So I have a sourdough start now. At 8 days old now it’s doing all the things it’s supposed to do. It smells good. It floats. It doubles when I feed it.

You have to feed a sourdough starter. It’s a living community that you care for, like some kind of strange collective pet that you also eat. I’ve grown plenty of plants, and mushrooms. I had a water kiefer culture that I used to use partially for the yeast to make bread. I also had a regular kiefer culture that turned milk into a soft cheese about once a week. The whey is perfect to kick start pickles, and I would pickle anything I could. I once pickled choke cherries with salt and anise to get something that could probably have been about as passable a substitute for li hing mui as one could make from all local Washington state ingredients. We had chickens that gave us eggs. I also pickled those. They were amazing.

I miss all of that, so now I’m sort of starting again small. We have our little plants in the apartment, clippings of anything I can grow in water. I had a water kiefer but it was never quite the same. The yeast was strong but the bacteria was weak, so the flavors never developed the way I had hoped. I gave up because I’m not interested in sugar beer.

But I’ve been slowly tending these jars of flour and water over the last week or so, watching them grow and change, until I have something I can use. All of this, mushrooms, plants, pickles, chickens, requires an attention and flexibility. We didn’t use any (human made) chemicals on our plants, Our whole thing was informed by permiculture. All of this forced me to slow down and observe, just be present and be with the natural cycles of things.

Last night was the first time I was able to use my start, or at least tried to, to make bread (instead of relying on commercial yeast). Each time you feed the culture, you discard some. At a certain point that discard goes into your cooking. I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to do with the culture. See, I hadn’t really been using commercial yeast when I was in the US but I’ve been forced to use it since I got here. I just wanted to change that. So here I was with a bubbling jar starter, trying to figure out exactly what I do with it. So I watched a video about it, and I reminded me of all of this.

Though out the video she’s just kind of feeling things out. Nothing is exact. She’s interacting with this thing, this culture, that she’s gotten to know over the past 11 years. It’s not something that can easily be taught, because it’s something that one learns to feel through experience. The chickens, the mushrooms, the plants, all the various cultures and things, they all have a life of their own.

They don’t fall into easy and predictable schedules. They don’t conform to mechanization. They refuse rigid time tables. They are alive. They respond to the weather, the humidity, the temperature. They defy the exact rigidity that we, humans, are forced in to at work.

There’s something about that connection, to food, to life. There’s something about a fluid involvement that stands in stark contrast to tables of fake metrics, concocted to pad resumes, that obscures the complexities of the world.

Maybe that’s the thing I have against buying yeast. It has been bread to be regular and predictable, and in doing so has lost the chaos and complexity that forces you to understand it rather than control it. Control. This is the inescapable anathema of the capitalist life that brings death itself. It is for this purpose that our lives our fractured, we are isolated, and algorithmically fed mind-melting garbage until we snap. And yet, that control is an illusion.

There is something about being in a different relationship with food or medicine. Food, that thing that is so central to our lives, that we experience so often as forgettable transactions. But it becomes so visceral when you are part of it. What an interesting coincidence that capitalism has so prioritized separating us from this experience, enclosing the commons, removing our self-sufficiency, severing our relationship with our food, that we may be forced into the factories to become more predictable, controllable, quantifiable…. domesticated.

Some wild things are poorly adapted to domestication. Some things cannot be quantified, contained, controlled. I didn’t always feel the walls, but, interestingly, it’s through food that I feel them most intensely now.