Bread influencers are the Instagram stars of the quarantine

The panic from Covid-19 and the quarantine that relegated us home has affected our lives in more ways than one. With more free time available than they thought they could manage, many people dedicated themselves to rediscover the pleasures of cooking by returning to devote themselves to one of the oldest gastronomic rituals ever: homemade bread. And not only in the early stages of the emergency flour and yeast seemed to have disappeared from the supermarket shelves, but on Instagram, many pages specialized in bakery, such as that of Maurizio Leo o Breadhead, Blondie + Rye, The Bread Bakers Guild saw the number of their followers rise, literally, in a few weeks. One of these pages is @fullproofbaking whose followers, according to a Forbes estimate, have increased by 30% in the last month, with an average of private messages approaching 200 per day and a private tutoring service of 70 dollars an hour. 

Baking has become the new national pastime in both the United States and Italy. Searching for the word "bread" on Google Trends you can see a sharp surge in searches on the topic that starts on March 1 and culminates on the 28th. Also on the same page, we can see how searches for the topic "instant bread" have increased by 1700% since the beginning of 2020. Forbes also reported that, on Instagram, the hashtag #bread has been searched 30,000 times in 36 hours with an average of 833 searches per hour. The phenomenon has also reached Twitter, where several American users joked that at the beginning of the emergency the depleted goods were toilet paper and now, instead, flour and yeast of beer. Something similar had happened in Italy at the beginning of the emergency, with several supermarkets having to ration yeast sales. 

This bakery trend might actually sound strange – before the pandemic, it was a hobby limited to relatively few people. But the human motivation behind the phenomenon is, as in the case of skincare, psychological. Observing the sourdough, as well as the smell of hot bread, activate the pleasure centres of our brain as well as Pavlovian reactions that date back to prehistoric times. As Donna Pincus, professor of psychology at Boston University, explained in an interview with the Huffington Post:

“Baking actually requires a lot of full attention. You have to measure, focus physically on rolling out dough. If you’re focusing on smell and taste, on being present with what you’re creating, that act of mindfulness in that present moment can also have a result in stress reduction”.