The Hidden Legacies of Canadian Strong White Bread Flour
The story of how Canadian wheat conquered British supermarkets. Words by Luke Churchill.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, we are publishing companion pieces on two wheat products in Britain, and the histories of ownership and colonial monopoly that they hold within them.
On Monday, Jack Thompson wrote about Weetabix and the state of British wheat production via the lens of his family’s farm, which supplies wheat to the company. In today’s newsletter, Luke Churchill writes about the supermarket staple Canadian strong white bread flour, reckoning with the legacies of his grandfather’s land in Manitoba and the erasure of Indigenous foodways.
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The Hidden Legacies of Canadian Strong White Bread Flour
The story of how Canadian wheat conquered British supermarkets. Words by Luke Churchill.
It’s just after 7am on a Tuesday when I enter the Sainsbury’s at the back of Fulham Broadway station. The shutters have just been raised, and a steady flow of sleepy commuters begin to pluck anaemic packaged sandwiches and pastries from the shelves, while others blearily poke at the instant coffee machine. I, however, forgo both and head for the baking section to buy flour to bake bread. I am looking specifically for Canadian strong white bread flour, which is packaged and sold in 1kg bags and is widely available in all major British supermarkets.
In the UK today, More than half of the 750,000 tonnes of wheat imported by British flour millers per year comes from Canada. Wheat expert John Letts tells me that Canadian flour is favoured for its ‘heightened protein content that produces a fluffy loaf suited to commercial baking’, while baker Dan Lepard explains that dough made with strong white Canadian bread flour is ‘more tolerant of haphazard or uncertain methods’. This is why Canadian flour shows up in all manner of pre-packaged goods, including cakes, pies, doughnuts, dry pasta, and Warburton’s bread. The pastries that the morning commuters around me are about to flake down themselves on the District Line could very easily have been made from the grain.
Like the flour, I am also of Canadian origin. My paternal grandfather, Jacob, inherited, owned, and farmed a square mile (640 acres) of prime Canadian prairie farmland in Manitoba. Prairie lands were originally inhabited by communities represented today by the Cree, Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Nakoda Oyadebi (Assiniboine), Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy), and Dene First Nations. These lands were then, from the mid-1600s onwards, seized and settled on by Europeans, who introduced wheat – a foreign crop that would bring profit to generations of Canadian farmers. When I was growing up, I was told about how Jacob would stand on his porch, surveying his crop across the great expanse of flatness. How he would squint towards the boundary of his land, which was somewhere out of sight, beyond the golden dusk.
In the 1890s, when my great-grandfather Adam first claimed and settled upon land in southern Manitoba, he began to grow wheat on scale. He was farming during the ‘Canadian wheat boom’, a period of exponential growth between 1896 and 1914. The cultivation of wheat formed the foundation of Canada’s booming economy, with Britain fashioning an agricultural hinterland throughout the prairies to proliferate its empire’s food supply. (According to historian Lizzie Collingham, the UK recieved least 60% of its calories from imported food until 1939.) The European settlement of the prairies created a colonial agricultural economy with permanent consequences. These were systems of so-called ‘productivity’, founded through the dispossession of Indigenous people on stolen land.
Compared to the United States, Canada seems to have successfully concealed its history of violence against its Indigenous communities, conveniently distancing itself from the narratives of extreme violence glorified in tales of the ‘old west’ and the American frontier. The story of wheat’s role in this starts in the seventeenth century, when a band of merchants called the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) aquired exclusive rights from Prince Rupert to colonise stretches of land across Central and Northern Canada, including the prairies. Two centuries later in 1867, the British government created the Dominion of Canada, and this land – which was set up for resource extraction under the HBC – was sold to the authority of the crown.
In 1871, the Canadian government coordinated its first land-surrender treaty (by 1921, there were eleven in total) to enable Indigenous lands to be settled upon by Europeans. After this, the Canadian government implemented the Dominion Lands Act in 1872, whereby for $10 settlers could claim 160 acres of land. It was under this scheme that my great-grandfather came to Manitoba from North Dakota. In keeping with the scheme’s requirements, he would have built a home, then cleared and cultivated his homestead for three years, before expanding his farm to 640 acres, with the intention of growing wheat.
John Letts tells me that it was ‘hard Eastern European grains that first made their way to the prairies,’ carried by migrants from the Gdańsk region. However, the development of the Red Fife wheat variety in the 1840s facilitated the wheat boom, which flourished even further with the introduction of ‘roller milling’ in 1874. This created an efficiently produced high-protein grain, perfect for large-scale merchandising. In the early 1900s, plant breeder Charles Saunders developed a variety named ‘Marquis’ wheat, which matured ten days faster than Red Fife and yielded greater bushels per acre, while maintaining the renowned baking quality of its predecessor. It was Marquis that established Canada as the greatest wheat-exporting nation in the world; by this point, the value of Canadian wheat was estimated to be $500 million.
The profitable economy of wheat played a central role in the erasure of the Indigenous food culture that existed previously. It rejected Indigenous concepts of land sharing, farming (in which crops like wild rice, maize, and sunflowers were grown), and sustainable fishing, developed to suit the prairie’s ecosystems. Simultaneously, First Nations communities were forced to abandon a nomadic means of subsistence, and instead resettled to reserves with rocky terrain unsuitable for cultivation, so they could no longer grow the food they needed. Their productivity was suppressed by policies like the Peasant Farming Policy in the late 1800s, which stipulated that Indigenous farmers could cultivate only small tracts of land. They were also denied access to modern agricultural machinery, which forced them to farm with rudimentary tools, in a way that is comparable to mediaeval agricultural standards. While settler-farmers like my great-grandfather could sell their crop at the market with impunity, Indigenous communities were required to obtain a pass to leave their reserve and a permit to sell their harvest. They were often obstructed from acquiring these documents, leading to their crops to spoil and decay.
The enduring effects of these colonial policies still impact the lives of contemporary Indigenous communities across Canada, evidence of the permanent damage done by settler ideology. The introduction of a Eurocentric diet of refined carbohydrates has contributed to increased rates of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes in contemporary Indigenous communities across the nation. It has meanwhile been left to individual efforts and community-led enterprises to advocate for Indigenous food sovereignty in Canada (for example, the organisation I-Collective, which highlights Indigenous food, culture, and ingredients and brings their histories to the fore).
Over a hundred years since the wheat boom that happened on prairie soil, products made from Canadian flour have become central to the country’s diet. European migrants to Canada brought with them a desire to make their own pierogi, pasta dishes, and breads. Today, if you think of what signifies Canadian food, you might think of a Montreal bagel, or maybe bannock – a dish associated with Indigenous cuisine but coloured by the impact of reserve rationing and colonial legacies. Whichever springs to mind first, it’s likely you will think of dishes influenced or centred by European tastes. Meanwhile, Canadian flour still thrives in the UK. London’s The Bread Factory, one of the country’s largest artisan bakeries, uses Canadian flour to bake one of its signature loaves. Shipton Mill sells it in 25kg bags, ready for any blooming micro-bakery to use when knocking out small batches of hand-crafted bread. It’s also purchased by scores of home bakers like myself, without knowing where exactly it comes from.
The truth is that everywhere in the Western world today, we are surrounded by similar food products that were cultivated, shipped, and traded to the detriment of Indigenous populations across the globe, and which continue to impact their health and environments. While we may be more than the culmination of the actions of our ancestors, we still inherit the food ways they established. People like myself – who descend from systems fashioned from colonial occupation – are often removed from our legacies because of the hazing of historical narratives and the ideation of newly hatched national identities, which allows such systems to endure and propagate without question. It allows for us to routinely purchase ‘staple’ and ‘essential’ foods for our own tables, without thinking about what they stem from and the histories they erase.
Sure, the pillowy white loaves made from Canadian bread flour are a delight to pull from the oven, and as I live in West London, my use of this flour maintains the fibres of connectivity to my family’s wheat farming heritage. However, when I purchase Canadian bread flour, I purchase its cultural legacy. The 1kg bags are imbued with a story of colonial endeavour and the dispossession of foodways indigenous to prairie land, a story more vast, more crucial, than that of my grandfather’s lands.
Credits
Luke Churchill is a British-Canadian, London-based food writer, assistant food stylist, recipe tester, and development chef. Luke is also an analogue photographer and can be found on Instagram.
Thoughtful and thought provoking. Thank you.
Coming from Australia, the story is pretty much the same. Your writing has made me realise how blindly we continue to do things that suit us, without considering the legacy. I also like to bake, and try to avoid plastics when possible to help future generations. How can we help the past generations? Knowledge helps start a conversation. Any other suggestions? Or do I need to start to cook in different ways?