Just a corpuscle in a giant organism, flowing along the stream

The bread courses through the bakery like blood, mixed, panned, proofed, depanned, cooled and bagged over a four-hour cycle, trucked all over the Western United States, Alberta, Canada and Hawaii. We make artisan organic bread in a mass production environment, each stage of the process in groups of six to ten, becoming the corpuscles and platelets of a living organism, making a living product of whole grain flours, yeast and sugar, baked with care.

In the mixing department the ingredients are measured out and rolled station-to-station in 400-pound stainless steel bowls that gleam inside from careful cleaning. They roll like coal bins over a smooth red floor, a floor maintained at intervals with an industrial cleaning machine called a floor cat, which resembles a miniature Zamboni, stiff circular brushes rotating on its underside, a water vac and a large squeegee at the back. Driving the floor cat is a rank of privilege--only senior team members get the assignment, clearing their way with warning toots of the horn as they make tight circles about the production floor.

It's a regimented workplace. Safety glasses, hairnets and ear plugs are required everywhere. We wear plain brown bakery-issued shirts with snaps instead of buttons, the same drab color (just lighter than brown khakis) for our bakery pants, becoming an army of washed-out UPS men as we scurry about our tasks. It's very leveling and democratic, though managers wear black polos. Team leads and supervisors are all in brown like us.

The regularity and regimentation centers me. Monday night we made 30,000 loaves of whole grain bread, filling racks, rolling them into the proofer, mopping floors and scrubbing dishes and we rotated through stations. The bakery feeds us lunch and provides snacks like steel cut oatmeal, vegetables with hummus and yogurt for prework and breaks. Who does that? Around the country most large corporations are busy shelling out bonuses to upper management and sending jobs to Asia. Bread has to be baked reasonably near where it's eaten, but it isn't hard to envision a future where most of us will be replaced by robotic arms and sensors. The dough is no longer rolled by hand, and technology advances every year.

It seems like a reality our country is ill-prepared for. Revolutions are painful. The nature of work is undergoing a profound change. Whole industries will disappear over the next few years. Soon there will no longer be bakery workers or truck drivers or order pullers, only the technicians smart enough to maintain the machines. I'm nearing the end of my working life anyway, so I'd likely transition to subsistence living, reading, writing, taking long walks. It doesn't sound that frightening to me. But what about the millions of ordinary people abruptly stripped of a way to make a living and the foundation for a meaningful life? What will they do? How will they support themselves? The current political leadership seems ill-equipped to handle that massive conundrum with any kind of wisdom or compassion. Meanwhile change hurtles on. In Dubai they are experimenting with air taxis, self-piloted drones and helicopters capable of zipping passengers around the city. Our world isn't as organized and purposeful as the bakery: an egotistical, narcissistic fool threatens to destroy humankind with casual tweets about the size of his nuclear button. How did we come to this? How do we find our way out?