On Bread and Virus
Miguel de Cervantes wrote, “All sorrows are less with bread.”
For centuries before and after Don Quixote, bread signaled not only bodily sustenance but also a spiritual leavening. The ancient Egyptian god Osiris taught people how to cultivate wheat. The Greeks considered the unison of wine and bread a ritualistic part of their daily lives. Jesus multiplied loaves for the starving and broke bread with righteous and sinner alike. At its core, sharing bread remains the symbolic opening of one’s home to others, friendship, and familial warmth.
And just as flour encounters water to leaven into bread, so too has bread given rise to a form of wellbeing despite the disruptive force of COVID-19.
Before the virus began rattling the gears of consumeristic daily life, I would have laughed at the idea of baking bread myself. My mental imagery placed sourdough bread as either an emblem of the distant past — a simpler life, perhaps in some remote village off the dreamy coast of Scotland — or as a nod to the Tartine-esque bakeries of our time dishing out visual feasts and culinary institutes flaunting videos of slap-thrust motions of flour hitting steel at just the right angle.
And there I was, weeks into self-quarantine, grabbing a notebook in which I delineated “Sourdough Bread, Spring 2020” as my foray into bread-baking. The interest came from a sense of urgency clashing against an unsettling slowness creeping into my days. The new lifestyle has forced many of us to be still (at peace with our internal critiques); slow (to adopt crisis mode); aware (of our surroundings); conscientious (of the ripples forming from our moods and actions). I thought learning how to bake bread would provide relief from the dulling of the days and a sense of accomplishment. More than that, it dulled my ego and mirrored the ways in which we can better cultivate depth.
The liturgical 7 a.m. alarms to feed the sourdough starter tightened my scatter-brained tendencies, while the daily visual of the rise and fall of fermentation provided a harmonious dose of focus and reward.
Witnessing nature do its thing with three simple ingredients humbled me, all while chipping away at impatience, demanding expectations, and irritable tendencies.
I learned to value patience when my sourdough starter didn’t bubble up or rise as expected. In discarding the mature starter and replenishing the feed each day for a more robust bread, I built on my mistakes instead of discarding them, too, as failed attempts. In reading up on sourdough guides and seeking wisdom from encouraging bakers, I began to lean on expertise rather than glossy but useless Instagram shots of bread.
Bread-baking became a symbolic cultivation of the bandwidth for deeper thinking to help better navigate new waters. Patience was the secret ingredient.
And as we navigate these uncertain coronavirus waters, I wonder, might we do so while subscribed to the very things bread baking teaches us — more patience, less complacency, more self-reliance?
Rise, fall, rise again.
Are we up for it?
