Days of Bread and Toothpaste

(Originally published in the Juneau Empire, August 2010)

Bread and toothpaste. One is older than farming, the other younger than some people on the planet today. Both are completely indispensable after you put them in your mouth the first time.

These are two items I’ve wondered about when folks discuss food security and future scarcity. If there comes a time when shipping goods to Juneau is a problem, because of high fuel costs or limited access, many items would quickly become scarce or expensive. If that happens, you can all head for Radio Shack and Caribbean emeralds. I’ll be at A&P looting for bread and toothpaste.

How the heck did folks live before the sliced loaf and the striped tube?

In Southeast Alaska, before there was access to Outside goods, we filled our own needs just fine. We hunted and fished for meat and went to forests and beaches for vegetables and fruits. In fact, everything we needed, including dental cleaners, came from the ocean and forest superstores. Even after more people moved in and shipping started from Seattle, the boats were likely to bring basic ingredients, not finished products: fabric instead of clothes, seeds instead of apples, chickens instead of buffalo wings. We opened dairies and planted gardens; increasing the variety of food available to us. It didn’t miraculously show up at the store back then I hear.

So bread came to Juneau as flour (or grain, milled into flour locally), sugar, and salt. We added local yeast (did you know it’s actually in the air? Crazy), and milk and butter from the local dairy. Eventually, Purity Bakery, where the Silverbow Inn and Bakery is now, would bake for you if you could afford it, or you’d do the week’s baking on Saturday.

On the early boats, tooth care probably came to Juneau as tooth powders and, again, the ingredients needed to make your own toothpaste. Before that, I’m guessing we used what people used all over the world before modern dental hygiene: fibrous or aromatic wood sticks to brush with and herbs to clean with. Of course that was also before the avalanche of cheap, sugar-filled foods. Keeping our teeth from rotting was probably easier back then.

So I’ve been thinking off and on about how to become bread and toothpaste secure. I know, some people free slaves and feed starving children, but this is what I do when nursing the baby or waiting for my 10-year-old to finish judo. We each do what we can.

Bread:

Ahhh, fresh baked bread. Remember when Le Petit Paris bakery was on North Franklin and 3^rd, in the 1980’s? We’d run down there from Capital School just for the baguettes… imagine the odd sight of little kids on the playground with long loaves of French bread.

The economics of making my own bread is already in my favor, even without higher prices. Two middling quality, non-organic loaves of bread bought from a store are $8 to $10. Two mostly organic loaves I recently made at home came to $3.50, including electricity for baking and gas for transportation. Assuming the cost of ingredients goes up at the same rate as pre-baked bread, that’s more than 50% saved. Of course, fresh bread tastes so good that we need twice as many loaves!

Basic Bread Recipe: Scald (heat until the edges start bubbling) ½ cup milk in sauce pan, remove from heat. Add 3 tbs sugar, 2 tsp salt, and 3 tbs butter to pan, stir until dissolved, cool to lukewarm. Pour 1 ½ cups warm water into large bowl, sprinkle in 2 ¼ tsp (or 1 packet) active dry yeast, stir until dissolved. Stir milk mixture into yeast mixture. Add 3 cups unbleached white flour, beat with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add 3 cups unbleached white or wheat flour a little at a time, eventually using your hands. Will be firm but slightly sticky. Roll dough ball onto a floured board and knead (fold ball toward you, press down with heels of hands, give a quarter turn, repeat). TIP: find a low counter or a step stool and put your back into it. Knead for 10 minutes, shape into a smooth ball and put in a large greased bowl. Cover with a cloth and set in an 80-85 degree, draft-free place (some ovens have a “bread proof” setting). Let rise about an hour, punch the middle, put back on the floured board, let rest for 5 minutes. Knead again for a few minutes then pull into two halves. Shape each into a 7 inch long oval and place in greased loaf pans. Cover with cloth and let rise in warm place again for another hour. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, bake for 35-40 minutes until golden brown and hollow sounding when tapped. Take out of pans and cool on a rack.

Toothpaste:

So I’ll have my bread should crude hit the fan – what about toothpaste? I remember childhood days when we had a baking soda concoction at the bathroom sink. I’m guessing my dad read something in Mother Earth News about the benefits of homemade tooth powder. (In fact, I found their 1975 article online – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it , Dad?) It was no Crest, but my parents used it for a good while. And I’ve noticed that recent articles still promote the same tried and true recipes for tooth powders and pastes, so maybe there’s something to it.

But do I really want to make my own? My family has no dental insurance so prevention and our two annual trips to the dentist are key. Tricky balance. And how important is that fluoride? I remember folks got pretty riled up about it around town a few years ago; fluoride was taken out of City water over some protest. So it seems like it could be a bad parenting moment to take it out of my kids’ toothpaste unless I have no choice. Maybe for toothpaste it’s better to know that there are options, but stick with modern technology until there’s a real reason to return to the days of Dr. Mercury’s Amazing Dentifrice and Pot Cleaner.

Tooth powder recipe: mix 3 parts baking soda with 1 part salt.

Toothpaste recipe: for each cup of tooth powder add 3 teaspoons of glycerin and 10 or more drops of your favorite flavor oil (mints are traditional, but why not orange or almond?). You can even add a drop of food coloring. Keep the paste in a covered bowl in the bathroom, dip your toothbrush, and brush how the dentist told you.

It’s not that I think we’re really heading back to the 1920s. If fuel tops $8 a gallon, I think most of the goods we’ve become accustomed to will still be available. We’ll just use them carefully, and sort out which ones we can live without. I think bread and toothpaste are good examples. Without much difficulty, and maybe with more pleasure, we could bake all our bread locally. But I’ll stick with imported toothpaste and visits to the dentist, paying for them with money saved by the double-good of keeping store-bought bread and sugary foods out of the shopping cart.

Sarah Lewis is a local architect who just realized that she actually likes bread because it’s a vehicle for butter. If anyone wants to re-start the local dairy scene, she’d be a regular customer.