Georgia Hilmer

 Lexie Smith

August 31, 2021

I am uneasy with my obsession — flowers feel frivolous. Yet I cannot stop growing them, picking them, photographing them. I am pulled towards them as if by gravity, I am beset by every cliche: consumed, compelled, enchanted, agog. This is my first time feeling so totally absorbed and I am bewildered. Lexie Smith is my best-obsessed friend; her kink is bread. She’s a baker and artist, both a student and teacher of all things grain-related. To know her is to yoke Lexie-and-bread, bread-and-Lexie. Her longtime online project Bread on Earth explores “bread’s potential as a social, political, economic, and ecological barometer” and functions as a recipe and resource repository. Lexie is currently building a grain program near her partner Dan Colen’s food justice project Sky High Farm in the Hudson Valley. She’s also writing a book about bread. Lexie’s practice as an artist, writer, and researcher is founded on the notion that understanding our relationship with bread can teach us about ourselves as political creatures and creatures of appetite.

Lexie’s engagement with bread is impressive and academic and thorough. Yet I know she’s plagued by the same obsession-induced anxiety I have started to feel. Is this singular and feverish focus ridiculous? Self-indulgent? Girly? To me bread seems serious and weighty, a practical and useful subject worthy of devotion. Our conversation makes clear that Lexie has internalized the dismissive stereotypes and symbolism that surround bread and baking: it’s feminine, trivial, gratuitous. But Lexie’s insistent attention has made bread feel expansive and urgent in my mind. Witnessing others in that state of rapture is a consistent delight; why is it hard to see one’s own preoccupation in the same generous light?

Talking to Lexie about her relationship to bread gave us the chance to discuss that heady mix of obsession and anxiety. I’ve come to believe that how we feel about our passions — whether insecure, adamant, or some confusing mix of the two — tells us a lot about the societies and systems of value in which we are embedded. Contending with all that baggage becomes part of the commitment and often illuminates aspects of an issue that warrant greater interrogation. With luck, over time an obsession can become a special kind of lens through which one sees the world. Life becomes richer when we get to share those lenses with each other and know the world in its finer detail and fuller complexity.

This interview took place in June 2021. It has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: Why don't you set the table and explain the eighteen things that you have going on different burners right now?

Lexie Smith: Okay. I am still the luckiest girl in the world in that the things that I get to do are somehow all rather specific to my individual history and aspirations — but also all interconnected and making me feel more enmeshed in a community than I have in a while. And it's very special to me to tackle my chosen subject from all these different angles. Let's do this sort of chronologically. After many years of feeling like it was not my place and I wasn't quite ready, I decided to try and write a book. I have basically already written it, in the form of all my work with Bread on Earth, I just need to finally commit to organizing all of the ideas and expanding upon them. So I got myself a wonderful agent who's very supportive and I committed to writing the book … for about a month. I began, I was excited. I had it in mind that I would be writing a book in the fall, I had finished my proposal and sent it off for edits, and then I was offered this opportunity to lead a small experimental agricultural project on a property near Sky High, my partner Dan’s farm.

Essentially there's this property owned by a very lucky woman who's interested in redistributing a ton of her money. As part of the programming that she wants to create on this property, she wants to be investing in land reclamation efforts and regenerative farming and local agriculture and supporting marginalized communities through food equity programs. She basically offered Sky High wonderful land as part of a grant and, in addition, wanted the farm to take over the project of turning two particular acres into farmland. Because the farm is already at capacity, from a labor standpoint, I was nominated to take over that project. What has happened is that I am now entirely in charge of facilitating the thing. It is so much work. I am tasked with developing this incubator program wherein every 18 to 24 months there's going to be a new resident grower coming up with an experimental, community-oriented and collaborative growing project that center ecological and racial equity and justice. So I'm developing the infrastructure on a material level and on a systems-based level. And then I'm also tasked with creating a pilot incubator, being the person who is that first grower.

So right now you are thinking on a shorter-term timescale about getting grain in the ground to grow soon — and you're also working on this longer timescale of creating the infrastructure to support the mission of the project for years to come?

Yes. For the next two years, I'm going be the one who will be getting food in the ground. I have the wonderful privilege of working with the new farmer at Sky High, Don Wilson, who I really adore and I work so well with. He's always available for my questions but these questions are manifold. I'm not doing anything I've ever done before.

You don't know that you don't know.

I don't know what I don't know. This does feel like a baptism by fire but one that I am really grateful for. So for the next two years I am going to be growing out heritage grains. I'm sourcing them from different seed savers around the region and internationally. Some of them will be heirlooms that are taken from regions that are currently colonized. I have some heirloom grains from the Palestinian Seed Library and I'm hoping to get more seeds from the Middle East and the Levant. We are growing them for a number of different reasons: some will be used to fortify these seed libraries and to amplify the seed banks of these rare and an heirloom varieties and give them back to the donors and then half the field will be ideally used for food production. Those grains will be included in donations that are given to people who don't have access to fresh food. I believe strongly that responsibly grown heritage grains and non-perishable food items are really, really important when it comes to food security. There will be wood-fired oven, I will be baking, I will be feeding people.

It's a lot easier to get people to think romantically and poetically about vegetables but a lot of this program will be talking about why we need to be revaluing our grain supply and decentralizing it and de-commodifying it. We also want to set up a lending library of equipment for small grain processing. A barrier to entry for a lot of people who are interested in or haven't even considered getting into growing grain in a non-commodity, non-conventional market way is getting grain equipment. It is really expensive and hard to come by. You only really need it once or twice a year because grain is a determinant crop, which means you harvest it all at once. Back in the day people worked in community to get the grain production done. The idea is to take the money from this organization and give it out to people and get as many other people involved as I can — giving them space and also compensation to use however they see fit. 

You have done a lot of different jobs in the food industry and the hospitality sector and the arts. How is this new endeavor a combination or culmination of all the things you’ve learned? Does it represent a lot of threads coming together?

In a really organic way this is a culmination of many of the things that I've done in the past. I worked as a baker and a pastry chef; I worked as a recipe developer, recipe writer; I wrote about food in a more general sense, and still do a lot of these things. I have taught people how to cook and how to bake. I advocated for centralized regional food systems. I was always focusing on grain because it's an obsession. While this project does incorporate all of those things, it really does feel foreign to me. It’s motivating and exciting but also intimidating. This work will have an impact in a way I haven't been able to before. Namely because it is directly rooted, no pun intended, in a community-oriented project. I've tended to feel, in my previous work, this kind of siloed feeling. Even when I was working in certain kitchens, I didn't feel like I could have impact. A kitchen kind of isolates you. I felt disconnected and far away from a community and what community there was translated to a kind of audience.

In terms of isolation, I can vividly picture you totally sequestered in a basement below the last kitchen you worked in, making pastry by yourself in a dank, small space. The feeling of distance is not a metaphor, it was literal.

The distance was not a metaphor. Not to be so, “Oh, poor me,” but even when I started to have this public following on social media, I still felt totally siloed. People would say, “I love your bread!” But no one had ever eaten it! Making bread and posting pictures of it made me feel so useless and disconnected from the people I was trying very hard to connect to and feed and nourish and learn from and educate. So it felt important for me to do things with utility, which is why I started writing recipes and publishing them through Bread on Earth. I haven't felt like the restaurant experiences I've had, nor the virtual experiences, have really allowed for that. The closest was teaching and I was doing that more and more up until the pandemic started.

The grain project does feel like an outgrowth of that inclination to share space with people and encourage them to learn how to feed themselves and to learn how to ask for what they deserve. And more broadly, to make food that is nourishing both to their own bodies and to the earth body through skill sharing and knowledge. I'm developing a stage that other people can use to nourish a community and that's really, really satisfying for me. Because this was kind of handed to me out of the blue, it's not something I feel like I worked towards directly — but as soon as it was offered to me I was able to basically write up a proposal for in under 12 hours because I've been kind of subconsciously working on it for the past five years.

Can you talk about the two different modalities you're working in right now, which are knowledge-sharing through the book you’re going to write and knowledge-sharing through this IRL community-based work? 

So with the book endeavor, I’ve learned just through writing the introduction and through writing recipes over the last few years that everything hinges on voice. My presence in the narrative is unavoidable. I spent a long time being uncomfortable with that. I struggled a lot with the idea of writing a book because of the difficulty I have with feeling entitled to write a book about bread, something that is so deeply entrenched in the lives and cultures of so many people who I do not have direct relationships with.

With in-person teaching and creating a space that is meant to explore many different people's perspectives and experiences, I feel like I can finally be set free a bit from the idea of my own voice and my persona being central to that. It becomes so much more about the participants and the individual physical experiences that you get to have in the same place. Instead of describing my own experience in language or images, I get to connect. It feels much more horizontal and collaborative, even if I am the one who is leading.

I'm very excited to see how taking on this project will change what I'm trying to write. I do think that it's a book that I would want to read, which is why I want to write it — I don't think it's been written. But I think it will be really changed by this opportunity to exist in a  creative space that is using bread and grain as a point to gather around and to explore. As much as I love theory, I am kind of exhausted by it. I don't want the book I write to be abstract and theoretical. Some of it is emotional, some of it is philosophical, but I want it to be utilitarian. I want it to be something that can inspire.

Maybe I’ll decide I don't even want to write a book, you know? But when it comes to what I'm interested in and passionate about, which in this case is de-commodifying grain and asserting the value of good grain and bread and widening access to and distribution of those things, I think a book can help serve as a guide in a continually shifting culture. A book is a piece of culture in a way that a farm is not. I am trying to embrace this asset that is: people (in a relatively mainstream way) have liked what I've done. I need to embrace the idea that a book I write could move mainstream ideas around grain and human beings’ relationship to it in a direction that would end up supporting the de-commodification of grain.

Do you feel like you are slipping some medicine (food policy) in with the candy (beautiful bread) when you're sharing your work online? Or is that what just happens naturally when people engage with the ideas you’re presenting?

I have long understood the appeal of my more visually captivating breads as a kind of ruse to get people in the door and then blindside them with conversations about things that are far less palatable, or at least less expected.

You started making bread — unusual breads, breads that are uncommon or uncommonly beautiful — and at the same time were on this parallel track of learning more about commodity grains, Big Ag, and food justice. At some point the two pursuits dovetailed. Maybe that’s the wrong word. We see people on the internet who make very beautiful things but don’t engage with the political dimension and then we see other people who are very interested in policy but don't appeal to their audience with beauty or intrigue or mystery. I guess I'm stating a very obvious thing, which is that part of your success and the effectiveness of your messaging is the coincidence of beauty and flavor and serious policy interest. I think I take that for granted because I'm so close to the operation but it's definitely unusual and puts you in an unusual position, voice and tone-wise.

[Laughs] I'm maybe the only person closer to the operation than you. But I think you’re right. I witnessed that dovetailing myself. I was always really drawn to bread. Part of being drawn to something and being obsessive about something, at least for me, is I dig deep into it. Once I dug deep into bread, I realized it was an unbelievably rich topic. It satisfied a lot of things for me: I was able to use my hands and I was able to feed people, which brings people together. It makes me feel useful and necessary, it was a way to deal with social anxiety, in that it was a role I could fill in a social situation. I was really unfulfilled working in the kitchens I was in — I wouldn't say it's that way in all kitchens — but I was not philosophically and intellectually stimulated.

And, you know this is kind of related to this question that’s much larger, one that I think we both probably consider a lot and is important. What is the responsibility of the artist to actually stand for something? Does all art have to carry a message? Is art better if it carries a message? Can some art just be beautiful? I think it's very worth considering how necessary beauty is just by itself, despite the presence or absence of some kind of moral objective.

Oh my god, this is what I'm just constantly thinking about lately because, even though I've been interested in flowers forever, the obsession has undergone some kind of turbo charge. It's definitely because I'm upstate and I have space to garden and I have places I can walk and look at wildflowers but it's just the biggest cliche in the world. Flowers are so fraught with baggage.

Flowers are divine, literally. Flowers are god. I'm obsessed with grain. Yes, because it has all of this intricate, layered, controversial symbolism in our histories and our lives but when you boil it down, it comes from a plant and that's what makes it so incredible. A plant that is a grass that has inspired empire and allowed for empire. So, I resist the idea that everything we do and everything we devote our lives to has to somehow be pointed in a very clear and literal way toward making the world a better place. It is really tied to the way that we have been conditioned by capitalism — it's about productivity. I feel like if we can't say that what we're doing is directly tied to some kind of improvement, even if that's a deep study of something that has a moral imperative, or a literal improvement of a form you know, aesthetically, even, it's hard for us to justify our interest or feel comfortable caring about it. It's bullshit. It's so fucking cool to me that you're deeply in love with flowers and you photograph them over and over again and in constantly new ways.

Well, here's where my brain is going when I spin out about the cliches. What I'm trying to parse is this: I can very easily connect flowers to bigger issues of ecological stewardship and environmental justice. There’s climate change, gentrification, globalization, and industrialization all tangled up in flowers. The more I learn, the more those matters become present. Is some part of my subconscious rejecting the pure pleasure of flowers and seeking that complicated context to make this preoccupation feel more hefty? Or are the two parts just so inextricable that the political dimensions naturally reveal themselves? I completely agree with what you're saying about capitalism and productivity and our pursuit of meaning. It's funny to watch yourself become in thrall to something and then try to hone in on “Why does this make me tick?” There’s deep insecurity there.

It's an absolute dream to think that we can devote our lives to the study of something for no reason other than we love it. I think it's okay to continue to spend time with a topic and to learn more and more about it and maybe it evolves into something that you can explore from a more professional standpoint. I also think that you and I both, if we want to equate flowers and bread, which I do, we can see the ways we have a shared experience in digging deeper and finding all of these issues that we are equally inspired by. I think that the original spark and the deeper thinking can be related but like … I still love just fucking baking bread. Not fucking talking about it also brings me so much joy.

The elephant in the room is that both of the things we're talking about, bread and flowers, are seen as feminine interests. They're coded with gender expectations and seem frivolous or domestic or whatever in a lot of people's eyes.

So this is another thing that you and I both relate on — I have long had this deep insecurity around the perception that I am a frivolous person. A lot of that comes from the fact that I have made money because of the way I look for a long time now. Even if I didn't, I'm still a relatively feminine woman who likes to dress a certain way. I've always had an insecurity that people basically just don't think I'm smart. I've always had this instinct to be in control and to be kind of masculine in certain traditional ways, and an interest in baking didn't jive with that, and it doesn't jive with that, to me. So creating an intellectual house for activities like this has definitely felt like a legitimizing force. I do wonder how much of my public sharing of my bread and grain research and interest comes from this idea that I need to prove that I'm serious and I need to prove that this matters and I'm not just this girl who sits in her apron in the kitchen, playing with flour. We’ve been conditioned to think about femininity as if there's an inherent weakness to it.

And the idea that caretaking and pleasure-providing are not serious pursuits is deep in there. Making food is so much about sharing with other people. Flowers are sort of obscene in their beauty, I compulsively share the experience of encountering them by taking photos.

Do you know where the word companion comes from?

I don’t but I can guess now that I think about it — you tell me.

It comes from Latin “with bread,” and a companion is someone who you break bread with. We could get into the nuances of this because to me it's a really interesting class distinction thing — not just about camaraderie and fraternity but about who is suitable enough to eat with you because you would eat the kind of bread of your class.

You said before that you're writing the book that you want to read and you don't think a book quite like the one you're imagining exists out there. Can you tell me about some of the books that you love and that ask questions that you're interested in finding answers to?

I love field guides. I really appreciate a book that doesn’t tell us the answer to a question or doesn't even make obvious what question it’s presenting. When you have hundreds of versions of something lined up next to one another you are much more capable of comparing and contrasting and drawing conclusions about the information that you're looking at.

I think a lot of cookbooks are really hyper-specific and targeted and lay everything out to a tee. Those books are very much about creating a didactic form. They’re not discussing the variability and nuance of personal experience and not really encouraging that in a reader. In the book I want to write bread is a good vehicle and a very difficult one for what I want to say because it's so affected by individual environment — but baking is also really based on intuition and the intuition you build through practice. So it will be a balancing act to create a written environment that makes readers feel safe enough to explore and also doesn't instruct them so much that they don't have to explore.

I'm not interested in writing something that's going to be a coffee table book or a doorstop. I want to write something that lives in a kitchen and becomes a part of the fabric of how people think about food and feed one another. There's this delicate balance between content and usability. I fear that I'm going to write something and have to make it really beautiful and then no one's going to give a shit about the writing anyway.

When you write recipes you have to encourage and also command respect. That's not something I have a lot of interest in doing because I'm like, “I don't know! I'm not an expert. I'm just someone who's really interested.” With Bread on Earth I've been very lucky to convince some people to read little diatribes about bread. But what anyone has ever really said they want from me is a recipe or a cookbook. I am trying to write recipes that are very diplomatic where I'm like, “Listen, here's some basics that really helped me. You can get a deep understanding of the foundation and that way you can fuck around according to your own interests. You're gonna be fine.” That's kind of my overarching thesis: “You're going to be fine. Everything's gonna be fine. Sometimes it's gonna be better than others but most of the time is going to be fine. And if it's not, probably not that big of a deal, because we're talking about bread, not life or death.”

At a certain level, if you’re reading a cookbook for recipes you’re indulging and playing. You’re not in a primal mode of cooking to survive. It’s not that big of a deal.

I also don't really use cookbooks that often. I love them for inspiration — I flip through them and I think about new kinds of things I want to try. There's that book I stole from you, The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson, which I love and I've never made anything from. It takes this deep dive into the endless variety of Nordic breads, of which there are hundreds. They're all strangely specific and also exactly the same as each other. They're beautiful and very modest. I love that book but I kind of look through it and read the recipes and look at the drawings and then put it down and my brain starts churning. I would love to make something that does that for people.

This spring I was reading about sprouting grains. I sprouted some wheat berries the other day and the top popped off and I could see that there was life inside of the berry. I thought, “That can be a leavening agent,” so I made a loaf of bread with sprouted wheat berries as the sort-of-starter. You can take all of this information you collect and then turn it around in your head and make something new and weird. I think the point of the book I want to write is that bread doesn't belong to anybody. The second that we act like it, we're in deep shit.