CONCLUSION: BEYOND GOOD BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 102

ety. The urgency of defending purity against contagion, nature against artifice, health against weakness,
and us against them helped proliferate other social divides.
This is why I like fermentation. Unruly to its core, fermentation defies boundary making and combat
mentality. It blurs lines between nature and society and suggests that true security may lie in conscien-
tious impurity, not coerced purity. And it does this from a moral low ground: dreams of purity, natural-
ness, control, perfect health, and security evoke precise borders and confident certainties, but fermenta-
tion can't. It requires acceptance of constant flux and perpetual reconsidering.
Let me explain. The dominant strain in my cracked bowl is probably Saccharomyces cerevisiae , the
planet's most common baking and brewing yeast. One of its ancestors may have been the first living
species domesticated by humanity, our first biotechnology. 3 Of course, by helping humans produce beer,
bread, and cheese—the first manufactured foods and the foundations of settled life—yeasts domestic-
ated us as much as we domesticated them.
Although contemporary bioscience hotly debates the origins and ecology of Saccharomyces cerevisi-
ae , baking yeasts have not been “wild” or “natural” in any meaningful way for as long as humans have
made food. Contrary to popular belief, Saccharomyces cerevisiae exists in relatively low levels in the
so-called natural environment—even if we include orchards and vineyards in this category. The “natur-
al” habitat of this creature culture is not fields or forests, but rather the artisanal-industrial environment
of wineries, breweries, and bakeries. It is the crack in my bowl, the countertop where I knead, the walls
of the hundred-plus wineries in my town, the world under my fingernails. 4
For a long time, I prized an heirloom starter inoculated with the must of some particularly prestigious
organic tempranillo grapes. The romantic in me—the part of me that would have been at home in Gra-
hamism or the 1960s counterculture—clung to the idea of “wild” yeast. Like artisan bakers around the
world, I coveted the powdery must coating grapes, apples, and certain other fruits as a source of wild
yeast, and imagined that making a bread starter was something like hunting untamed beasts. There is
something comforting about these natural origin stories. Who really wants to hear that the microbes
rising in their pain au levain come from underneath someone's fingernails? But the natural origin story
probably has it backwards: the life forms colonizing my tempranillo grape starter almost certainly came
from the nooks and crannies of a winery, carried to the surface of the fruit on the tools, hands, and con-
tainers of the people who handled it. The ecology of Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a human ecology, just
as certainly as human civilization is, in turn, very much a product of fermentation.
Despite the mystique ascribed to old heirloom starters with noble bloodlines, yeasts also defy human
nostalgia. Saccharomyces are famed for their genetic volatility, swapping DNA with abandon, con-
stantly morphing and changing. Whether we like it or not, the ecology of old starters is constantly chan-
ging. 5 A group of microbiologists has shown that even “pure” commercial strains employed by industri-
al beer makers are riddled with genetic material from different species, the result of enthusiastic promis-
cuity in the brewing environment. 6
The dream of naturalness runs strong in food movements, and many avid fermenters cling to visions
of authentic connection to nature and the past. Slow Food writer Dominique Fournier concludes,
“Whether in domestic rituals or public codes, people use fermented foods to maintain a harmonious
relationship with Nature and, more generally, all that is transcendental.” 7 From this perspective, fer-
mentation offers a pathway back to “authentic” and “natural” life. What I see instead is a more complex
companion-species relationship, continually remade in the present. 8 This is not a warm fuzzy relation-
ship. When I gaze affectionately at jars of Saccharomyces cerevisiae imprisoned in my fridge, Sacchar-
omyces cerevisiae does not wag its ascospores at me. Sometimes it refuses to help me bake bread when
I need to, and I am aware that any ideas of control or conquest I might have are illusions. I negotiate