I don't know what the deal is with everyone else who's making bread right now - a need to feel productive, maybe; extra time at home (though that makes less sense with dutch oven-style no-knead bread, which basically seems to just want you to put it in a bowl and leave it alone for hours, then chuck it in the oven). Bread might always have been a part of their lives and now they're baking it even more. For those who are single and without kids, it feels a little like a desperate attempt to show that one is doing something meaningful, but that might just be projection on my part. Maybe people just miss bread. I miss bread.
For me, it's a little of all of those, and also this: I used to be so good at making bread! It's true: in high school, in the interstitial summers between college semesters, and even in Seattle when I worked at the bookstore, I loved to bake bread. I made my grandmother's recipes: her dilly bread (no-knead, before it was cool), her challah. I made so much bread that it went stale before my three roommates and I could finish it.
