Kerching!

After months of hard work, the Real Bread Campaign is now celebrating securing a Local Food grant from the Big Lottery Fund. Woohoo!

This new funding will help Sustain to appointment a permanent project officer to co-ordinate the campaign, a role filled until now by volunteers.

Over at least the next four years, we’ll be working around the country with independent bakers, public institutions such as schools and hospitals and local community projects including food co-ops and community cafés, to help make Real Bread accessible to more people from all sectors of society. We’ll also be continuing to promote the pleasures and benefits of locally produced Real Bread and helping to spread both commercial and domestic breadmaking skills.

All in all, it’s pretty exciting. As below, next on our calendar is Lammas on 1st August. Please get in touch if you want to join in the fun.

The Real Bread Campaign’s Local Loaves for Lammas

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Over centuries of international trade, many have forgotten that wheat and other cereals are seasonal crops. Fighting as it does for a return to localised, sustainable production, the Real Bread Campaign believes it’s high time for a shared celebration of the natural and seasonal heritage of our buns, baps and bloomers.

That’s why on 1st August we are calling on bread lovers across the land to enjoy a local loaf for Lammas.

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Taking its name from the Old English for loaf mass, this ancient harvest festival’s traditional highlight is eating bread baked with autumn’s first grain. Lammas is a great opportunity for everyone to seek out and enjoy locally produced Real Bread or roll up their sleeves and get baking. It’s also a chance for kids to find out that Real Bread is an all natural food that starts its life in a field not a factory.

We reckon that it’s a fine excuse for anyone who loves Real Bread to join the festivities with their own local activities and events.

Some ideas of how you can celebrate Lammas:

• Organise a Real Bread picnic for family, friends and other members of your local community


• Fun, tasty and messy hands-on learning by breadmaking with the kids


• Dig your bread machine out of the cupboard to make a loaf or two


• If you are lucky enough to have a local bakery, suggest they bake a special Lammas loaf


• If you are a local bakery, see the above.


• Learn to make a corn dolly (the Guild of Straw Craftsmen can give you tips)


• Go morris dancing (or perhaps just watch some morris dancers and then eat proper toast)

You can share your own ideas for Lammas activities and let others know about your event on the discussion board of our Facebook group. We’ll also be re-tweeting selected events sent to us @realbread on Twitter.

Closer to the day, we’ll put a round up of events at http://www.realbreadcampaign.org/.

Thanks to The Guild of Straw Craftsmen for the image of the Staffs knot above

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