Yeast tamagotchi
You’re handed the starter by someone who later confesses to being antivax, is called in, then called out, then banned. Presumably there are no viruses in the starter.
You think of starter as a way of holding tradition, not as a millennial pandemic trope or San Francisco-perpetuated food trend. You once ate bread made from starter that, the chef claimed, predated the american revolution, which okay, it tasted really good but at the end of the day was just bread and not some wholly different thing. You recognize how spoiled you are by even saying that you’ve eaten 250-year-old bread.
“How is starter made? Like, from scratch,” people ask you, and you have no idea. You’ve been told that SF sourdough is that way because of the bacteria in the atmosphere there, but don’t know how true that is. Maybe you get yeast and inoculate a flour-water mixture? Or you don’t.
The process of making sourdough from starter takes two days and requires continuous attention, which works great for pandemics, including the current & still ongoing one, shot through with the simultaneous apocalypse, where all told you aren’t really planning to go out with people anymore. Instead, you bake bread that is uniformly worse than the kind of bread you can get at the bakery that is literally around the corner from your house.
You call the starter a “yeast tamagotchi,” because that’s what it is: a weird, slightly annoying thing you have to put in minimal effort for, and if you do then it stays alive. You can afford the flour, despite your grousing. You can afford to compost starter every week, despite your grousing, despite knowing that you can turn used starter into other things all the time.
You wonder about abundance: what it means to have this overflowing nutrient paste, to have resources and to not share them, to let some of this go back where it came. You, inveterate midwesterner, hate wasting food more than anything, and you know that right now an awful lot of food is being wasted everywhere: in restaurants, in grocery stores, in food systems that have chosen not to work.
You wonder about gift economies, especially after reading the latest Kimmerer book that was based on this essay about a plant that you have in your backyard and tattooed on your body, which you harvest every year and turn into jam for your chosen family. Some people ask for starter, but not many. Others kill their starters after asking, and ask again. No judgment. There’s enough. There’s always enough.