“I wish you could smell them,” says Susan Reid ’79, looking down at a tray of English muffins she’s just pulled out of the oven. They’re steaming, golden, dusted with semolina.

Reid is addressing roughly 1,700 people who have gathered, via Instagram, in her home kitchen in Vermont, just a few miles from King Arthur Flour headquarters in Norwich.

Reid, a chef, editor, and senior recipe tester, has worked at the legendary flour company for 18 years. These days she’s also playing counselor to the tens of thousands of newly minted American home bakers with nearly that many questions.

Starting in March when the country started locking down because of the COVID-19 crisis, bakers, both veteran and novice, stripped grocery shelves of yeast and flour, and began home-baking everything from cakes and cookies to pizza dough.

Susan Reid ’79, a chef, editor, and senior recipe tester at King Arthur Flour, is also playing counselor to the tens of thousands of newly minted American home bakers. (Photograph by Andrea Brown)

Long-neglected bread machines were pulled out of cupboards and set to work. Photos of fermenting sourdough starters suddenly seemed more popular than selfies on social media.

Reid says King Arthur was prepared for strong sales in April, since the weeks around Easter are usually the second-busiest baking season (Thanksgiving through Christmas being the first).

But as they shut down their popular baking school in Norwich, which is too tactile and tourist-driven for remote instruction, and sent staff home to work, they weren’t prepared for an “at-home tsunami” of baking that has turned spring 2020 into the equivalent of a prolonged holiday baking season — and turned King Arthur products, and Reid’s skill set, into particularly hot commodities.

“We blew through everything on the shelves and were able to refill with the Easter supply,” Reid says a few days after the muffin-making appearance for cast iron manufacturer Lodge, on whose Instagram cooking show she’s becoming a regular. “And then the pinch hit.”

“Americans are so extreme. They think, ‘If yeast breads are good, sourdoughs are even better.’ They also think they have to maximize their time.”

The employee-owned King Arthur scrambled to address the supply-chain problem. There is plenty of wheat available — but with its usual mills already working overtime, King Arthur sought additional mills that could grind to the company’s precise specifications. They found one, but it only has the capacity to package in 3-pound bags. Soon that smaller size will show up online in place of the usual 5- to 10-pound options, allowing King Arthur to send more product to grocery stores.

Presumably, the home bakers who have been frustrated by empty grocery shelves will soon be able to get back to self-soothing with bread making. Reid absolutely understands that impulse. “The feel of dough is really soothing and therapeutic,” she says. “There is nothing better than a warm loaf of bread. It’s so enticing and rewarding. And everybody is stuck at home anyway.”

Jim Amaral ’80, the founder of Maine-based Borealis Breads, is also unsurprised that baking bread suddenly got trendy in a time of crisis. “When I am shaping bread it is like a Zen experience,” he says. “It’s calming and you feel like you’re doing something constructive.

“There’s all sorts of good, strong emotional context to the process. You’re feeding your family and it also speaks to a nostalgia for a simpler, home-based kind of life that we might have grown up with.”

James Amaral ’80 poses at his Borealis Breads store in Wells, Maine, in 2008. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College).

Borealis shut down its retail stores in Waldoboro and Wells in March, but is preparing to re-open in mid-May with new social-distancing protocols. Amaral’s wholesale business was diminished but never halted.

“About 20 to 25 of our wholesale accounts [including �ֲ���ý Dining Services] temporarily stopped taking orders, but all of our biggest accounts, including about 35 Hannaford stores, have continued to take orders.”

That’s kept his truck drivers and production staff fully employed. The furloughed retail staff is starting to come back to work.

For bakeries like his, there’s plenty of flour to be had. It’s the same product, but coming through the wholesale market, and delivered in bulk packaging (too big to be wedged on any grocery shelf).

“We haven’t seen any shortages at all,” Amaral says. With some bakeries closed, he says, if anything there’s probably more available on the wholesale market. “I’m sure there is an excess of flour sitting around in 50-pound bags.”

Before the two retail locations closed, when flour demand had already started to soar on the consumer market, Borealis Breads employees started digging into those giant sacks of flour and bagging up 5-pound parcels for retail customers. Amaral advocates for homebaking; it’s no threat to his business and a good thing for any household, particularly right now. “It’s one more great thing to do with kids.”

He co-authored a book last year, Borealis Breads: 75 Recipes for Breads, Soups, Sides, and More, and in recent weeks there’s been an uptick in sales. He adds, “I have certainly had a lot of people reaching out to me saying ‘What do I do with my sourdough?’’”

“The feel of dough is really soothing and therapeutic,” Reid says. “There is nothing better than a warm loaf of bread. It’s so enticing and rewarding. And everybody is stuck at home anyway.”

In fact, that trend-within-the-trend is one reason Reid has been so busy. An extraordinary number of bakers are going straight to the bigger challenge of artisanal breads made with sourdough starter, which leavens bread with “wild” yeasts rather than the commercial, packaged yeasts that have been in such short supply during the pandemic.

Unless the baker is lucky enough to get a good sourdough starter from a friend, they have to “raise” it on their own. It takes a lot of time, patience, meticulous measuring, and flour.

During that process, a starter requires flour and water to invigorate and strengthen it. Some recipes demand three “meals” a day for this growing starter, and after they serve their purpose, roughly 80 percent of the starter is removed (dubbed “the discard”).

Pampering a starter is a lot harder than opening a packet of yeast. “Kind of like the Grand Canyon” of baking, Reid says, “where you are leaping across into new territory.”

Novice sourdough bakers have questions. Engagement spiked on King Arthur’s website, which is when Reid raised her hand to help produce more content, including tips about keeping starters alive.

“People worry, ‘What if I kill it?’” she says. Usually her answer is, unless you see red, or streaks of orange, indicating bad bacteria, it’s probably fine. On a typical busy day pre-COVID-19, the King Arthur Flour website might have 600,000 unique visitors. Now? “I think we hit like 956,000 in March and it hasn’t let up.”

“Americans are so extreme,” Reid says with amusement. “They think, ‘If yeast breads are good, sourdoughs are even better.’ They also think they have to maximize their time. ‘I have all this time. I have to do something with it.’”

For some, the business of throwing out those leftovers, known as discard, is a cause for guilt, especially because flour seems to be in short supply. That’s where those English muffins come in. Like many of the recipes coming out of Reid’s kitchen in these pandemic months, the English muffins are meant to show how bakers can use discard.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_90ayojzTQ/

“We have like ,” Reid tells her viewers. “You can put it in almost any recipe that has flour and liquid.” (Pro tip: It’s also great for the compost heap.)

“There’s no sign of it slowing down,” Reid says, referring to the home baking trend. “Even if a switch got flipped, we would probably still have these people in our universe.”

She believes nothing since World War II has presented this kind of challenge for America. Many Americans are likely to stick close to home for months, even years to come. “How do you plan for that? How do you plan for this world now?”

Baking is a way to feel you have some mastery over your world, Reid says. The only problem? Amidst too much of a bad thing, baking presents too much of a good thing. Those English muffins are headed out of her kitchen, just like the muffins, breads, and five cakes she made last week for demonstrations. The beneficiaries will be her friends and neighbors. “I’m doing lots of porch drop-offs.”

Then she’ll make a chocolate cream pie.

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Elizabeth Strout on Returning to Olive Kitteridge — The New Yorker

Elizabeth Strout ’77 thought she was “done” with Olive Kitteridge, the central character in her 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Until, she told New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Triesman, one day in a European cafe when Olive “just showed up.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout ’77 stands with President Clayton Spencer following her 2017 Reunion discussion with Spencer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Olive, Again, will be published in October. The sequel features Olive as she ages and her interactions with other characters deepen and change.

The books’ Maine setting, Strout told Triesman, is inextricable from its characters. “Olive — my Olive — would not be Olive if she lived anywhere but Maine,” she said. “She is like a barnacle clinging to the rock of the place.”

Read the story:

• “,” The New Yorker, July 29, 2019

See also:

• “,” Portland Press Herald, Sept. 1, 2019

Michelle Greene

�ֲ���ý College receives its largest-ever federal grant — Multiple outlets

Maine and national outlets covered the announcement that �ֲ���ý received a $3.97 million National Science Foundation grant to build a video database to support research in fields that rely on the analysis and recognition of images, such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, the principal investigator for the grant, will lead the creation of a Visual Experience Database comprising some 240 hours of video clips that depict everyday human activities and, importantly, simulate human vision and track head and eye movement.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene (right) works with student researcher Hanna De Bruyn ’18 to prepare an EEG test in March 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Greene told Maine Public, the process of collecting video clips for the database will involve trained members of the project team, including �ֲ���ý students, “going out into the world wearing head-mounted cameras, like a GoPro. We’ll be recording what the world looks like as we engage in some common, everyday activities.”

Read the stories:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 16, 2019
• “,” Maine Public, Aug. 16, 2019
• “,” The Associated Press, Aug. 16, 2019

Peter Goodrich ’89

Timeout: 9/11 still a painful day for those who knew Peter Goodrich — Sun Journal

On the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Sun Journal sportswriter Tony Blasi returned to the story of Peter Goodrich ’89, the track and field All-American who died on Flight 175.

Blasi had interviewed, written about, and gotten to know Goodrich as a student as he racked up track and field awards and majored in math and physics.

Peter Goodrich ’89, shown throwing the shot put for �ֲ���ý, “was a gentleman,” said classmate Greg Nespole ’89. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

This year, Blasi talked to Goodrich’s classmate Gregory Nespole ’89. “Peter was a kind, thoughtful man who was modest, though highly exceptional as a student and athlete — a gentleman,” Nespole told him.

A lawyer, Nespole has long worked in Lower Manhattan, and his office is near the 9/11 Memorial. “I lost many friends,” he said. “It is still a painful day.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Sept. 11, 2019

Christopher Petrella ’06

Colin Kaepernick wants you to know your rights — PAPER magazine

Chris Petrella ’06 had a in a recent issue of PAPER focusing on human rights.

The issue, called a “,” by the New York Daily News, carried the theme “Know Your Rights” and featured Q&A interviews with 10 black thought leaders, including 2018 �ֲ���ý Commencement speaker Bryan Stevenson.

Christopher Petrella ’06, director of engagement at American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center, makes a point during a meeting of the college’s Justice and Equity Reading Group in 2017, when he was a �ֲ���ý faculty lecturer member of the Office of Intercultural Education staff. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The issue’s lead story, “Colin Kaepernick Wants You To Know Your Rights,” was written by Petrella along with radio host Miabelle Bocicault and scholar Ameer Hasan Loggins. The trio also wrote the introductions to each Q&A story.

The entire issue was guest-edited by Kaepernick, the football player-turned-social activist, whose current efforts with his Know Your Rights camps teaches young people their legal rights and, importantly, how to exercise them.

A friend and part of Kaepernick’s inner circle, Petrella is director of engagement at American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center.

Read the stories:

• “,” PAPER Magazine, Fall 2019

Michael Rocque

The U.S. Attorney got the numbers wrong. Here’s a look at D.C.’s actual incarceration rate — DCist

A recent debate in Washington, D.C., saw criminal-justice reform advocates saying that D.C. imprisons more people than any of the 50 states. At the same time, the district’s U.S. Attorney said the opposite, that it sends fewer people to prison than any state.

The news website DCist turned to criminologist Michael Rocque, associate professor of sociology at �ֲ���ý, to untangle the numbers.

Michael Rocque, associate professor of sociology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Ultimately, you can’t compare D.C. statistics to state statistics, said Rocque, “just as I would caution against comparing NYC to Maine.”

The contrasting data points were bandied about during a public debate over a D.C. Council bill that would “expand opportunities for certain violent offenders to petition for a reduced sentence,” according to the DCist story.

After its initial claim, the U.S. Attorney backtracked and admitted that it had used federal data that only counted inmates at the D.C. jail as opposed to D.C. inmates held by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in federal facilities across the country.

Read the story:

• “,” DCist, Sept. 10, 2019

Edmund Muskie ’36

During his 1972 presidential race, Maine’s Edmund Muskie faced at least three death threats — Sun Journal

FBI files related to Edmund Muskie ’36 and released to the Sun Journal revealed that Muskie received three death threats while campaigning for the 1972 Democratic nomination for president.

“It doesn’t appear from the 1,038 pages of material released to the Sun Journal that the FBI ever tracked down two of the culprits,” wrote the paper’s Steve Collins, who obtained the files through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Federal prosecutors opted not to charge the other, a mentally ill man quickly found by agents.”

Edmund Muskie ’36 and supporters at a 1968 campaign event, location unknown. (Burton Burinsky / Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Collins also learned that Muskie had a police record (sort of). “On Dec. 28, 1965, in the tiny town of Centreville on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Muskie was issued a criminal summons at Broadwater Farms for ‘attempting to take migratory water fowl with the aid of bait,’�ĝ writes Collins.

Muskie paid the $25 fine.

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 31, 2019

Clifford Odle

‘The Petition’ addresses black liberation and white allyship in the Old State House — WBUR

Jerome Campbell of Boston public radio station WBUR sat in on a performance of The Petition, a play by Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle that explores the contradictions of the American Revolution when it comes to slavery.

The immersive play, in which audiences sit around a table in the Old State House Museum in Boston, is about Prince Hall, a free black man who unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts assembly to abolish slavery.

Lecturer in Theater Clifford Odle (right) talks with Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read during Opening Convocation on Sept 3. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In the play, Hall’s friend and ally Joseph Warren encourages the petition but ultimately prioritizes the “liberation” of white colonists from British rule.

It’s an example of the harm of white inaction, Odle told Campbell. “Unless you are arguing and agitating for people to have the same rights that you already have, unless you are willing to put your privilege on the line, the job is not done.”

Read the story:

• “,” WBUR, Aug. 27, 2019

Julia Sleeper-Whiting ’08

Local people who are all about the work share what motivates them — Sun Journal

A Lewiston Sun Journal article on what motivates community members’ work featured Julia Sleeper-Whiting ’08, co-founder and executive director of Tree Street Youth.

Julia Sleeper ’08 (right), co-founder and executive director of Tree Street Youth, speaks in 2016 with then-Lewiston High student Binto Matan and Gene Geiger, who supported an expansion of the youth center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Work is about creating solutions to things happening around us and solving challenges in the world,” Sleeper-Whiting told reporter Beth Herman. “As long as your focus remains on the greater purpose, the work itself remains relevant and meaningful.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Aug. 31, 2019

Ann Kranjec Fortescue ’84

New IMAS exec seeks cross-culture experiences — The Monitor

Francisco E. Jimenez of The Monitor of McAllen, Texas, profiled Ann Kranjec Fortescue ’84, the new president and executive director of the International Museum of Art and Science.

Fortescue said her 35-year career in museums was inspired in part by a �ֲ���ý course on 19th-century European history that included a visit to a historical farm.

“We spent two days on this farm, harvesting rye with a scythe and experiencing what it was like to live as closely as we could to 19th-century peasant farmers,” she told Jimenez. “That was when a switch went off in my head in terms of, ‘I could actually work in a museum and teach with objects.’”

Read the story:

• “,” The Monitor, Sept. 3, 2019

�ֲ���ý College

New students at �ֲ���ý College told to become activists — Sun Journal

The Sun Journal covered �ֲ���ý’ Opening Convocation, in which labor activist and civil rights leader Dolores Huerta received an honorary degree and delivered the keynote address.

The 89-year-old co-founder of the United Farm Workers told the incoming Class of 2023 to learn their history and engage politically to get the country “off the road to fascism.”

Dolores Huerta acknowledges applause as she’s given an honorary degree at Opening Convocation. Ready to present her with the honorary hood is Michael Murray, Phillips Professor of Economics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The wonderful thing about a democracy is that we can change things,” she said. But “nothing is going to change unless you decide to change it.”

Read the story:

• “,” Sun Journal, Sept. 3, 2019

See also:

• “Convocation speaker Dolores Huerta to the Class of 2023: ‘We have the power,’�ĝ �ֲ���ýNews, Sept. 4, 2019

James F. Amaral ’80

“We want people to bake”: Baker, food writer team up to publish book — The Lincoln County News

Jessica Clifford of Maine’s Lincoln County News interviewed Borealis Breads owner Jim Amaral ’80, who wrote a cookbook with food writer Cynthia Finnemore Simonds.

Amaral told Clifford that the goal of the book, Borealis Breads: 75 Recipes for Breads, Soups, Sides, and More, is to encourage people to bake, even if it costs him business at his popular bakery.

“It’s hard not to feel good about yourself when you bake a loaf of bread, no matter how it turns out,” Amaral said. “It’s a life-affirming thing when you bake – you’re nourishing yourself, you are nourishing your family.”

Read the story:

• “,” The Lincoln County News, Sept. 9, 2019

“I can see the world through food,” said Kirsten Walter ’00, perhaps speaking for all the participants in a wide-ranging �ֲ���ý discussion of food-related topics on March 16. “I can see all these different issues,” she said, “and how to approach them and how to engage people with them.”

Walter, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, was one of four Maine-based �ֲ���ý alumni, each an expert in food issues, who took part in a panel discussion sponsored by the College’s Nourishing Body and Mind: �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food initiative.

Walter joined artisanal baker Jim Amaral ’80, founder of , and two farmers: Nicolas Lindholm ’86, who owns Hackmatack Farm in Penobscot, and Steve Hoad ’72, of Emma’s Family Farm in Windsor.

The discussion traced the concept of “good food” — local, nutritious, delicious, natural or organic — across a roadmap of knotty questions. How do you make a living growing food? How sincere is the supermarket industry’s commitment to local, healthy foods? How can food help empower, nourish and be affordable to low-income communities?

An audience of some 40 students, �ֲ���ý staff and local farmers attended the event in Pettengill Hall. Anna Bartel, of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at �ֲ���ý, moderated.

To begin the 80-minute program, the �ֲ���ý alumni shared how and why they embarked upon their current paths. Amaral, a sourdough breadmaker whose story of success is well-known, focused on one of his proudest accomplishments: the role he has played in re-establishing wheat production in Maine after an absence of about a century.

His early attempts to source wheat in Maine, Amaral said, were discouraging, as the grain was sometimes spoiled or contaminated. Those problems reflected what happens when “you lose a whole industry, you lose the whole network of relationships between farmers and millers and bakers, and the challenges of actually recreating that.”

Lindholm had a good-food conversion experience as a �ֲ���ý student, then held several jobs related to sustainable agriculture and now makes about half a year’s living — with carpentry filling the gap — through selling his organic produce directly to consumers.

He plans to build a freezing plant, the state’s first intended for a strictly organic growing operation, for wild blueberries — a fruit native to this region. “Working with a crop that’s native to our land has a lot of meaning for me,” he said.

Hoad and Lindholm expressed a common depth of idealism about farming. Coming to �ֲ���ý, Hoad left development-wracked New Jersey for a relatively unspoiled Maine, bringing with him with visions of working his own land with his family.

Hoad explained that his farm is deeded back to 1820 and are only the fourth family to occupy it. The first owners had the place from 1820 until 1950. “You can feel those people in this land,” he said.

Now he and his daughter Rose raise poultry, pigs and produce that they sell from the farm, with the goal of making the food affordable to all comers.

Walter, who has dedicated her career to food justice, picked up Hoad’s theme of accessible food. She traced her interest in food justice to her youth in California, where her early concern about farming’s impact on the environment gave way to the realization that she needed to consider “the people in that environment” — migrant farm workers.

Walter may be best-known at �ֲ���ý and in Lewiston for founding , an organization that uses community gardens in Lewiston to empower young people and their neighborhoods. “I really wanted to see how we could use [the work of] connecting people to their food, connecting people to their landscape and each other, as a means of building a voice and power.”

Walter described a food assessment, undertaken by the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center and local colleges including �ֲ���ý, that has revealed the difficulty of putting together a nutritious meal in downtown Lewiston. Of 67 stores that sell groceries, only seven sell all the basics for a well-rounded meal. And small downtown markets, she said, charge almost 50 percent more than the supermarkets, which are away from downtown, for the same basket of foods.

“Everybody deserves access to good food,” Walter said. “It shouldn’t be a privilege. It’s a right.”

Much of the conversation revolved around the supermarket industry and its efforts to meet the increasing demand for local and organic foods. As Amaral pointed out, the industry is willing to pay lip service to local food as long as consumers demand it, but at root, the current model — based on inexpensive commodities, large-scale processing and far-flung supply networks — is making money for them. If Maine was growing half or more of its own food, he said, “I’m not sure that the supermarkets could really prosper in that environment.”

Farmers in the audience, meanwhile, pointed out that even as supermarkets turn more to local growers for produce, they are imposing requirements on small growers and processors that make it impossible to profit. Mandates, such as liability insurance or certain security and sanitation measures, that make all kinds of sense for industrial-scale producers make none at all for small, hands-on operations.

Steve Hoad offered a telling example. At his roadside stand, he sells sweet corn grown by a farm that also supplies a local branch of a major supermarket chain. His customers are always surprised to hear that, Hoad says, because the corn from his stand tastes so much better than the supermarket’s.

The reason is simple. Corn loses flavor rapidly once it’s picked. The corn that Hoad sells is no more than a day and a half old, if that. But the supermarket chain, fearing that one fine day the farm might fail to deliver on time, insists on keeping as much as a seven-day supply on hand.

The farmer can’t convince the chain “that he’ll continue to show up,” even after 10 years of working together, Hoad said.

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among �ֲ���ý College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food initiative.

All these events are open to the public at no cost.

First on the menu is a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition by Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52). The talk is sponsored by the economics department.

Two weeks later, �ֲ���ý alumni involved in food production and nutrition in Maine discuss a variety of issues in a panel presentation at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Moderated by Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at �ֲ���ý, the panel comprises Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral ’80; Maine farmers Steve Hoad ’72 of Windsor and Nicolas Lindholm ’86 of Penobscot; and Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the . The event is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Finally, food activist and author ’72, gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event too is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

This academic year, inspired by the opening of a new dining Commons and a $2.5 million gift supporting the use of organic, natural and farm-fresh foods, �ֲ���ý launched Nourishing Body and Mind: �ֲ���ý Contemplates Food. The initiative explores the ramifications of our food choices and spotlights �ֲ���ý’ own award-winning sustainable food-service practices.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
• Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).