Nazareno Lovino, baker
A conversation about collective work, the importance of unlearning and reeducation and bread as a means of resistance.
this interview has been condensed for length and fluidity.
Nazareno Lovino welcomes me into his bakery, a small studio on the roof of his airy apartment. The orange spring light filters in through the windows and brightens his workspace. He lifts a wooden table top to reveal an old school bread bin, a deep trough used to knead large quantities of dough that was made obsolete by the advance of electric stand mixers. Lovino spends every day working alone and doing as much as possible with his hands.
“Bread is not meant to be mechanized,” he tells me. “This project is about me producing what my hands are capable of and building a system that supports that.” If there was enough room to build a wood-burning stove, I don’t doubt he’d do that too.
I originally met with Lovino in February to interview him for a piece I wrote for Life & Thyme about the history of anarchism and baking in Buenos Aires and a small but visible shift towards sourdoughs and agro ecological and organic flours in the contemporary baking scene. Lovino is a founding member of the Alliance of Artisan Bakers, a cooperative of about 90 independent bakers and flour producers who work collectively to cut the supply chain, eliminate access barriers to becoming an independent baker and create an open forum to talk about costs and prices. We discussed the importance of changing our mindset from one of individualistic competition to collective support, the power of cooperative work and unlearning conventional consumption models.
How did you get started working as an independent baker?
Ten years ago I was working in telecommunications and studying to become a pastry chef and I decided to start this small business. That basically consisted of buying a bag of flour and selling bread at a farmer’s market. I really loved being in the market alongside producers, the way that presence cuts the supply chain and being able to take fresh baked bread and speak directly with the consumer. The bread and I is all that is in the middle of the producer and the final consumer. The bread is the intermediary. That became the mission. Trying to value what bread symbolizes. Bread is about communion and sharing and that social aspect of bread was what motivated me to dedicate myself to this. It is a demanding job. It’s a lot of hours and it is very solitary. But I am working with something that comes from the land that allows me to work directly with the farmer and understand the way that they work. I know about their harvests, what grains they are working with and you learn to adapt because the same grain isn’t always available. Not using an industrialized product that is engineered to always be exactly the same means you have to constantly adapt.
You said that you see yourself as an intermediary: do you feel a responsibility as a person that feeds others to teach them where their food comes from?
I bake and am active in an international movement dedicated to our foodways.
Slow Food?
Yes, I’m an ally of Slow Food. Being a part of that organization has allowed me to understand foodways on a global level and not be solely focused on what happens here, which definitely changes the way you work. I started connecting with other bakers that were working from that same space and we began to form a resistance against the hegemonic model [sic] industrialized bread and massive productions. I think we really need to understand that we have an enormous responsibility to protect a good product and create quality bread. Now sourdough has become trendy and so businesses appear that sell sourdough bread or they sell dry starters which have some nutritional value but don’t compare to natural fermentation.
Right. The wheels of capitalism never stop. Even the most natural of processes, like the fermentation of a dough, there always has to be a way to produce more, scale a business model, take advantage of every single opportunity to commercialize something more.
They always want to accelerate processes, produce more [sic] that’s what the capitalist model incites within us. That was why we decided to join forces as independent bakers that were working from the same philosophy and form an alliance.
How many bakers are a part of the Alliance of Artisan Bakers and what was the impetus to unite with one another?
There are between 80 and 90 of us. We created local chapters and perform different collective actions together. Most importantly we want to make knowledge more accessible. We built a library of books that have all of the information you would need to bake and share resources. If someone is getting started and doesn’t have a professional oven yet, they can look to our network and work from someone else’s kitchen. The whole idea is that we aren’t alone like I do my thing and that’s it. This is a very lonely job and it’s key that we are all connecting to one another, to suppliers and farmers.
I agree. It’s incredibly important to connect not just from a business perspective but on a human level it’s important to understand what the other person is going through and needs. You mentioned that bread is a symbol of communion. It is also one of few foods that anyone can eat just because of how simple it is. Even a celiac can make bread with other flours. It’s the food that can be utilized to educate people about food.
And it also boils down to the ingredients. It’s water, salt and flour. It’s incredibly simple. It’s not a coincidence that it is a symbol of sustenance around the world. We created brochures that we can give out to our clients to educate. Every baker that is a part of the alliance can print them out and give them to their clients because if we don’t explain this product, the consumer has no other way of knowing. There is a lot of information that confronts consumers, like you go to buy bread and the label has a ton of information but the important information is more and more hidden. And people simply don’t know how to process all that information. When you read the ingredients of an industrially produced bread, half the ingredients are not understandable. There are additives, a ton of things that we have no idea what they are but on the front of the bag it says something like “whole wheat” and it’s so far from what a whole wheat bread is. People also have no idea how to understand the differences in prices. Why is industrial bread this price and artisan bread this price? Where does the money go?
This process of deepening your understanding as a baker, as someone responsible for feeding others, are those values something you learned in your schooling? Did you talk about history, ecology, any subject that helped you get to where you are mentally today?
No. At school, no, no one talks to you about the importance of what you are making. They teach you to produce in a way that I guess you could call conventional. They teach you to work with yeast, to produce at an enormous scale, they teach you how to use activators, how to ‘activate’ a dough so that you always get the same result. The work that I do is all manual. There is no constant. The weather changes and the way bread behaves changes. School taught us how to work in a way that is standardized. The thing about sourdough is that there are so many factors that can not be standardized.
They teach you to produce like a machine as if our food isn’t a living thing. As if the person making it isn’t human.
Exactly.
I know that you work with agroecological flours and you promote the work of independent farmers that work more responsibly. What is it like working directly with farmers? And where do you draw the line between using quality ingredients and working manually, which are more expensive to do, and catering to a wide audience?
We have to understand that eating is a privilege. Our biggest problem is that quality food is not accessible to everyone. It’s not accessible to all consumers. This type of work isn’t accessible for everyone either. It’s difficult for producers and bakers to work outside of the hegemonic system. It is really important to keep a fair price. On one side of this equation, is me the worker at the end of the supply chain. It wouldn’t be fair for me to substantially elevate the price while a producer is making significantly less despite all of the energy that it takes to harvest good wheat, grind it into a quality flour and deliver the product. The reality is that I cannot work without good flour, without good ingredients I can’t do the work I want to do. Making sure that prices are fair across the chain is our north star.
How do you begin to define what a fair price is? Do you have a system in place to set prices or help each other out with that?
As a group we agree that it is important to be transparent about costs and prices. We’ve talked about setting prices and maybe working that out by where you are cooking from and building out a reference because we understand that there are different variables for running a brick and mortar, being in a trendier neighborhood, working alone from home, it would be impossible to come to a fair consensus. The solution has been to share information. We share work too. We want our work as bakers to be as local as possible. So if someone calls me and asks me to deliver bread in a neighboring borough, I could definitely do that but I would prefer that a baker that is from that neighborhood develop that relationship. It’s a different business model. We aren’t interested in competing with one another, we are interested in creating a space where more people can work this way. Prior to the pandemic, we got together a few times and began analyzing the problems that we had in common which mostly had to do with logistical and purchasing problems that happen when you work small scale as an independent. The local chapters help with that. People have a small community where they can do collective purchases, work together, do campaigns together.
That is so radical to hear. Especially in an industry that conditions us to constantly be competing against one another.
Bread is something that can be very elitist. Knowledge can be elitist too. Information is not accessible to everyone. Especially this kind of work. Manual work, you learn by doing and that isn’t possible for everyone. That is what we need to work on. You need a full structure that not everyone has the possibility to build alone. That is the interesting part of people starting to work out of their homes. I think it’s great that suddenly people see a possibility in working and being a part of gastronomy and not needing to open a brick and mortar or be indebted to a system that isn’t sustainable.
That is the big challenge for the industry post pandemic. It’s great everything that we are talking about working fairly, but I think it’s most, or even only possible from a purely economic perspective, in this small informal format. I’m not sure what the road to taking this philosophy, this vision for a better way to work, is. How do we transplant that to a brick and mortar that has to sustain employees and do that within the rules of the industry and the reality of this country? I think that it is clear that the less anonymous investors and more owners that are also working inside the business, the smaller the project, the better the chances are of working in a better way. It’s like what you say about cutting the supply chain, it’s about making this more humane. I think that the pandemic has shown that changes are completely necessary, but now how do we get there.
The only way to move forward in a real and significant way is to build alliances between people. The other option is maintaining alliance to a system that values the individual, elitism, the idea that I only care about me and who cares about anyone else. It’s time to be more empathetic and understand that we are already all connected. Let’s restructure those connections. It’s about truly respecting gastronomy, the people within gastronomy, the product and not just thinking about my bottom line.
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