When the world around us stops making sense, I find comfort and clarity in bread.
Inside one tablespoon of active sourdough starter, the fermented culture made of flour and water used for thousands of years to leaven bread, there are billions of microorganisms. Without a microscope, they can be witnessed only through their output: bubbles of carbon dioxide belched up by the Lilliputian workers metabolizing the starches in the flour.
Over time these bubbles cause the mixture to swell in its container, creating an illusion of spontaneous material creation. It’s easy to understand how before the 1850s, when scientific discoveries shed light on fermentation’s inner workings, bread was considered both wicked and holy.
In late 2019, humanity met an invisible microbe of a different sort, one that sent us lurching toward our homes and away from one another. Unable to feed and comfort through my baking, I tried, like many others in pandemic isolation, to find a new way to connect with people.
Instead of baking loaves I used my personal town crier, Instagram, to offer up for free something I could ship through the mail: portions of Barthelme, the sourdough I had coaxed into existence some years prior.
How to create a sourdough starter
Fresh bread offered itself as a useful anchor, both as a symbol and as a direct supply of sustenance and emotional comfort. During this global crisis, many felt drawn to a substance that has connotations of life, money and God, all at once.
Still, I was surprised to receive hundreds of requests for bits of my Barthelme within the first 24 hours of offering and more than a thousand within a couple weeks. They poured in from around the world. The emails, which I had to set up a new inbox to collect, were peppered with words like “angel,” “bless,” “honor” and “humble.”
Sourdough was trending. As a dealer, so was I. Through the following year, I sent over 1,700 packets of dried sourdough starter — most dehydrated in my oven on endless parchment-lined sheet trays, with a handful produced by volunteers — to recipients in 46 states and 36 countries.
Sourdough can lie dormant for many years before being revived. (Seamus Blackley, the designer of the original Xbox and an amateur Egyptologist, went viral when he and some collaborators raised loaves with 4,500-year-old sourdough spores extracted from an ancient Egyptian vessel.) This quality, along with the fact that a small baggie of dried sourdough can pass relatively unfettered through the international mail system, makes sourdough an excellent candidate for global distribution.
As the coronavirus traveled the world, bits of potential bread spidered out of my kitchen in brown paper envelopes and landed in mailboxes on shores so distant that our tomorrow is their today.
Around the time this process began, online searches for the word “sourdough” skyrocketed over 500 percent. People with bread know-how enjoyed newfound (ahem, deserved) cachet.
Supermarkets ran low on yeast. And many Americans realized that they didn’t know how to feed themselves. Bread, a suspect indulgence in the age of the low-carb diet, became a humble promise of salvation, or at the very least, a rewarding way to pass the time.
A sourdough starter is fruitful by nature: After each feeding of equal parts flour and water, a healthy starter will rise until it doubles in size, at which point it is either ready for use in a dough or ready for another meal. Under ideal conditions, this doubling can take around four hours. If a baker kept up with her starter’s appetite, consistently feeding it whenever it was hungry, it would quickly outgrow the kitchen. To avoid this exponential growth, a portion of sourdough starter is traditionally discarded at every feeding, which means there’s plenty to go around.
Despite the interest in “heritage” sourdoughs, their original microbial balance can change once they’ve departed from their place and materials of origin. Take my starter packets: In the mail they were all genetically similar, but after a few feedings in new habitats they became unique, their resulting loaves determined by the environment, ingredients and hands involved in their maintenance.
According to a 2020 study published in the microbial science journal mSphere, not only does a decent portion of a sourdough starter’s ecosystem of yeast and bacteria come from the baker’s hands, the transfer is also bidirectional: Increased numbers of Lactobacillus (the yeast found in all sourdough cultures) are present on the bakers’ hands after a few weeks of consistent breadmaking.
It’s hard to resist the cozy feeling served up by the thought of nearly 2,000 of Barthelme’s children scattered across an otherwise fractured and disconsolate globe, especially when I consider they’re working to unite our bodies on an imperceptible scale.
“Sourdough starters? Proof of connection in this garbage town, thank you!” one recipient wrote. “Yes, please!!! Any way to feel connected to other humans right now,” wrote another. In 2020, a pervading feeling among many Americans was that the powerful were not equipped to save us. We were going to have to try to do it ourselves.
Throughout history, bread has been linked with political power.
Early civilizations with grain-based agriculture, such as the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, were largely made powerful by the riches and stability afforded by a storable, stretchable food supply. Caesar and his ilk kept a handle on the Roman Empire through “cura annonae,” the grain rations doled out to qualifying adult men. In late 18th-century France, the elite’s grasp loosened only when the peasantry revolted against untenable bread prices.
In the late 1970s, the Egyptian government cut subsidies for bread and wheat, triggering a “bread intifada”: two days of violent rioting and protest that led to a swift reversal of policy. Government austerity measures inspired similar bread riots in Tunisia a few years later; and in Egypt during the Arab Spring, demonstrators chanted for “bread, freedom and social justice.” In all cases, the upheavals were products of complex economic and political underpinnings, but bread was the final straw and a symbol of the people’s pursuit of justice.
Some part of me has always wanted to believe that the more people’s hands are in the dough, the more power is in the people’s hands.
Particularly because bread, as I join many in arguing, is the ultimate food. “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never go hungry,” said Jesus in John 6:35. Throughout the Bible, and later in rallying cries and daily maxims worldwide, bread stands in as the most basic foodstuff, what all people survive and strive for. The ultimate food: not just apotheosis, but also the last. In wartime, bread, requiring only water, flour and heat, has been known to keep people alive until the world order settles back into something more humane. It can be the line, sometimes literal, between life and death.
With this understanding, bakeries and the lines that queue outside of them are notoriously vulnerable in war, as has been seen in Syria, Ukraine and, most recently, Gaza, where a substantial number of bakeries have been damaged by Israeli air strikes. By early November, all bakeries in what was then the densely populated area of northern Gaza were closed because of infrastructure damage, lack of fuel and ingredients or fear of further attacks. Prior to the closure of the final bakery, people in the region were surviving on an average of two pieces of bread a day.
About a month into the war, I saw a video of a woman in Gaza holding a piece of saj, a thin, tortilla-like bread cooked on a convex metal grill of the same name. She gestured at the viewer: “This is the only food that we’ve got,” she said. “But after that, where to go?”
In November, Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations’ relief agency for Palestinian refugees, said, “Now people are beyond looking for bread. It’s looking for water.” Last week, the BBC reported that some Gazans had begun using grains intended for animal feed to make bread flour, as flour fit for human consumption became impossible to find.
Bread is a bellwether, its absence a death knell. In the corners of the world where bread flows freely and remains affordable for every rung of society, there is at least the potential for people to thrive.
I have followed the trails of a few far-flung packets of my starter to some of these places. They have new names, have been divvied up and reshared, have gone through divorces and international moves. Many were neglected and are now defunct. At least a few recipients transformed from beginner bakers to professionals. A friend of mine has baked more than a thousand loaves using the starter, almost all of which have been distributed to and eaten by her neighbors.
The Netherlands
Anna Celda
Czechia
Veronika Moravcikova
When I began this project, most people I knew were simmering in isolation and despair. But in dispatches from around the world, strangers displayed a desire to connect and nourish, along with the sincere hope that feeding and eating this tiny living thing might offer some small cure to a very big problem.
Today, as during those isolated months at the height of the pandemic, we’re once again bearing collective witness to incredible human loss. Gazans, lacking adequate sanitation, medicine, food and water, are facing starvation. Many of us are again simmering — boiling, even.
We want an end to the war. We want life (the Egyptian Arabic word for it, aish, also means bread) for our children and all children. Is sourdough a solution? Of course not. But if Barthelme’s spores still bubbling away in kitchens around the world can tell us anything, it’s that it’s within our nature — especially when the world around us feels like it’s dissolving — to reach out to one another and give bits of ourselves away. There is still, and there is always, something to be done with what you have right here, in and on your hands.
