Fermenting Relations

The following piece is a look at sourdough bread baking and affect during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was published in the latest issue of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry

Fermenting Relations

Johnny Gainer VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY

Hand dipped in starter, Jean-Luc Gallic, 2020

Lately, I find myself sharing space with a newly-formed co-inhabitant. Just out of reach from any direct sunlight, we cross-contaminate and intimately touch. Here lie bubbling connections, violent fermentations, and sticky com- pounds. Usually, I never fully get the culture off my fingers—instead I let it dry and cake on for the next handwashing. Over the past few weeks, the gooey culture seems healthier, stronger, and more alive in my presence. Its ultimate fate guided by my anxieties and excitements while living with the pandemic.

Since the onset of the global pandemic, sourdough bread baking has exploded in popularity with Google searches for “bread” hitting an all-time high in March 2020 (McCarron 2020). Like wild yeast, the popularity seems to have saturated the air of the world-at-home and given rise to a flood of social media posts and articles illuminating active starters and Instagrammable loaves. In fact, so many have returned to and adopted this form of ancient baking that along with the shortages of fresh produce, toilet paper, and sanitizer, active yeast has begun to disappear from grocery store shelves (Makalintal 2020). These shortages sur- rounding food security and its overall infrastructure can be seen as relational (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section) as acts of stocking-up and settling-into domesticity—in quarantine—meet with feverish anxieties concerning the unseen virus and troubling biopolitics. Essential workers strike for better PPE while rallies to “re-open the country” occur ( Jaafari 2020). State-controlled initiatives develop self-policing, over-policing during mass protests, and growing fears of one’s own breath (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section) are felt during chants of “I can’t breathe.”

While keeping bodies in and isolated is essential to efforts bent on slowing the spread of COVID-19, agency over these movements is not equal—with some forced indoors while others out into the streets (Arnold 2020). Fears of the unseen, between each other and our things, causes us to begin to develop a “numbness” towards rearrangements, haphazard barriers, and boundaries built between one another (Wołodźko 2020). With an increased awareness of the things around us and the simultaneous asociality that comes with being physically distant, whatit about these emergent spaces that can be and should be amplified? Can the reorganization of human/nonhuman meetings—with sticky things like sourdough starter—challenge the heightened attention turns toward the unseen under the pandemic?

We get home, disrobe for the virus, disrobe from the protest. Shower. Wash our hands. The house is silent (given what just happened): long gazes, exhausted routines. I remember the dough left out to rise, I mindlessly start kneadingto prepare for a bake. Wait, did I wash my hands again? I check between my fingers for the distinct orange powdered residue that is left from tear-gas. The fiery taste is still in my mouth. I knead, feeling the dough, repeatedly turningover without looking.

To counter the coziness stemming from settling into the pandemic, this short thread hopes to add to the attunements sewn into Mathew’s piece Writing Pandem- ic Feels. Here, I hope to draw attention to the trend of sourdough bread baking in order to tease out the messy, volatile interruptions that come with touching, eating, and tasting the unseen—the microscopic bits we encounter while being home in our daily lives. Taking the increased interest in sourdough bread bak- ing seriously will require a critical look at the microbial elements of sourdough starters and the messy, speculative work that comes with making through amateur bio-art as an active labor of care during the pandemic. Possibly, through attuning to these alternative labors and working-with the lack of control felt with fer- mentation, the microbial, and the contaminated, a potential for new knowledges and connections can emerge from ambiguities as boundaries between human/ nonhuman start to fall apart. These knowledges challenge colonial configurations and anxieties concerning microbial species so that we may discover our own agencies in connecting with one another even in isolation (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section).

Most days my sourdough starter can be found sitting, fermenting its composition of flour, water, salt, and yeast. However, it is never just sitting. When combined, this mixture bursts and expands on a microscopic scale—the yeast and glucose (from the flour) meet to form carbon dioxide, raising the concoction into bubbles of sticky goo (Dunn 2018). Gently pushing against its top to make itself known, daily burpings help it release tension. These small moments of communication and repetitive visits lead to a mutual caring for the starter—fulfilling intimate connections while in isolation. Care in this regard can be giving, but it can also be a violent disturbance to its being—cutting, ripping, and removing of large amounts of starter is done continuously and infinitely to feed and grow the cul- ture. Shortly before going into quarantine, I acquired my starter for sourdough bread from a friend who offered recommendations for maintenance and care. This friend had acquired starter fragments, an ancestor to my starter, from someone else. Through the passing down of portions, these starters were cut from previous starters that may have been maintained for years elsewhere.

The culture of yeast is everywhere in my home. Confined to jars, stuck to floors, sitting out on the table, crumbs in the bed. Sometimes the contents of the jar seem to change in hue, sometimes I cannot tell if there is anything different about it at all. Today, bubbling and bouncing, the gaseous contents have burst out of the lid, running down the sides and pooling on the surrounding coun- ter. I too am eager to escape, to open up, to feel things and be messy again. I accidentally get starter on my hand. It is sticky. It tastes surprisingly good.

Through each contact, the microbial composition of the starter is changed: an assemblage of bits and pieces from before dictates what future state it will be in tomorrow. What is unique to sourdough, and to the fermentation process, is this ability for a continuing evolution through its feedback and transient nature; passing from person to person, imprinting memories of what worked and what did not (Hey 2017). Different baking methods brought to the meeting with fermented sourdough alongside improvised tricks (that just so happen to pay off) open potentials for knowledge production that reflect what Maya Hey calls making-do. Making-do with this assemblage, amassing both the starters’ histories and the bakers’, is as much an experimental and sensual research method as it is a learned practice of paying attention to the “ambient conditions” that surround our daily lives (Hey 2017, 86). If your house feels a bit too cold, or if the air quality has changed with the humidity outside, you must adapt along with the material conditions that guide your starter. The gaseous openings that glue the bread together get all over you as you get all over it. Slowly, you knead the dough with your hands instead of a mixer, the body gauging and weighing shapes and pressures like a measuring tool (Dunn 2018). Pulling, tucking, feeling its “skin” over and over.

Making-do with your starter, you begin to develop your own sensibilities of care: an ethical way of touching the dough that is as unconscious as it is conscious (Sutton 2006, 314). So much of the starter imprints on us. The microbiome of the hands of those who bake often tend to be closer to the biomes of the loaves they cook than the biomes of a human (Reese & Madden 2020). An interface between hand and dough, the mixing of microbiomes connects as a lingering in-between space, a split moment of chance and underlying influence. Maybe you forgot to wash your hands again? Maybe the filter for the tap was left unchanged? Small interruptions, unconscious decisions made in the middle of the night when you are too tired to bake, these are so often the factors that influence your breads.

This agitation to concepts of the human and nonhuman as boundaried is a funda- mental reconfiguration, an always-developing spatial realm of confusion to where our bodies might begin and end amongst the microbial, amongst the virus (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section). When you build on shifting memories and speculative recommendations, always looking for potential adjustments for better growth, and never knowing for sure if the starter is pleased, you give room to biological transitions and affective capacities. An affective potential arises in the overlooked richness that comes with shifting privileges over the anthropocentric narrative (Bennett 2001) and towards the histories and labors held in all micro- biomes—human, baker, dough, or otherwise. Slowly, you learn how to handle the sticky mass, adding more flour when needed, feeling for shorter intervals of kneading when the dough is wet, ditching the timer, instead adding a sample taste to your sensual/temporal map.

Starter float test, Jean-Luc Gallic, 2020

Mold has grown on top of my starter. I skim it off and stir in a handful of fresh flour to feed it. No time to worry, like a wound for something I must bake this week to get my mind and hands into something.

Sourdough bread is a blending—a chimera of sorts—that thrives on a necessary contamination, a necessary vulnerability. In this sense, experimenting with the concept of contamination during fermentation adds another potential to the DIY ethics of bio-art, a potential of risk, of anxiety, and of fear that attaches itself to the objects at hand: microbes, viruses, disease. Amidst the global pandemic, fear has been established through the declaration of boundaries as affective designa- tions that—in order to be reproduced or reconfigured—require openings, leaks, and floods (Ahmed 2004). These shifting configurations are met with genre flailing (Berlant 2018). We rush to make sense of the anxieties and insecurities surrounding Zoom privacy leaks, of a favorite celebrity catching COVID, of yet another infectious cruise ship in limbo. The “pandemic imaginary” of fear continuously expands and time blurs (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section). In contrast, the mandate to stay at home is pitched as a patriotic and active duty against border anxieties during crisis, against any unplanned cross-contamination with an invisible other. Working with the starter gives us unconscious moments of breaking these boundaries of constructed fear—daily repetition with the fer- menting starter is risky but also sediments in daily life as a regularity. To fully become a body, we experiment with the limits and capacities of the starter as it experiments with us. Bits of family members, strangers, animalia, and ourselves are devoured through the daily bread. In 2011, exploring the limits of infection, a woman used her own vaginal yeast as the active agent in a sourdough starter (Rees 2015). In 2019, Seamus Blackley (creator of Xbox) extracted ancient yeast (found embedded in an Egyptian clay bowl) to develop a 4,000-year-old starter (Machemer 2006). These risks, in exploring the limits of sourdough baking as a bio-art, also extend the limits of what it means to exist with a body amongst other affective things.

Is getting take-out safe? Should I use plastic face shields or cloth masks? Can singing project aerosols further than speaking? Risk follows an attunement with all bodies that might come in contact with—and create potential transformations through—our objects, human or not. Between one another, we are interfaced with speculative risks (DIY masks, homemade hand-sanitizer) treading in active futures of what could be but also in what could kill (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section). The microbial elements that make sharing our bread poten- tially dangerous—unseen instigators of fear—are the same agents that have many touting sourdough as a “superfood” well-suited to COVID-19, as the sourdough microbiome adds infection-fighting healthy flora to the gut (Counihan & Van Esterikn 2012). Similarly, during the 1854 Cholera outbreak, those who drank more beer had a better chance of fighting off the virus; the microbiome found in their gut was stronger (Dunn 2018). As uncertainty about the spread of COV- ID-19 circulates, repairing and refocusing our conceptions of ‘the biological’ is urgently important. As paranoia fuels shared narratives, extractive powers hope to capitalize off our widespread isolation.

Another repetition, another day in quarantine. Today, I nervously open its top, exposing it, always surprised by the ‘pop!’ sound that it makes, always waiting for the final explosion to end the experiment all together.

Working with sourdough is an active realm of attuning to underlying forces, a trust in tasting and eating bits of shared histories, fears, and desires. On this intimate level, being aware that we are never alone and never have been—due to the microbiome that pervades us—can help to nuance responsibilities toward a productive politics of care, one that requires a reevaluation of our nonhuman counterparts. To do this requires that we consider the “behind the scenes” labors of our everyday life as an ethics of care (see Mathew’s piece in the previous section). This thread hopes to push the trend of sourdough bread baking further, to create/ to offer/to present an active force against the fear of the microscopic and the food/ sustenance shortages outside of us. Time spent with a starter’s microbiome can get snagged on openings, a potential for peeking inside our infrastructure, an infrastructure that is increasingly black-boxed. We must stay with these forms of interruption in fermentation, a potential to uncover knowledges that disregard borders during a time when so much is being closed off or shut down.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22 (2), pp. 117-139.

Arnold, C. (2020). ‘Tsunami’ Of Evictions Feared As Extra $600 Un- employment Payments End. NPR. Available at: https://www.npr. org/2020/07/24/894996949/concern-over-evictions-rise-as-covid-19-un- employment-benefits-expire [Accessed July 23, 2020].

Bennett, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Berlant, L. (2018). Genre Flailing. Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1 (2), pp. 156-162.

Counihan, C., & Van Esterik, P. (eds.). (2012). Food and Culture: A Reader. New York & London: Routledge.

Dunn, R. (2018). Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live. New York: Basic Books.

Hey, M. (2017). Making/Doing/Thinking Fermentation: Working with Plural Knowledges in Research-Creation. Commposite, 19 (3), pp. 79-95.

Jaafari, D. J. (2020). Health Care Workers Show Up at ‘Reopen PA’ Protest to Urge People to Stay Home. WHYY. Available at: https://whyy.org/articles/ health-care-workers-show-up-at-reopen-pa-protest-to-urge-people-to- stay-home/ [Accessed July 22, 2020].

Machemer, T. (2020). The World’s Oldest Leavened Bread Is Rising Again. Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ smart-news/worlds-oldest-leavened-bread-rising-again-180974605/ [Ac- cessed July 7, 2020].

Makalintal, B. (2020). Where Is Everyone Getting All of This Sourdough Starter All of a Sudden? Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ pke4dm/where-is-everyone-getting-all-of-this-sourdough-starter-all-of- a-sudden [Accessed July 3, 2020].

McCarron, M. (2020). So Everyone’s Googling ‘Bread’ Now. Eater. Available at: https://www.eater.com/2020/3/25/21194467/bread-tops-google-trends- searching-for-recipes [Accessed June 13, 2020].

Rees, A. (2015). The Woman Who Made Sourdough Bread Using Yeast From Her Vagina Just Ate The Bread. Cosmopolitan. Available at: https://www. cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a49894/yeast-infection-sourdough-bread/ [Accessed June 29, 2020].

Reese, A. T., Madden, A. A., Joossens, M., Lacaze, G., & Dunn, R. R. (2020). Influences of Ingredients and Bakers on the Bacteria and Fungi in Sour- dough Starters and Bread. Msphere, 5(1). Available at: https://msphere.asm. org/content/5/1/e00950-19#fn-group-1

Sutton, D. (2006). Cooking Skill, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, 5 (1), pp. 87-117.