Seeding the Story Vault

What is Bread and Stories? In a nutshell, it's a website and newsletter in which people tell personal stories with connected recipes, so that we can share their experiences with all our senses. Simple enough, but I've struggled to find an image to hold all the ideas and feelings around it in my mind. Then last week, a work assignment handed me just the right metaphor.

The assignment was a typical one for an educational publisher: to write a short informational reading passage for students learning English as a second language, one that lends itself to assessing specific reading skills. The given topic was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

The what? I had no clue, and I figured it was going to be a yawner. Yet it turned out to be anything but. On a remote Norwegian Arctic island is a concrete bunker built deep inside a mountain that serves as—holy snow peas!—a war-proof, disaster-proof Noah's Ark for the world's food supply. After reading about this sub-zero doomsday vault and taking a virtual tour, I may never look at the food on my plate the same way again.

The global vault, which is funded mostly by the Norwegian government, offers free, long-term storage of duplicate plant gene banks. Its humanitarian purpose is to safeguard crop diversity for future generations. Here's what's so important about crop diversity (I had to look that up, too): industrial farming focuses on a few crops that are easy and profitable to grow. Moreover, in clearing vast swaths of rain forest and other unique ecosystems to plant a single crop, growers may wipe out thousands of plant species. With fewer and fewer edible plant species and varieties within each species, we get closer to the kinds of conditions that created the Irish Potato Famine: any one species may fall prey to pests or pathogens, wiping out entire crops. Thus the fewer varieties we save, the more fragile our food supply is. And then, of course, there's scorched-earth modern warfare. One nation has already made a withdrawal from the Global Seed Vault: Syria in the wake of their civil war. So thanks, Norway, for building this bank I never knew the world needed.

Back to Bread and Stories: I think we're in danger of telling and hearing too few kinds of stories about ourselves, too. Although each life is unique and never to be repeated, we tend to limit ourselves to a narrative that somebody else has framed for us: an easy, palatable, or somehow profitable version of a group identity. The more we trim ourselves down to fit in, the hard it is to see and feel what we might have in common across and beyond those borders. And that makes us all more fragile than we would be otherwise. So the more unique, personal stories we share with each other, the stronger and safer we all are. Stories are seeds to nourish us in harsh times.

Really, this is just a little website, not even remotely resembling a concrete bunker in the Arctic, but I'm as excited as a kid at Christmas to make space for people's stories and share them with you. In the spirit of a tiny, warm Svalbard, here are stories about two unique women who are dear to me. To meet them and me, you might assume we had little in common, but here we all are, eating chicken soup.

Far from Home: Amna’s Story

Amna’s warmth, humor, and hospitality have touched many people in the small southern town where she lives. She and her husband work, raise their kids, and look out for their neighbors like any American family—but their journey to “ordinary” was anything but. Until a few years ago, home was

Bread and StoriesAmna

Hidden Grace and Hot Soup

In our digitally intertwined, always-on lives, one of the more startling windows into another person’s day is the accidental connection: the butt-dialed call, the mis-addressed email or text. Yesterday I answered the phone and heard a friend cussing at some “moron” in traffic. Another friend in a distant city used

Bread and StoriesJody Frank

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—Jody