As a nurse, I have a special affinity for shift workers. I used to work long night shifts in a hospital, and though my current job does not require night shifts per se, it still does occasionally call for us nurses to be up in the night to look after sick patients.

Though it is physically painful to work nights, and studies have suggested that shift work decreases life expectancy, I did (and still do) enjoy the feeling that the world was all mine at night, because I was awake and working while everyone else slept.

Everyone thinks about nurses, police, and paramedics when they think of shift workers. But one group that we always forget about is bakers. There is no bakery in the world that isn’t open for business first thing in the morning. But anyone who has ever baked a loaf of bread or made a pizza from scratch knows that you cannot rush bread. Yeasted breads require hours of cyclic mixing, rising, shaping, and rising again.

A bakery is able to open in the morning because a baker has worked all night to make breads and pastries.

Walking home one night around midnight in Barcelona from an evening of tapas and cava, I spied this baker working away in a beautiful bakery called Baluard, close to our flat. I watched him for a while before I snapped these photos. He was sliding loaves of peasant bread, having already risen twice, into the huge, hot, industrial oven.

Thank you to all the bakers who make our daily bread while we sleep.