BACK IN 2009, baker Andrew Whitley was astonished to find that almost all the wheat grown in Scotland was being used for booze, biscuits or animal feed instead of bread.
Now, 14 years later, the wheat grown by his sustainable charity is featuring in a new film which has been shot around Oban with support from local craftspeople and businesses.
Alongside being a stunning, genre-defying visual experience, Harvest involves Scotland The Bread, a sustainable food charity which grows some of the varieties of wheat traditionally grown here.
Their expert input helped bring to life the striking wheat fields featured throughout the film, rooting the visuals in Scotland’s agricultural past, adding depth to themes of harvest and renewal.
Based on Jim Crace’s Booker Prize short-listed novel of the same name, Harvest has just opened in cinemas in the UK and Ireland before being released exclusively on streaming service MUBI on August 8.
The film was shot entirely within the Argyllshire countryside, including the picturesque glen of Inverlonan, and drew extensively on local talent, with members of the community joining the film’s cast as villagers and supporting crew.
It’s hoped the film will also help bring Scotland The Bread to the public’s attention.
The Fife-based sustainable food charity is a collaborative project to establish a Scottish flour and bread supply that is healthy, locally controlled and sustainable – in other words, to promote and develop a “People’s Bread”.
“Our idea is simple – grow nutritious wheat and bake it properly close to home,” the charity’s co-founder Andrew Whitley, below, told the Sunday National.
The charity was founded in 2016 by Whitley and Veronica Burke who worked with scientists in leading institutions to research heritage Scottish and Nordic wheats to find nutrient-rich varieties that do well in local conditions.
In November 2017, the charity launched its first three fine wholemeal flours and began selling them online and from markets.
For Whitley, the charity was a natural progression from his long career as a baker. He was the first breadmaker to supply genuine sourdough bread to supermarkets – even though he thought it wouldn’t sell.
However, it “flew off the shelves” because many people had begun to suffer digestive complaints from mass-produced supermarket bread.
Curious about what was causing this reaction, Whitley began to investigate further and was appalled at what was being used to make supermarket bread.
“It’s pretty horrifying when you actually see it laid out page after page, all the additives, emulsifiers, fats, crumb-softening enzymes and so on,” he said.
He concluded that it wasn’t just the additives that were the problem but also the modern varieties of wheat that were being used, which were often less nutritious than the wheat grown in Scotland in the past.
Not only that but he found Scottish farmers had been hit by cheap imports so had stopped growing wheat for bread and switched to growing wheat for booze or animal feed instead.
“In the 1990s, when I started getting interested in this, it became obvious that there were significant differences between traditional and modern varieties of wheat in terms of their mineral density and their goodness for eating as food,” said Whitley.
“I wanted to make bread that nourished people, not bread that just filled a supermarket slot. We’re all struggling with diet and ill health because our food system has been completely hijacked by money interests. So that’s why we started a campaign.
“That’s what gets me up in the morning, the feeling that we’ve gone too far towards a new version of the kind of oppression that began with the emerging capitalist system where people were cleared off the land to work in factories and when the only bread that starvation wages could buy was adulterated with chalk and alum to make it look whiter.”
Whitely said it wasn’t just human health that was suffering by eating “rubbish” as the system was also “trashing” the environment.
“We have to sweat the land to grow vast weights of crops, much of which are wasted at the mill end and by the supermarket system,” he said. “They travel massive distances and their production causes massive amounts of emissions.
“We have to fight against the system because it’s killing us.”
Whitley said this was why the charity is working on the concept of “the People’s Bread”.
“It’s a bread for everybody that meets the needs of our times,” he said.
“We can do this if we just do it together and get the corporations off our backs.
“I would also add that we should challenge those public servants, for example, in the Scottish Government and Food Standards Scotland, who have responsibilities for health and nutrition. They seem reluctant to stand up to food industry interests.
“Take the so-called ‘reformulation project’ – removing a little bit of sugar from Irn-Bru, replacing it with artificial sweeteners and calling this a public health gain – you don’t have to be a policy guru to realise that’s nonsense.
“We could do so much better. So let’s start with a really good loaf of bread, ideally made with wholemeal flour and fermented with sourdough, because that keeps everything good in it, rather than substituting the good harvest with rubbish,” said Whitley.
