ABOUT US
Fanny Leenhardt
Born and raised in the South East of France, I graduated at Paris University in Human Nutrition before being offered to study Bread and Nutrition as part of a PhD. “How to improve bread nutritional quality” was the question I had been assigned to investigate. Throughout those 4 years I got the chance to work along with passionate growers, seed savers, millers, farmer/bakers and other scientists specialised on soil quality or seed selection. I quickly grew a passion for Bread that has not left me since.
If I had to condense the knowledge gathered, I would simply say "Mother Nature takes care of things best" and what our grandparents were baking before the "Green Revolution" was good. Hence the sad story of how, in less than a century, we abandoned both the flavour and nutrition of our staple food, in favour of producing vast amounts of cheap industrial bread.
After completing my PhD, I was eager to make scientific publications more accessible to the general public to help reverse bad practices leading to bread with poor nutritional quality. Meeting French farmer/miller/baker Roland Feuillas allowed me to go further in my quest for better Bread by retrieving forgotten heritage varieties of wheat that are nutritionally superior and environmentally more relevant today than ever. I have been teaching Nutrition applied to bread at Roland’s bread school for the past 10 years, constantly updating my knowledge at his side.
At that stage, 13 years ago, I had moved to Cork to coordinate a project at University College Cork on how bread salt content is contributing to hypertension. (The real reason for my emigration being my other passion, playing Irish traditional music...)
It wasn’t long before I met with Declan Ryan who kindly gave me a loan of Bread Matters, a reference book by Andrew Whitley, pioneer of the Real Bread Revolution in UK.
To spot one of my publications quoted by Andrew made me feel part of the Real Bread movement already and naturally led me to join Real Bread Ireland and find my own way to "spread the (good) bread" here in Cork.
Baking real bread is a revolution that anyone can be part of !