Bread. I love it. You love it. If I could eat one meal for the rest of my life, I’d grab a hunk of sourdough and a wedge of pepper jack cheese, and call it good.1
Luckily, there are some humans who are really, really good at both bread and writing, and I suppose, if we’re going to get technical, at combining these loves with a slice of spirituality.
As such, I’m excited to introduce you to a woman who calls herself both a baker and a writer, and for good reason: she makes something out of flour, water, yeast and salt, and she strings stories together like it’s her business.
Kendall Vanderslice, author of By Bread Alone, really is a baker, writer, speaker, and founder of the Edible Theology Project, a ministry that connects the Communion table to the kitchen table.
She’s our featured author on “read this” today, and I’m telling you, you’re going to eat. it. up.
Pun intended.
Enjoy!
Cara Meredith: How are you coloring outside of the lines, all over again, when it comes to your writing and this book in particular?
Kendall Vanderslice: In my writing, and in this book in particular, my hope is to help people see something as ordinary as bread in a way they've never seen it before. Bread is so simple, so basic that when we read about it in Scripture, we assume it to mean just about anything but actual, physical bread. We pray for daily bread, by which we mean God's provision. We talk about breaking bread, by which we mean eating meals with others. But I want to propose that there is something to the materiality of bread itself that heals our relationships to our own bodies and to the Body of Christ.
When I began working on By Bread Alone, I assumed I would be writing more of a theological text. I'd spent years studying the role of bread in Scripture and in Christian tradition, as well as the chemistry of bread baking (after all this project began out of my work as a professional baker!). I wrote my thesis at Duke on theology of bread. I was ready to expand it into a full academic treatise. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't quite articulate this theology of bread in those terms. The crux of my theological understanding of bread is that bread is God's way of communing with us in tangible form when words or thoughts can't fully capture the depth of God's intimacy. In order to convey this theological vision, I had to write my own story—the story of how God has drawn me in, again and again, through bread.
Cara Meredith: You wrote a book! Tell us! What upside-down idea were you trying to turn right side up again?
Kendall Vanderslice: I like to say that By Bread Alone is a theology of bread as told through my story. It shares the story of my years as a dancer and as a professional baker, years when I had a really contentious relationship with my body and with the Church. Somehow, though, through these years God kept drawing me in through the process of baking bread. It was through bread baked and broken in community that God slowly healed my relationship to both.
My goal in writing By Bread Alone was to write a book that was theologically rich but also accessible and compelling to those who don't really want to read theological writing. Bread is this incredibly simple, yet also infinitely complex, food that has been the core of the human diet for most humans throughout most of history. It's so basic, and yet also so varied across time around the world. I wanted to be able to use bread to show how our own communities are similarly so simple but also so complex. They are messy, and also necessary for us to thrive.
My hope is that this book will be a gentle offering to those who have complex relationships to their own bodies or to the Church. I hope it offers hope and a tangible sense of God's nearness and love for you.
Cara Meredith: Okay. We talk so much about audience when it comes to book-writing, but what did you learn about yourself along the way?
Kendall Vanderslice: This book was such a gift to write. In many ways, I worked on the book for 5-6 years. I was reading and researching the academic pieces for such a long time. But once I signed the contract, I had four months to actually finish the manuscript. And that was the first time I'd really sat with the personal narrative that I was writing. Four months is a really short amount of time to write a book like this one! Which meant this manuscript was my sole focus for that entire time. To sit with these stories day-in and day-out, stories of my own anxiety and heartbreak but also stories of God's continued faithfulness in unexpected ways...it was so healing.
In the year and a half since finishing the manuscript, I've had to make some major leaps of faith both personally and professionally. They have been terrifying. But sitting with those stories of God's faithfulness gave me the confidence I needed to listen to God's still, small voice and trust that God would be faithful once again.
Cara Meredith: Putting ourselves out there when it comes to storytelling is always a risk. What is the biggest, fleshiest risk you took with this book?
Kendall Vanderslice: I have never written about many of the topics I covered in this book. I write about my own history of disordered eating. I write about my experience of singleness in far more detail than I've written about it before. I write about the death of a close friend and the failure of my business. It was nerve wracking to make these parts of my story so public, but they all felt so central to the thesis of the book. I didn't know how to really convey the theological themes I wanted to show without demonstrating the ways I've experienced them in my own life. I'm really proud of how the book as a whole turned out.
Cara Meredith: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What else are you celebrating in your ordinary, everyday life?
Kendall Vanderslice: Ooh, this is a great question. I love celebrating all the small career milestones in my life and in my friends lives. But I'm less good at celebrating things in my ordinary, everyday life. I recently bought a house, which is something I'm very proud of as a single, self-employed woman. I mostly love that it allows me to finally root myself to a place and care for my own tiny plot of land. I'm learning so much about how to tend to the grass and trees and plants all around me, and I love the sense of home it provides.
P.P.S. All of these brilliant questions (and the sub theme as well) stem from interviews that the equally brilliant
originally created. I adapted them for this space, but the origins are all hers!Problem is, while my inner-25-year old self wants to eat bread and cheese all day, my actual plus-19-more-years self cannot live on bread and cheese alone. Alas, a salad a day and not so many hunks of cheese and bread it is. Curses!
I enjoyed this with my lunch of bread/cheese/salad. I always enjoy these brief interviews, and would love to read Kendall's book. Thanks Cara!