Vanessa Kimbell is a sourdough baker and food activist based in Northamptonshire, UK. Here she talks about her very personal journey into sourdough, which led to her mission to change systems in the food industry. Drawing a connecting thread between transdisciplinary research and the role of microbes in human health, she has developed an education system to foster sustainable food practices through baking bread.
Sophie Lovell: At The Common Table, we’re particularly interested in the contextual aspects of people’s work related to food and the systems within which they are working. Could you explain your approach in terms of systems?
Vanessa Kimbell: When you look at the development of knowledge, we have essentially invented disciplines and categorised knowledge into them. Chefing is a discipline, medicine is a discipline, and within each of them, there are yet more disciplines – psychiatry, gastroenterology, oncology and so on. When you work within all these separate systems, everybody stays in their own lane, their own space with their own language. In doing so, their understanding, knowledge and methods become reductionist.
When you approach your work in an interconnected way, you start to look at it through a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary lens which means your system suddenly opens up and you begin to reconnect. When I founded the Sourdough School, I based it on a Japanese concept called ba, [in which the individual is not separated from the environment or each other]. The space that I wanted to create was a safe space where disciplines can come together, share knowledge, interact and make connections.
Orlando Lovell: Can you tell us about how your own journey to sourdough led you to teach others?
Vanessa Kimbell: When I was a tiny baby I was treated with antibiotics for something which set off a cascade of autoimmune-related responses that that were often mistakenly treated again with antibiotics. It was a vicious circle that can happen when you gut microbes are disrupted. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was given 57 different courses of antibiotics and their impact on my health was severe. The last course really knocked me over the edge of health into a space where I was challenged physically and mentally, with inflammation, brain fog, joint pain, mental health issues and gastroenterological symptoms. When I was young, I was three-times British taekwondo champion but in my early 20s, I went from being top of my game, getting into the ring to fight three, three-minute rounds full contact, to being unable to find the strength or willpower to get up off my sofa.
It was like losing my identity. I felt I was not able to be myself.
I had also gone to college for two years to train and apprenticed as a baker but had to stop baking completely because I could no longer tolerate bread. It was like losing my identity. I felt I was not able to be myself. Also, this being the early 1990s, the gluten-free bread available was disgusting, so it felt like I was being doubly punished.
Sophie Lovell: It must have been devastating for you. What turned things around?
Vanessa Kimbell: For several years, I gave up my career baking bread and moved into a completely different discipline, which was, ironically, the commercial business aspect of what holds me in place today. Then at 27, I traveled with new boyfriend (who is now my husband) to the Dordogne in France, where I’d grown up. I hadn’t eaten bread for many years, and I walked past the bakery where I had learned to bake at age 11. Hervé the baker was still there and he was so pleased to see me. Of course, he picked up a warm fresh loaf and pushed it into my arms. I just couldn’t resist, so I took it back home, sat at the kitchen table, slathered that beautiful loaf in butter and Marmite and just went at it like a crazy woman.
Afterwards, I braced myself for the inevitable gluten intolerance after-effects but nothing happened! Overjoyed at this, I spent the next two weeks making up for five years of not eating bread. Back home in the UK, I blithely bought a loaf at my local supermarket, made myself a nice sandwich and was hit with that total symptom annihilation of joint pain, brain fog and bloating all over again. I went to my GP, and asked “Why can I eat the French bread and not the English bread?” I thought he would have the answer, but he said he had no idea, so I decided I was going to work it out for myself.
The answer was obvious really. In England, we made our bread with fast-action yeast. In Hervé’s bakery it was leavened, so I asked my mum to bring some fresh dough from Hervé and tried baking with it. The first loaf I made was terrible, like a house brick, but it didn’t make me ill.
Orlando Lovell: So was this when you realised the answer lay in microbes?
Vanessa Kimbell: The realisation I had from that experience was that I needed to stop thinking about leavening bread as fermentation and think of it as digestion instead. That is when it all connected for me. As my research progressed, I started to understand that we are microbial, everything we do is microbial, our interconnections with each other and our food is microbial. When you look at food and health systems today it is clear that it is microbes hold everything together but back then it wasn’t so well-known.
I needed to stop thinking about leavening bread as fermentation and think of it as digestion instead.
In 2015 I had my gut microbiome tested and discovered that I had less than two per cent microbial diversity in my gut. In 2016 I was offered a full gut microbiome transplant as part of the study. After a year of having this treatment, my gut microbiome went from less than two per cent diversity to 70 per cent.
Not long after that, I had a real systems epiphany. I had spent a year with people like Richard Hart, David Zilber and Sandor Katz talking about and working with microbes. I happened to be standing in a field of population wheat with Richard and Gabrielle Bonci. I remember the moment exactly. There was an olive tree and the scent of the wild oregano and mint I had just stepped on. I looked to my right, and there were “volunteers” (self-seeded remnants of previous crops) in the margins: rye, oats, wild barley, and some roses. I suddenly wondered why we strive so hard for monoculture when our gut needs this diversity. I realised, we needed to mill all the edible plants in the whole meadow, not just the wheat crop. In the past, we would have eaten everything in the field and that’s what we need to do again.
I realised, we needed to mill all the edible plants in the whole meadow, not just the wheat crop.
Sophie Lovell: Restore diversity to the modern, industrialised diet?
Vanessa Kimbell: Yes. We know from archaeology that our ancestors had a huge diversity of plant species in their guts. Finally, we understand that monoculture and faster fermentation have disconnected us from that diversity. We have basically ruined our connections and separated our understanding and diets from our environment. My job has been to try and put that connection back again.
At the Sourdough School, we make botanical blend flours which contain mixes including spelt, einkorn, emmer, barley, naked oats, poppy seeds, buckwheat, flax seeds, dried peas, dried cornflower, mallow flowers, rose petals and nettles. We created an education awards programme funded by sales of our flour that we call the BALM Protocol (Baker’s Lifestyle Medicine Protocol) which trains people therapeutically through breadmaking to improve both mental and gut health. It’s a self-funding, circular system that can show anyone how to reconnect to farmers, soil, microbes, their gut and each other through baking nourishing bread.
It’s a self-funding, circular system that can show anyone how to reconnect to farmers, soil, microbes, their gut and each other through baking nourishing bread.
Sophie Lovell: You teach individuals through your school and your books, but you also work with large food companies. Would it be correct to say you are a food activist who works from within the system?
Vanessa Kimbell: How can you blame people working in a system that started going wrong 120 years ago? The people who make our food didn’t get out of bed one morning and say “I’m going to ruin everybody’s gut today”. They’re not the Grinch, they just go to work and do what they’ve always done. You cannot change things unless you show people an example of how to change, so I decided I would be that example. I’m one of billions of people who are suffering as a result of the industrialised diet but I only need to help one person. If you can change one person, you change the whole world. So I started with myself and took it from there.
How can you blame people working in a system that started going wrong 120 years ago?
People like to create a kind of John Wayne movie scenario where you have goodies and baddies. People want to thump the table and talk about a revolution. They want to talk about change. I looked at the people who were making bread and needing to change and realised that they didn’t have a clue how to change because there was no framework. What is healthy bread? I didn’t know what healthy bread was, so I had to define it with what I called the BALM Protocol, a system of baking eating and sharing bread as part of preventative healthcare.
My work is mostly invisible until you stand in the supermarket today and see multigrain, multi-seeded sourdoughs. I have trained hundreds of commercial bakers to positively sabotage bread internationally. I’ve increased the diversity of fibre in the bread that is going out to large percentages of populations which means gazillions more microbes around the world getting in people’s guts and getting nourished.
Yes, you are right, that’s activism. I’m a complete and total activist. But I also know you have to allow the people who take bread forward to own and take the credit and glory for their bread. I’m far better off inspiring others and being underneath the change, rather than trying to front the change. If you build an army of 1000s of sourdough bakers globally you initiate change throughout the world. With half a million followers on my social media channels and best-selling books in many different languages, it has taken me two decades to permeate this knowledge into the system and actually facilitate change.
Orlando Lovell: Trying to contribute meaningfully to the huge system changes the world needs right now is pretty daunting and can get depressing. What keeps you going?
Vanessa Kimbell: I think there are three things that keep me going. Firstly, I wake up, even on my most tired days, and consider it to be a huge privilege to have a voice and to be able to communicate. It gets me out of bed knowing that so many people are listening.
Secondly, baking is something achievable, it’s not a fantasy. I’ve built an army of people who bake and eat and nourish and understand sourdough now. These people have changed their system and that’s how the system changes.
The simple, unadulterated, humble and equitable joy of getting an absolute kick-ass bread that rocks out of the oven never, ever gets boring.
I guess the third thing is just the simple, unadulterated, humble and equitable joy of getting an absolute kick-ass bread that rocks out of the oven never, ever gets boring. I’ve been doing this since I can remember and I’m still, here going: “Look at that bread!”
How can you possibly not love doing that and sharing it? Sharing is at the centre of everything. It’s generosity, kindness, support, love, nourishment, and everything that it is good about being a human being.
Dr Vanessa Kimbell is a leading expert in nutrition and the digestibility of bread. Her doctorate focuses on Baking as Lifestyle Medicine and preventative health, specialising in personalising bread for gut health and genetics. She is the Course Director and founder of The Sourdough School, a centre of research and education in bread, the gut microbiome, and the impact of bread on health, based in Northamptonshire. She is currently writing her sixth book and is a best-selling international author.
Cover image: Joe Westley courtesy of The Sourdough School.
