À LA RECHERCHE DU BLÉ VIVANT IN SEARCH OF LIVING WHEAT Roland Feuillas and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac 14 × 19 cm 240 pages softback october 2021 estimated retail price: 20 €
An engineer and company boss for over twenty years, Roland Feuillas fell in love with bread when he discovered the Cucugnan mill in Corbières. Since then, he has thrown himself body and soul into producing “living bread” by revolutionising the bread‑making process, winning the plaudits of professional bakers and the world of fine dining. An essayist, journalist and publisher, Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is the author of several works including interview collections (N’espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres with Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière [Grasset, 2010]), biographies, essays and several books about bread, among them the Dictionnaire universel du pain with contributions from 150 specialists from across the world and the Larousse du pain with the baker Éric Kayser (Larousse, 2013). In 2016, Actes Sud published his debut novel Azyme, which won the 2017 Écritures & Spiritualités prize.
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n this latest work, Roland Feuillas and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac continue the fascinating conversation they began in 2017 with À la recherche du pain vivant in which they explained that bread, far from being a mere foodstuff, is a foundational pillar of our civilisation. Their first book recounted Roland Feuillas’s discovery of the world of bread as he visited the oven and mill of Cucugnan in Hautes Corbières. À la recherche du blé vivant is a follow-up to this initial adventure that explores a crucial additional component: there is no such thing as good bread without excellent wheat. It again takes the form of conversation that encompasses personal experiences, historical developments, the most recent scientific research, and philosophical and spiritual reflections – a true intellectual odyssey impregnated with the odour of wild cereals and warm crusty bread. We learn that in the Neolithic it was not famine that drove humans to cultivate cereals but rather a hankering after convivial and festive intoxication. Bread is a descendent of this primordial fermentation process.
À la recherche du blé vivant is a poetic championing of a life philosophy – a way of living that encourages biodiversity in the fields and hedgerows, embraces yeast and microbiomes, delights in the pleasures of partaking of food together, and promotes a veritable culture of the living world.
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