A Delicious Culture Hack
This time last year, I had three important conversations that were really a gift while I was making sourdough bread.
I had a long conversation with my roommate, a children’s garden educator, about wheat farming and Roundup, increasing food allergies, leaky gut syndrome, and a rise in children’s mental health disorder diagnoses. Then another conversation with an herbalist friend of mine about surviving covid, lasting friendship, the need for collaboration in order for businesses to survive, the vulnerability of aging and the community care that is required for us all to be well enough. Later I was inspired by a forest activist and builder friend, who was helping to restore the landscape of our fire affected community by planting walnut trees in the burned seral environment.
About five years ago I chose to stop eating wheat because I learned it was sprayed with Roundup three times before harvest. The change made a significant impact on my overall health, reducing inflammation and ending some small but chronic ailments. I knew a woman in my neighborhood who baked gluten free sourdough bread. I was able to acquire a starter from her. I started making gluten free sourdough bread, two loaves at a time every other week. It’s about a three day process if you start with a cold sourdough starter.
When the above conversations were taking place, I was dividing and feeding my starter, mixing and rising my bread, baking and slicing the fresh seedy loaf. It is said that firewood warms you twice. Sourdough feeds you at least four times. Once with the relationship with it that requires you to feed it in order for it to feed you. Once when you give it just enough sugar to know it’s cherished and it blooms. Once in the kneading, through which it finds its ability to rise. And lastly when you get to enjoy it as a slice of toast with butter and marmalade.
Sourdough is a living organism that requires the spent dough to be separated and fed. Just like every one of us, it needs replenishment to thrive. As we navigate the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, the changing school and work landscapes and the impacts they have on our relationships to nearly everything, we may learn something from sourdough about dividing up the work and replenishing. We may need more inputs from more places to find our rise than we needed before. In each household “culture” sourdough will grow a little differently. It has its own micro biome that will respond to its environment uniquely.
When it is shared and fed in a new place, it’s cultures are diversified, changing it and making it stronger and more adaptable.
I’m considering my relationship to culture, family, healing, entrepreneurship and art, as I always do when approaching the new year.
I’m looking for the patterns of connection and regeneration that reveal themselves at the borders where genres of thought and practice meet. In ecology, these border spaces are called seral communities. A seral community is an intermediate stage found in ecological succession in an ecosystem advancing towards its climax community.
There are a lot of seral community spaces in Jackson County where I live after the devastating Almeda Fire. The Almeda fire took over 2600 homes and burned over 350 acres of the local greenway. As the community and the land are recovering, I hear in its heartbeat the desire to build back better, rather than to simply re-build. The community and the land was divided and punched down like sourdough. Like sourdough it is gathering new cultures and beginning to rise - new.
Sourdough is a superstar of a metaphor about the way that healing follows breaking, and in the healing is the glue that holds the culture together. Quick breads that are swiftly mixed, risen and baked all in one day are delicious. But, there is no replacement for the aroma and taste of the divided, punched down, mixed culture sourdough. It is the relationship with it that makes it so exquisitely delicious. It’s the mixed cultures that make it resilient, that make it rise.
Growing sourdough, then, is growing culture.
Sourdough starter makes a great gift. It’s like a prayer for advancing toward climax community. I hope those who grow bread in their homes will also intentionally grow in their capacity to break bread with folks beyond their usual social circles, growing a new culture from the existing culture and maybe regenerating our relationships and our gut biomes at the same time.