'McDowell is a slender, bespectacled, slightly flour-dusted young man in red trousers, black loafers, and V-necked white T-shirt, his face framed by a thick beard and mop of close-cropped dark hair. He looks like he'd fit in better onstage at an indie rock show than at an ag research center in a rural county. Yet he couldn't be more at home.
McDowell is the staff baker here at the Bread Lab, the brainchild of Washington State wheat breeder Stephen Jones, who's also the director of the Mount Vernon research outpost. Jones believes fervently that grain breeding — the art and science of creating new varieties — has been hijacked by large seed, milling, and baking interests, giving rise to high-yielding but boring varieties geared to the mass production of crappy, and mostly white, bread.'
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