What's in a loaf of bread? Better yet: What is a loaf of bread? These may seem like questions for the Food section, but if we look closely the answers get complicated, and can provide a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world that we live in.
I started baking bread as an angsty 15-year-old and got my first job in a bakery during college. I held different roles in professional kitchens for the next eight years, stalking the inimitable rush brought on by the alchemy of putting something into an oven and seeing what came out. In that time I developed a fascination with the history and culture of bread and its soothsaying, barometric capacities. Bread trends over time seemed to foretell deeper cultural shifts: For example, the rise of mass-produced white bread in America dovetailed with the industrialization of the food industry and an atmosphere of xenophobia at a time when many bakery workers were immigrants. I also found it a uniquely informative illustration of the ways the human experience is distinct but interconnected: Doppelgänger breads can be found around the world (see the similarities between paratha, buss up shut, rougag — I could go on), comparable in style but shaped and set apart by specific environmental influences, such as local grains, religious guidelines, cooking surfaces and more. I eventually left traditional kitchen work to focus on writing about and baking bread as part of a research and art practice I call Bread on Earth. It took a pandemic for many people — Americans in particular — to wake up to the power of bread. Sourdough (the oldest, and my preferred, method of leavening), especially, was having a moment. More hands than ever were in the dough, and this gave me some hope. People might discover the pleasure and convenience in it for themselves, but I was sure they'd find something more, too. So I did my part to help it along. In a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, I tell the story of how and why I sent more than 1,700 packages of dried sourdough starter through the mail to strangers across the globe during the first few months of the pandemic. But we've mercifully, mostly, moved on from the emergency of Covid-19. So, besides the joy of checking in on extended family, why consider my project now? An antagonism has re-emerged in our culture that's reminiscent of the fractious atmosphere of the early pandemic. We bear constant witness to tragedy and division. Isolation, if not as literal and mandated as it was years ago, is encouraged emotionally by a political climate where opposite sides sit in intractable defiance. Many of us were compelled to bake our own bread four years ago, when the ground beneath us felt as if it were crumbling. So today, when so much can feel lost once more, we should still look at bread. Bread tells the stories of the people who make and eat it, and what happens when they can't.
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Saturday, February 17, 2024
Opinion Today: What sourdough taught me
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