Apparently a love of muffins can generate a lot of good ideas.
Chris and Josh Hergesheimer, two look-alike brothers, one from Roberts Creek, the other from Vancouver, launched their book, The Flour Peddler: A Global Journey into Local Food from Canada to the South Sudan, in Sechelt last week.
Chris admits to loving baked goods all his life, and he had found a way to grind his own B.C.-grown grain for fresher food, using a heavy hand mill.
In the book he wrote: “So I set up at the farmers’ market in Sechelt, a small town on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, offering hand-milled flour. It took eight minutes of cranking to fill a half-kilogram bag, which I sold for five dollars. I left with a sore arm and 25 dollars.”
There had to be a better way, and the brothers found it — a mill powered by pedalling. The prototypes were made from used exercise bikes found at the thrift shop with the addition of a box and belt that connected to a flywheel. A grain mill was bolted to the box so that when the operator pedalled the bike, it made the flywheel spin to grind the grain.
Market shoppers will remember watching the process at Roberts Creek, among other places. In fact, in those energetic years from 2007 to 2012, Chris milled a great deal of grain, visited 100-plus farmers’ markets with his cycling flour mill and gave demonstrations at school workshops and festivals throughout B.C.
Josh is a journalist and photographer in Vancouver, while Chris studies the sociology of agriculture in the Faculty of Land and Food at the University of British Columbia. Both were poised to take on a new food adventure in South Sudan, if only they could raise the funds. Their interview with a potential investment banker is one of the more amusing chapters in the book, but in the end it was crowd funding from their own community that paid for the trip.
After forming a friendship with a South Sudanese man, William Kolong, while he was in Canada, they decided to go to William’s remote village with a model of their bicycle mill as a gift for the people. Back country Africa is not for the average tourist, and the brothers describe some of their experiences on the way: arriving at a deserted technical school with the parts of a bicycle and a flour mill in hand, then flying in a converted Soviet military helicopter to the far western end of the country. While in William’s village, they demonstrated the device to the women of the town who traditionally ground grain by pounding it. Chris said the women wasted not one ounce of the flour that was milled during the demo, and that they were delighted with the speed of the bicycle mill.
In February Chris returned to the Sudan to follow up on the projects they had begun. “Bring more,” the people told him.
As well as promoting their book and the project follow up, the brothers plan to visit Haiti, carrying another mill and building the bicycle device from scratch on site.
The Hergesheimers are delighted at the support from their publisher, Caitlin Press. Their story moved at lightning speed from first pitching the book in September of 2014 to arriving on the shelves in March.
“They believed in us,” Josh said, adding that the book is not so much a memoir of their past experiences in the flour trade as an account of something that is still taking place locally and in Africa. More about the journey with photos and video can be found at www.continuouscycle.ca. The Flour Peddler is available from Talewind Books in Sechelt.
