CONCLUSION: BEYOND GOOD BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 100

CONCLUSION: BEYOND GOOD BREAD
There is so much fog around the moral high ground .
—Peter Carey
BEGINNINGS
There is a seven-inch crack in the ceramic bowl I use to make bread most weeks. I never wash the bowl,
just give it a quick rinse and a wipe. It's not hygienic. Millions of leftover microbes colonize the cruddy
fissure. A slurry of flour and water begins to bubble with life when sealed in the bowl overnight, and
after two days, it stinks of overripe fruit. What had been a clean white paste now looks like the surface
of an uninhabitable swamp planet. It's easy to imagine why, before microscopes, people turned to theor-
ies of spontaneous generation to explain yeasty effervescence. Today, plagued and blessed by our acute
awareness of invisible life, we associate the change in my bowl with rogue microbial colonies and it
makes us squirm. “Shouldn't you use some bleach on that bowl?” a friend asks.
These days, playing with microbes at home is generally considered improper behavior. My ferment-
ation experiments are pretty tame; my wife's raw milk cheeses are a littler edgier. Then there's this from
the “wild fermentation” activist Sandor Katz: “After a goat slaughter, I fermented some of the meat for a
couple weeks. I placed the meat in a gallon jar, then filled it with a mixture of all the other live ferments
I had around: wine, vinegar, miso, yogurt, and sauerkraut juice. I covered the jar and left in an unobtrus-
ive corner of our basement [for two weeks]. It bubbled and smelled good. … [Later], as it cooked, an
overwhelming odor enveloped the kitchen … there was some swooning and near fainting.” 1
It's not hygienic, but I can't help but wonder whether this kind of “improper handling”—the creative
contagion of yeasty fermentation—might offer a model for challenging the chauvinisms and exclusions
wrapped up in quests for “good bread.” Fermentation is my own food dream, and I know that's prob-
lematic. But one thing should be clear by now: food is so central to how we think about social life that
we'll probably never be able to completely avoid dreams of good food and their attendant risks. Nor
should we. Utopian dreams of good food inspire people to make the world better. I wouldn't want to lose
that passion. We can, however, be a lot more reflective about the politics, assumptions, and absences
contained in our visions of changing the world through food. Ultimately, it is possible, and eminently
practical, to strive for both eager optimism about social change and self-critical pessimism about the
costs of our actions. One without the other is dangerous, either overly naïve or debilitatingly negative.
In this topic, I've offered a lot of the latter—critique abounds in the preceding chapters. So, by way of
conclusion, here is my self-consciously optimistic dream of political fermentation. 2
First, what fermentation is not. Throughout this topic, five seductive dreams come up over and over
again. They touch a deep chord in consumers' relation to food, and yet have underpinned many of the
most ambiguous outcomes of well-meaning efforts to change the way the country eats. They are the
dreams of purity, naturalness, scientific control, perfect health, and national security and vitality. Each
of these dreams rose to prominence because it crystallized deep currents of longing and anxiety—and
thus galvanized action. All five dreams endowed eating with seductive moral clarity: some foods were