Sourdough…

…an accidental lesson in rewilding, reciprocity and interdependence?

I like to bake bread. I’m reasonable enough at it that I can’t buy it anymore unless it’s some fancy artisanal something or other that I haven’t quite mastered yet. Grocery store bread has become unappealing. It’s incredibly satisfying to have my morning cuppa with homemade toast and jam. In the last couple of years I began keeping a sourdough starter. I didn’t pick it up during the pandemic, like many. I was living off-grid then with a very old woodstove that didn’t keep a consistent oven temperature. I got into the habit in grad school. The kind of attention that sourdough bread requires being a wonderful side quest for my slightly neurospicy brain while I struggled with the focus necessary to write endless papers on Buddhist sutras and ethics case studies.

My most recent loaf of oatmeal sourdough.

I was chatting with a friend and fellow chaplain yesterday as I was going through the series of stretch and folds needed to develop the gluten in my most recent batch. I spoke to him fondly of how I had gotten over my intimidation of sourdough. Of how once you got to know it and how to care for it, once you figured out its rhythm, it was pretty easy.

“Once you know what it needs and can provide that, it will provide for you”, I said with a grin.

“Oh,” he said, “that sounds like a relationship.”

Yes, it is, I thought. It is a relationship.

Once upon a time we all would have had intimate relationships with our food. We would have planted, tended and harvested our gardens, we would have cared for chickens and other livestock. Even farther back we would have hunted and foraged, carefully stowing away food for winter. We could have named the places where each berry, each mouthful of water, each bowl of stew came from. Now we can barely remember which isle of the grocery store we found it in, never mind whose labor provided it for us nor the state or country of origin. It is not news to say that we have a profound disconnect from the actual material elements of our survival. We have no spiritual relationship with our food like we once had, making prayers for an animal slaughtered, making offerings to the spirits of the land from which we gathered. Relating to the aliveness of the river we bathed and drank and fished from.

This fundamental disconnection happened on the road to industrialization along with the loss of our understanding of reciprocity and interdependence that is at the heart of all Indigenous lifeways. It is echoed in our disconnection from our bodies and from Spirit.

For the many that now live in urban centers a sense of reciprocity with the land has no chance to develop. If you have never gotten down on your knees to weed rows of vegetables or had to go out in driving snow to tend to animals that need to eat regardless of whether or not it’s a snow day, you might have missed the importance of this relationship. There is something ineffable in the way that this intimacy can shift your perspective.

My sourdough starter is a living organism. Its frothy little microbiome lives in a glass snap-lid jar in my fridge. I have noticed the difference in its health and vitality depending on what kind of flour I feed it. I need to keep it healthy by maintaining its right level of moisture and transferring it to a clean jar every couple of weeks. I bake with it once or twice a week and if I travel I need to take it with me or make sure it has enough food while I’m gone. In return for this care, I have a never ending source of leavening for wonderful bagels, pancakes, muffins and bread. I don’t need to use sugar in my bread dough. It breaks down gluten in the flour so that my belly can digest it easier. I take care of it and it takes care of me. It is a reciprocal relationship. If I don’t attend to it, it will die.

You may have heard that in many teachings, humans are said to be the caretakers of the earth. It is a false understanding to think of this as anything other than protectors, nourishers and tenders. What is needed now more than anything, is to bring humanity back into right relationship with our Mother Earth. To rediscover what it means to be in a relationship that is reciprocal, humble and respectful. To understand what it means to be connected to the land, to our food, to our labor. To see ourselves as a small part of the greater whole and feel the deep gratitude of understanding what an amazing abundance we have been given.

From whence comes your daily bread? I challenge you to keep your own sourdough starter. Are you willing to have a wild yeast be your teacher?

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On the topic of bread and the teachings of interdependence, I offer you this poem. Click the link in the title to hear it recited aloud and to read more about Margaret Atwood.

All Bread by Margaret Atwood

All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens. This dirt
flows through the stems into the grain,
into the arm, nine strokes
of the axe, skin from a tree,
good water which is the first
gift, four hours.

Live burial under a moist cloth,
a silver dish, the row
of white famine bellies
swollen and taut in the oven,
lungfuls of warm breath stopped
in the heat from an old sun.

Good bread has the salt taste
of your hands after nine
strokes of the axe, the salt
taste of your mouth, it smells
of its own small death, of the deaths
before and after.

Lift these ashes
into your mouth, your blood;
to know what you devour
is to consecrate it,
almost. All bread must be broken
so it can be shared. Together
we eat this earth.

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