. But it also has far greater potential for greatness — in flavour, in the wild beauty of the crumb, and in the joy and satisfaction of the process. Not to mention the health benefits of naturally leavened breads.

Using commercial yeast shields the dough from many of the vulnerabilities of time, temperature and environment that make sourdough so much trickier to work with. But the process is cut and dry. It lacks life: literally, as a mono-culture of yeast, but also figuratively, as it bypasses or diminishes many of the human qualities of the bread-making process — patience, discernment, attentiveness, creativity, presence and emotional investment.

(Similarly, store-bought fillo pastry is far less vulnerable to tearing; indeed, it is likely already cut for you into perfect, uniform rectangles of even thinness. But it is also far less tasty, far less beautiful, probably made of poor-quality flour and oil, and full of preservatives.)

The more we bake, the more adept we become at protecting our dough from those variables that might undermine its strength; we become better at predicting success for our loaves. But even the most experienced baker is capable of a ‘bad loaf’ — because he is still at the mercy of a living process that is inherently vulnerable. No matter how well measured, mixed and shaped the dough, it remains susceptible to collapse — or, at the very least, imperfection — the whole way through the process, until its final form is captured in the oven.

This fallibility is true of all things made by hand, and made of living materials. In our attempt to mitigate this weakness, humans deploy machines and synthetics. Being dead, these means and materials allow us to produce with less risk and less variability — in other words, less exposure to the necessary contingencies of a living system. They work on a principle of exclusion: that is, omit from the process of production everything except that which is minimally necessary to bring about the product in its most basically sufficient form. But there is no concern for the quality of the product — its inward complexity, depth and completion. Often the result is an image, a mere shell of what the product could, and should, be.

It is no surprise that mass-produced, mono-cropped wheat causes inflammation in the body, in the same way that the mono-culture in commercial yeast produces bread with an inferior health profile to sourdough. Both result from reductive systems that prioritise predictability, efficiency and uniformity at the expense of quality. They do this by cutting off the product’s exposure to the natural variables of its environment — and yet again, it is precisely these variables that, when properly received and integrated, give the product its potential for greatness.

Sourdough fermenting

As human beings, too, we love to exclude. We erect manifold barriers between ourselves and our environment. Many of these are necessary, no doubt. But many also squander our potential. Like a batch of sourdough, we must sometimes risk exposure to harm in order to achieve anything of quality. We must be vulnerable in order to develop proper strength.

Easier said than done. My teenage-self certainly wasn’t capable of this. The only way she knew how to weather the storm of her manifold confusions and insecurities was to designate some scapegoats and define some enemies. She thought that by excluding (gluten, dairy and meat, among other things), that she would consolidate some ground.

I hope it is obvious by now that I am using ‘gluten’ and ‘dairy’ and ‘meat’ as placeholders. Insert anything that is ostracized or defamed without due consideration. We all demonise, whether people, or groups, ideas, foods or lifestyle choices.

Sometimes disapproval is well-considered, valid. And sometimes we really must exclude. But only from the right starting-point and only through an affirmative capacity to see and feel things properly, to come close to them, work with them, get beneath the surface of their (mis)representations and appreciate what good they might contain even if their net-effect is bad.¹

I fully understand that gluten- and dairy-intolerance can be genuine physiological conditions and not simply dietary fads or ideologies. These conditions are, obviously, not the object of my critique. What I take issue with is the scapegoating of certain foods in reductive, often deceptive, portrayals of environmental and human health. It is infinitely clear to me that the most vehement and radical advocates of veganism — those who vocally demonise meat and dairy and all the people who choose to consume them — have far greater, far deeper demons to deal with than they realise.

My point is that, in the absence of genetic intolerances, cutting out dairy, meat and gluten categorically, and demonising them mentally, is not a sound basis for health.² On a broader scale, blocking, cancelling and defaming political opinions we (think we) disagree with is not a genuine basis for intellectual and social health.

Instead, we have much to gain from approaching those things that we think we ‘hate’ and from welcoming what we usually exclude. We become better, fuller versions of ourselves this way — in the same way that a loaf of sourdough is a better, fuller version of a loaf of yeast bread; in the same way, too, that our gut microbiome benefits from diversity of input; and in the same way that the agricultural yields of bio-diverse farmlands are far superior in quality to their mass-produced, mono-cropped counterparts.

What I am trying to show is that quality — of food, health and character— is intimately linked to the capacity to receive, include and integrate the living variables of our environment, including its risks and ambiguities.

You can produce by excluding as many contingencies as possible and, like a machine, reduce the process to its bare level of sufficiency. But your product will suffer. We can produce ourselves, our characters, by defining our enemies and by excluding what threatens us. But this is a reductive way to live. What might our enemies teach us?

Sourdough crumb

So here I am asking myself — what has gluten, once an enemy, taught me?

If it’s not already obvious, gluten has taught me the proper nature of strength.

This is fitting since gluten is a structural protein. But it is also my relationship with gluten over the years that has been a great teacher.

Something that is truly strong also has the capacity to break.

True strength inheres in things that can be touched, affected by the weather, by the seasons, by time. Things responsive to the forces around them; things subject to limits and to the cycles of life.

Unlike the ersatz strength of the concrete and steel behemoths lining our city-scapes; or of the rigid synthetic objects now filling our stores and homes — true strength is receptive to the forces of nature, because it is part of nature.

Something which is so void of life so as to be unaffected by its environment, incapable of change, unbending and unbreakable (or purportedly so), is surely not something strong, but something dead. Not the kind of ‘dead’ which is organic — even this has more strength, more life. The kind of dead that never lived in the first place; the kind that, like a plastic bottle, takes aeons to reincorporate itself into the earth, if it ever does. A kind of alien, nihilistic ‘dead’.

The strongest people are those that know how to be vulnerable and open. They are not isolated from the world — they know how to receive its influences, good and bad, in the right measure and with appropriate handling. They avoid when necessary, but their health does not depend on exclusion. It rests on tolerance.

Likewise, a strong body is one that can absorb and process, without being compromised, an array of substances, particles, antigens. A strong gut microbiome knows how to deal with gluten³. A state of health that depends, indefinitely and categorically, on the exclusion of certain foods does not seem, to me, to be a strong state of health.

I would have told my teenage-self this — that excluding gluten, dairy, meat, and shutting myself off from the world, would not make me strong. And yet, perhaps this is exactly what I needed at the time: a cocoon, and some false enemies, to preserve a sense of ‘self’ by way of contrast. Perhaps this bought me enough time to heal and consolidate my potential, a potential which was, in those years, at risk of ruin.⁴

In other words, it is at times necessary to exclude, avoid and cocoon; conserve one’s fragile self until it is sufficiently strong. This is what the infant child does in the womb; what we do when we huddle up at home after a lengthy social occasion; when we rest and hibernate to recuperate ourselves; when we go to sleep at night.

But soon enough, we emerge. We face the world, the weather; we face people and manifold stimuli; we interact and consume. But we are strong enough, now, to know who we are in amongst all of this. Not by means of reactionary exclusion, nor by means of scapegoats.

We know who we are now based on what we love. And although there are many things we still strongly dislike, many things we considerately avoid — there is nothing, truly and resolutely, that we hate.

A finished loaf

Afterthoughts

The kind of strength described in this piece is an aspiration; not something I think I have already achieved. It is probably something that takes a lifetime, or more. And yet, I do feel that a crucial part of my coming of age, my transition to adulthood, was developing the capacity to identify false enemies and false idols; to check myself for ‘hatreds’ that are, in reality, a roadblock, and invitation, to self-betterment. Dietary fads and political allegiances were some of the first of these false idols that I clung to while navigating the turbulence of my teenage years and early adulthood. I have not directly spoken of politics in this piece, but I feel its template could be readily made a political commentary — substitute gluten for any social scapegoat used for political advantage.

I’d also like to make more explicit the distinction I’ve attempted to draw between hatred and dislike/disapproval. My point in this piece is not that we should love everything, eat everything, be in contact with everything. Quite the opposite, really. I’m a strong advocate for a selective lifestyle that focuses on Quality in all its forms — food, fibres, relationships, experiences; the way we design our homes; the media we consume. My point is that, for all that we do choose to avoid, the choice should be well-considered, conscious. It might be intuitive, but it shouldn’t be reactionary. Hatred is reactionary.

Finally, I’d like to note the deep influence that Friedrich Nietzsche has had on the thoughts shared herein. Of course, Nietzsche was all about smashing false idols. His work was something else that I clung to during those tender years of teenage-hood, but while I have changed in manifold ways since then, Nietzsche has stayed with me, a true love and not, I would like to believe, a false idol. In Ecce Homo, perhaps my favourite of all his works, diet and nutrition become the locales of psychological and spiritual health. But diet is more than food — it’s all that we consume. The books we read; the company we keep. In states of creative gestation, as in pregnancy, self-conservation is crucial. Isolation, exclusion — necessary. But when the masterpiece is finished, and full strength consolidated, Zarathustra reemerges into the realms of men.

Chicken pita & sourdough lunches

1. Sugar, for example, is something I believe should be minimised — not because it’s the root cause of all the evil in the world, but because overall, it really is not particularly health-enhancing. On the other hand, there are occasions when avoiding sugar would detract from other kinds of benefit — a sense of communal participation at a celebration, for example; or a gracious acceptance of the offerings of another’s hospitality.

2. Avoiding them periodically, however, can be helpful and even necessary (see footnote 4).

3. Hopefully the kind of readers my work attracts are nuanced enough to understand that my point here is not that people with gluten intolerance are ‘weak’.

4. From my experience it can be good to avoid flour-based foods temporarily for the sake of gut-healing. I’m no nutritionist, but the GAPS nutritional protocol makes a lot of sense: the point is not to ‘cut’ anything out indefinitely, but to refrain from potentially inflammatory foods temporarily and focus on gut-healing foods until optimal gut health is restored, after which the gut is strong enough to deal with those otherwise inflammatory substances.