Yael “I can't bake to save my life” Mejia's business began with bread.

The love of good bread coupled with a total inability to bake makes for strange bedfellows. It allows one to disconnect from conventions rife in the modern “bread” world.

Baking for most of human existence was a about centred activity. Historically, bread, cakes, biscuits, baking in all its diversity, was at the heart of everyone’s kitchen.

Ceding the responsibility to big business to provide us with our daily bread has proved to be a bad move. Letting big business bake for us was the precursor to letting big business cook for us. We are being fed notional food masquerading as the real deal.

Bread is a natural product and every natural product has a life of its own. Real bread is simplicity incarnate. Three or four elemental ingredients combined with the fourth dimension, time. And time is what modern man seems not to have. Human intervention – the artisan baker – is at the core of good bread.

Yael was instrumental in the resurgence of small artisan baking in the UK.