I keep turning over one small thing I read, and I am still not sure what to make of it.
A software engineer in California, suddenly with "so much free time," goes looking for yeast and can't find any. It is, she says, "nearly impossible to get ahold of." Flour she has. Yeast, no. So she turns to sourdough starter instead, and she begins using it, in her words, "in basically everything I bake." Then she does the part I can't put down. She dries some of it out, and she plans to mail it to a couple of friends around the country who want to try making their own.
Think about what that is. To send a starter through the mail, you dry it down until the living culture goes dormant and still, so someone at the other end can coax it back to life with water and flour. That is what she planned to do: mail it to friends around the country. It is a strange gift for a strange spring, and I want to understand why it stays with me.
The baking itself is not strange. A lot of people seem to be doing it. Yeast sales jumped 647 percent in one week of March against the same week a year before, the fastest rise of any grocery item the trackers follow. One large yeast maker is running its plants at 110 percent capacity, day and night. Retail flour sales are up 154 percent. King Arthur says it has put a million bags of flour on trucks in two weeks, and that nothing in its memory has been this hard on home bakers. On the feeds, more than 64,000 posts sit under a single baking hashtag, crumb shots of sourdough next to photos of the empty shelves that made them.
I should say plainly what those numbers are and are not. They count yeast bought, flour bought, posts posted. No one I can find counted how many kitchens actually started a starter. And none of it was a grain shortage. The millers were clear: there was plenty of wheat in the silos, plenty of capacity at the plants. What ran short was the small retail bag and the packet of commercial yeast, both of them genuinely hard to find, because home baking surged all at once and the flour mostly moved in bulk to the mills' usual buyers, not into enough small home-sized bags fast enough. So the shelves were bare and the mills were full at the same time. There was flour; there just wasn't always flour on the shelf. But the thing that was hardest to find that spring did not come in a bag at all. It was a shape to the day.
And here is what nags at me. Of the common ways to make bread, sourdough asks the most. A packet of yeast is a tool. You use it and throw the packet away. A starter is a dependent. It is flour and water kept just warm enough for wild yeast and bacteria to live in, and it has to be fed, more or less forever, or it dies. One writer who keeps one called it "as much a weird roommate as a kitchen ingredient," and he meant it literally: the thing is "truly and palpably alive." "It MOVES," he wrote. "It expands and contracts. Sometimes it spills out over the lip of the jar." People give them names, the way you name a pet. So the question that won't leave me is simple. When the shelves are bare and the news is frightening, why do so many people reach for the one kind of bread that asks the most, and asks it every single day?
The easy answers only take me part of the way.
The first easy answer is that it is just practical. The packet is gone from the shelf, and sourdough needs no packet; it rises on the wild yeast it grows itself. That is true for the engineer, and I believe her. But a starter is far more than a stand-in for commercial yeast, and being practical doesn't explain the rest of what people did with it. You don't name a yeast packet. You don't photograph it, or draw a map to it, or dry it out and mail it to your friends. The practical part and the sourdough part keep coming apart in my hands.
The second easy answer is boredom. People had time, so they filled it. But boredom only explains that people did something. It doesn't explain that they did this: the version with a living thing on the counter and a chore that never ends.
The strongest answer, the one I want to give its full weight, is that this was a real return to craft and care. I think that answer is mostly right, and I want to argue it as hard as anyone who believes it.
For a lot of people the bread was not a show at all. It was the thing that held the day together. A casting director in Santa Clarita, her production shut down, said the days had been "blurring into the next" until the morning she woke and knew she had to start proofing the bread. "It feels like I'm actually getting something done in the day," she said. She baked with her daughter, who was home from school, and made loaves the family could eat for dinner. There is nothing there to sneer at.
A designer and baking blogger in San Francisco spent early March driving his mother, a breast cancer survivor, to radiation every day, and stopped going into stores at all so he would not carry the virus home to her. He dug into his pantry and baked, he said, "more for myself as opposed to perfecting recipes for my blog." The hard part, he said, was not the flour running low. It was that he had no one to give the food to. "A freezer can hold only so many brownies."
The experts in the same stories were not wrong either. A counselor said baking gives "a sense of accomplishment, especially in this period of angst and unknowns." A clinical social worker said the measuring and the steps force you to pay attention, because "you really have to be present and attentive or you'll screw it up." A woman in Verona, a month into lockdown, said baking, mostly sourdough, was "saving my days and my mind." And the starter itself became a kind of mutual aid. In San Francisco people stapled little bags of it to telephone poles and trees, drew a shared map of pickup spots, and gave their cultures names so a stranger could adopt a piece of something alive.
So I grant the whole of it. People fed their families, learned a genuinely hard skill, cut their trips to the store, and kept one another company through a living thing they could hand from one household to the next. If that were the entire story, it would be a lovely one, and I would stop here.
But none of it is new, and that is where it stops adding up for me. Artisanal bakers had been reviving sourdough since the 1970s. Well before quarantine, a man with a family starter gave dried bits of it to anyone who mailed him a stamped envelope; his family said the culture had been kept alive for more than 150 years, and after he died, volunteers kept it going and called themselves the grower and the keeper of the mailbox. Prospectors, by one account, once carried starters over a mountain pass in flour sacks and held the sacks against them on cold nights so the culture would not freeze. The craft was always there. The care was always there. Neither of them arrived this April.
What arrived this April was the need to be seen keeping something alive.
Because think about what a starter gives back to a person whose usual markers of a day have gone quiet. For someone sent home from work, the commute is gone; the meetings, the deadlines, the errands that used to tell you the day had moved can go with it. The calendar thins toward a blank wall. And into that blankness you set a jar that does the one thing a blank day never does. You feed it, and a few hours later it answers. It rises. It bubbles. It doubles and spills over the lip of the jar, and you can see, with your own eyes, that time passed and you are the reason it went well. A starter is the one thing in the house that still keeps score.
A starter is the one thing in the house that still keeps score.
That is the picture I keep landing on. It is less like a hobby than like a scoreboard lit up on a night when every other scoreboard has gone dark.
This is the part the craft story leaves out. A starter is a clock you can photograph. You can read the rise; you can read the crumb; the whole thing is proof, in a form other people can see, that your day was not empty. That is why the feeds filled with tens of thousands of baking posts, so many of them crumb shots held up to the camera. Some of it was showing off. Most of it, I think, was proof that the day had held something. Even before all this, a father in Cincinnati sent his grown kids pictures of his bread "to torment my kids to entice them to visit me," and now a son in Denver "just has to suffer." The photo was always a way to reach the people you couldn't reach. It only got louder when reaching them was all that was left.
Which brings me back to the engineer and the starter she dried. She dried a living thing out so it could travel, and she planned to send it to friends around the country. I don't think that act was a fake. I also don't think it was only generosity. It was both at once, and I have stopped believing those were ever opposites. What she planned to mail was proof of life, hers, in a form her friends could soak back to life and feed and keep. People had been sending starters this way for years: a rounded teaspoon of dried culture sealed in a stamped envelope, mailed to anyone who asked. She was doing an old thing, for a new reason.
What unsettles me is how honest the whole thing turns out to be, once you stop reading it as either craft or performance. We are animals that need some way to tell that our days count. Most of the time the world hands us one, in wages and errands and the plans on the calendar. Take that away, and people will build a small one on the counter out of flour and water and wild yeast, and feed it, and check it, and hold it up to be seen, because they need something in the house that can still tell them the day was used, and for a while this was the thing that could.
Someday the old clocks start again. The calendars fill; the errands come back; the world goes back to keeping score for us the way it used to. And I find myself wondering, with no answer, how many of these jars will still be getting fed once there is somewhere to be again, and whether the ones we let die will die because we no longer need the bread, or because we no longer need the proof.