Flour, sugar, and fat were my way into food, in many ways and on multiple levels. I accidentally launched a vegan microbakery before that was even a word on Long Island in 2012, while working my day job as a magazine copy editor. In the aftermath (and “aftermath” is apt here—chronicled, of course, in the forthcoming On Eating), I became a food writer who sought to use what I’d learned about sourcing, pricing, packaging, and selling artisanal foods in my work. 

Ever since, I’ve continued to look toward the bakers, who have a different, often more direct relationship to their customers than other kinds of cooks: They’re taking the birthday cake orders, chatting with them about their days while passing a loaf over the counter, explaining the local flour to them at markets. Once, someone told me the cupcakes I’d made for her had been an ill friend’s final birthday cake—this has stayed with me ever since, as one of the most important things I’ve done in my life. 

There is also an expectation of some level of consistent availability, a dailiness, whether serving a loaf of sourdough, a concha, or a chocolate-chip cookie. Sugar, flour, butter, and eggs are commodity ingredients that one can either be totally mindless or wildly thoughtful about (that goes for quite a bit of what we eat, but the volume used in even a microbakery is something that opens the eyes). People are open to having their mind changed when it comes to a sweet treat—open in a way they might not be about, say, a vegan tasting menu. I know this stuff because I lived it, because I saw people’s eyes change when they realized my vegan shortbread was just as good as the one they’d always known. 

I asked the writer Caroline Saunders, who’s made the intersection of climate change and baking into her beat, why she thinks sweets are particularly suited to being an entry point into bigger topics around food. “I think that there's just essentially no friendlier way to start a conversation about a big, weighty topic,” the Pale Blue Tart newsletter author says. “Dessert brings joy. And so if you're trying to start a conversation about climate change writ large, or food system shifts or threats, over a slice of cake is a pretty good way to do so.”

A professor whose class I was visiting asked me, in late 2025, “Where do you see examples of people who are working within regional food systems?” My immediate reply was, “I see it in the bakers.” That made me want to talk to the folks who came to mind. They each use baking as a way of storytelling through their ingredient usage, their flavors, their techniques—and they each happen to be writers, too. Perhaps you’re familiar with their work already, but even if so, here’s a bit about what they use and why while baking with many ingredients grown within their regions: It’s not about perfection or pretension, but the effort to create within and support the places they call home. These interviews have been edited and condensed.

“There are ingredients, like sunflowers, that historically have defined [the region] and have been growing here for a very long time, but are not commodity or not purchasable, for reasons that have a lot more to do with large-scale food systems than ecology. But sunflowers, I think, are one that's very interesting for their history in the region, and some do grow here, and I personally like to use them in my baking. 

Some of the more esoteric stuff, I think, is a fun storytelling opportunity through a baked good. One of the main things I make using the sunflower flour is a sunflower brownie, and it has sunflowers incorporated in a couple different ways: soaked and ground. And sunflower flour, which is made as a byproduct of making sunflower oil, I'm not using it in everything, but in this one particular thing, if someone is asking, Oh, why does it have sunflowers? You can tell a little bit of a story about sunflowers being indigenous, being important here, and then also chemically, being able to do various things for vegan baked goods. There's a lot of vegan baking and vegetarian dishes based on soaking and grinding cashews, and I think sunflower seeds work just as well in most of those applications.

Apples are grown here, lemons are not. So when I need to use an acid—and I'm often using just baking soda and adding some acidic ingredients to balance it—I go for apple cider vinegar. I reach for that over lemon juice. I reach for maple syrup as my primary sweetener, balancing it cost-wise with sugar. That's the way that I build the flavor palette up.”

“I often describe our state, specifically, as the California of the East. We don't have quite as much as California does—obviously, that's a huge place with a lot of different terrain. We're a huge dairy state—it's much less than it used to be, which is unfortunate, but we really have amazing milk cows, especially in Lancaster, which is about an hour and 15 minutes from Philadelphia. 

Grain-wise, we get access to a lot of stuff. My primary mill is really known for their spelt. They started as a spelt grain grower and mill, and now they've expanded to everything, pretty much, crops wise—it runs the gamut. 

All of the flour we use at the bakery is grown and milled locally. Our grain is the key thing, and we use two mills. It's Small Valley Mill in Halifax, Pennsylvania, and then Castle Valley Mill, which is a 30-minute drive from the bakery, and their grain is getting sourced largely from either Pennsylvania or New York— in our sort of northeast area, but primarily, like I said, we're using a lot of rye flour—rye grain, spelt grain, and then our classic sort of bread flour grain. Our wheat is all local. It's not specifically all Pennsylvania, so I would say our definition of local is as far north as Maine. Usually, we don't often get things that far north, but we consider anything within the Northeast region and maybe as far south as Maryland, Virginia—keeping it within this belt. 

You can get any kind of apple; you can get every kind of beautiful green. We use kale all year round. The limiting factor is we just don't get citrus, pretty much. But that's even sort of weirdly changing, because we have a farm called Threefold Farm that we work with, and they are growing like amazing Meyer lemons inside, in greenhouses, and they're grown in Pennsylvania, which is really rare and special. In the summer, I think that the real advantage for us is we have almost too much fruit to process. We’re constantly getting new stuff in and so we sell jam. What we do is really focus on the preservation of the thing. Especially with fresh local fruit, we get in raspberries; they go bad in four days. So we really focus on, like, Ok, what can we do with this week? And if we can't do anything this week, we're making jam with it.”

“In the springtime until around the beginning of July, there's a lot of strawberries, which is why I'm always gravitating toward the berries in the spring. There's a company in North Carolina called Carolina Ground Flour—I'm always gonna choose the King Arthur all-purpose flour, but for specialty things, I really like [Carolina Ground’s] whole wheat pastry flour. I really like to introduce that with all-purpose flour, because I feel that gives a good combination of flavors. I feel like that people can detect that there's something interesting happening inside this product.

People go wild for peaches. Last year, the crop was kind of crappy, so I didn't even do anything with peaches last year; the heat has been affecting the crops and peaches are definitely one of them.

People will reach out to me about a cake, but they're from out of state or something, and they want me to ship the cake to them. And I have a hard no on that. Why would you eat this cake that had to travel on a plane to get to you? I equate that to the reason why I don't like to use strawberries in the fall, even though there are strawberries at the grocery store, that doesn't mean that they are the best. I definitely think that choosing these ingredients on a smaller scale that grow the closest to me is the way to go. That will really set your food apart from other places as well. If you care about where these strawberries are coming from, if you care about the fact that I had to skip peaches for one year—those are the decisions that inform the work that I do. It all comes back down to the ingredient.

Being a baker who is using these ingredients that are grown here in Georgia has really helped me to fall in love with Georgia. Because beforehand, I was just comparing it to California, and you can't do that, because it's two completely different places. Baking has really grounded me into where I am right now, and that's important to me too.”

“I'm from Singapore, part of the larger region known as maritime Southeast Asia, which includes peninsular Malaysia, Indonesia—and we are all connected by a long history of trade and colonization, that also manifests in the idioms and ingredients of our baking and sweet-making traditions.

When it comes to ingredients that define the region, I think there are four in particular that I like to think of as the backbone of sweet-making: Number one is palm sugar, that is sugar formed from the sap of various palms. The second is vegetable starches. So these are starches from root vegetables or plants like sago. Third will be coconut, of course: coconut byproducts, coconut milk, coconut oil. And the last one will be pandan—tender, aromatic.

I think together these four ingredients can be used in so many different ways across so many different recipes, and are often used in different permutations, as well. To me, these epitomize how natural resources, and our unique cultural resources, are one and the same, and can be leveraged towards much pleasure.

I think baking is a very powerful tool, simply because everyone is enthralled by sweets. There is something vivacious and something inherently celebratory of it.

With the exposure that something like the Great British Bake Off has granted to the figure of a home baker—and how much it has even started to actively shape ideas of home baking—significant accessibility to a diversity of baking cultures is now considered mainstream. And much of that has happened as a result of online exchange. As a result, the average person is increasingly au fait with, say, Asian flavors and techniques. In this landscape, we see that baking is a very productive genre for silliness and creativity in one’s own generative capacity, but also can be a fertile ground for people to learn about others, through these global baking traditions.

It's a very communicative medium for a baker to put forth a sense of principles, or to put forth a sense of world-making, right? The baker is always bridging multiple worlds—that of their intentions and desires, the farmers who have shaped each ingredient, the microbial life that shapes fermentation processes. The end product is nothing short of a statement about, and shaped by, the systems that our eating and baking are couched within.

Traditions over time, and generations of bakers, are what can define the norms and environment of a given locale. So many people are reliant on their local bakery, their local bread maker, and local bakers are the largest users of cereal or grains in their own immediate neighborhoods, which is just massive if you think about how that can incite a sense of change, if they choose to.”