Meet the Militant Bakers Feeding France’s Migrants

This article originally appeared on VICE Belgium.

Located in a former slaughterhouse in the northern French city of Calais, Le Channel is an alternative theatre, bookshop, and restaurant. In the bar's kitchen, activists have set up a makeshift bakery to bake bread for the thousands of migrants stuck at this busy border, attempting to cross into the UK via the English Channel.

When I visited Le Channel, the bakery was in full swing. On that day, the three-person team of volunteers baked 60 kilos of bread from scratch. The loaves were collected by the charity Secours Catholique (a local chapter of Caritas France) and distributed to migrants in Calais the following day. “We supply them with bread three times a week,” explained Yann, one of the volunteers, who talked to us using a pseudonym. “In exchange, the charity finances part of the project.”

Over the past 20 years, the small town of Calais has become a hub for migrants trying to get to the UK on rickety boats or inside lorries. Up to 24,000 migrants managed to cross the channel last year, while hundreds of people hang around the town waiting for their lucky break.

The local government has taken a very hard stance on migrants, who are forced to camp out in makeshift camps that are regularly cleared and destroyed by the police. The whole town has also implemented anti-homeless architecture and security systems on every corner, as well as cracked down on activists and NGOs trying to help the migrants.

Yann is a member of Internationale boulangère mobilisée (Activist Bakers International, or IBM), an informal network of militant bakers working on various social projects. Founded in February 2018, the group consists of volunteers who join projects whenever they can and bake bread in pop-up locations.

At Le Channel, the current team includes Andrea, 34, a full-time activist from Rennes who co-founded IBM and has his own portable oven. Yann, 31, is an engineer by training who quit his suit-and-tie job in Paris to lead a nomadic lifestyle. He makes ends meet thanks to benefits – just like Andrea. “I stopped believing in changing things from the inside,” Yann said. Then, there’s Marion (also a pseudonym), 21, who wants to gain more experience before officially training as a baker. IBM also organises courses for those who want to get an official degree, which is mandatory to start your own business. The trio will be working together for a few weeks before handing the project over to a different team.

Andrea, Yann, and Marion make bread thanks to donations including flour, bread molds, and other utensils. In times when even artisan bakeries resort to expensive equipment to be profitable, at IBM, they only use their hands. They also bake sourdough style, letting the flour and water ferment so the dough can rise without yeast. That way, the bread keeps longer and is easier to digest. 

Although their bread was an instant hit with the customers at Le Channel, that wasn’t the case at the migrant camps. “The migrants don't like our bread,” Andrea and Yann admitted. “At first, the Secours Catholique volunteers hid it from us because they didn’t want to hurt our feelings.” They both recalled how an Afghan refugee was put off by the density of the bread. “He said, ‘You can build a house with your bread,’” they laughed. Eventually, they adapted the recipe into brioche, which is more popular.

The team has also tried to share their skills with the migrants staying in Calais, as Yann finds it important to create a less hierarchical relationship between volunteers and migrants. Only two migrants have come to the bakery since the beginning of January, as most people here see Calais as a place of transit. “Their main goal is to cross the Channel, so it's difficult to form close relationships,” Yann concluded.