Sourdough Is Feminist as Fuck

Levity (and facts) as we prepare for Hot Fash Summer

So. I won't actually say that rejecting sourdough bread is anti-feminist — we all have our preferences — but I will edge up on it.

And. I will say right up front and above the fold that it's fine not to like sourdough. It's totally legit to think there's too much of it around. I had this same feeling about oaky chardonnay in the 00s. The chablis grape doesn't need help to be delicious. The flintier the better I say. And yes, sourdough is not the bread for all occasions.

But. The Goddess Civilization invented leavened bread. This I discovered as I was researching for articles in Issue 11 and 12 of THE RADICAL NOTION boldly subtitled “For 40,000 Years Women Lived in a World That Did Not Hate Us.” Making a simple bread without industrial yeast is a survival skill many need right now and more will need in the future — I mean while we can still grow grains. And women in covid lockdowns tending a rich culture to make bread with their own hands for their various beloveds is no bad thing.

Mine was called Monster. Mix 1 C of Monster with … I miss my Monster. I started her about three years, four?, before covid. Look at Gaia's divine love for her clever and dexterous children! Gaia is so generous as to put loads of live and eager yeast in the very air that we make leavening and ferment her many bounties. To eat is to offer gratitude.

Sourdough Is Lineage

Now. The cool thing is that Women Building Worlds and Make The Matriarchy types are among the sourdough mavens because Sourdough Is Lineage!!

Both literally, lineages of yeast, and metaphorically. Thus, a truth. 😀

Reach back in your imagination to Çatalhöyük, one of the earliest known settlements. A Goddess people. A stable, innovative, egalitarian society with a rich artistic and animist culture. This place:

Reconstruction of interior at Çatalhöyük. Credit: Emmanuel Parent

At CNN, Amarachi Orie and Gul Tuysuz report:

A largely destroyed oven structure was found in an area called “Mekan 66”... Around the oven, archeologists found wheat, barley, pea seeds and a palm-sized, round, “spongy” residue, it said in a press release Wednesday. Analyses determined that the organic residue was 8,600-year-old, uncooked, fermented bread. “We can say that this find at Çatalhöyük is the oldest bread in the world,” archeologist Ali Umut Türkcan, head of the Excavation Delegation and an associate professor at Anadolu University in Turkey.

It makes sense. Sourdough is only 4 ingredients, flour + water + yeast + salt. It's not a hard thing to trip over in the course of human curiosity. We don't even need the salt, the Ubaid people may not have had it, but that only means the bread would taste a little dull.

Çatalhöyük, just by the way, enjoyed these statistical qualities:

• Founded: c. 7200 BC

• Abandoned: c. 5200 BC

• Duration: 1400 years

• Religion: Animist, dominated by feminine divine imagery

• Area: 32 to 38 acres

• Population: 6-8000 or 6-800 depending on the source

• Food Sources: Agriculture (debated if with traction), domestication of cattle & sheep, hunting & gathering

It's hard for the patriarchal imagination to admit that it's looking at a matriarchy. It will say it's not looking at one and then describe a culture in some detail that by all classical feminist definitions is a matriarchy/partnership society. As in the wiki on Çatalhöyük:

In an article in the Turkish Daily News, Hodder is reported as denying that Çatalhöyük was a matriarchal society and quoted as saying "When we look at what they eat and drink and at their social statuses, we see that men and women had the same social status. There was a balance of power. Another example is the skulls found. If one's social status was of high importance in Çatalhöyük, the body and head were separated after death. The number of female and male skulls found during the excavations is almost equal."[ In another article in the Hurriyet Daily News Hodder is reported to say "We have learned that men and women were equally approached".

The decapitation of corpses seems to have had something to do with ancestor worship, maybe a desire to speak to some of the wiser or more talented dead. No one can say, but I'll stand by it for now. Many of their dead were buried under the sleeping pallets of the homes. The sense of connection to the death-regeneration-life cycle and to continuing contact with ancestors would have been intense. And typical of many Goddess civilizations.

Anyway, these people seem to have invented sourdough, so people have been making sourdough nearly as long as we have been working out how to live together in large groups and probably for a good while before that. Sourdough is an early sign of civilization. The Ubaid fed and honored their men and women alike, so it stands to reason that the work of making bread, preparing food, caring for people was as highly valued as the heavy labor (much of which women and men likely shared). So much for our ‘prehistory’ ancestors bumbling about in the forest looking for an unlucky hare while dodging lion prides.

Cracking Crust and Airy Sponge

Good sourdough bread does have an intimidating crust. The French prize this about their baguettes, ripping them in a shower of gold flakes at the table at breakfast. It's good boundary around such a warm and yeasty sponge. Both absorbs sweet butter and supports a slab of cheese. It's a crust dense enough to help the bread keep for an extra day or two. It's thrifty and sustainable.

The baguette. The miche. The boule.

The sponge though. A strong dough will bubble and rise with all the pockets of lovely little yeast-farts, both tensile and lacy. Come to think of it, a sourdough is sort of the Hag of Bread! Well-boundaried on the outside, spiky even, and full of nourishing care if a bit brittle in the bone on the inside. A Granny Weatherwax of breads. A bread as old as the hills.

She's not to everyone's taste. Good. What witch would want universally agreeable, easily dipped, nearly forgettable?

Trendy and/or RadMatFem

Also. Sourdough (for all its recent notoriety) is a humble bread, of the people, the pleb of bread. Like a good hag, close to the earth and not so showy. Kings and such like, they had breads made with eggs and milk like something much closer to … cake. A bread made of flour, water, salt, and yeast from the air? That is a bread available to all even when bird flu drives the price of eggs right out the coop.

It's become a bourgeois influencer trend now precisely because it's simple, and so yummy you guys!. It can be made so spectacle. Well, that’s not on the bread. That's on the influencers.

Ancient Greece Neolithic Stone Grinder | CC0 1.0 Universal

It also takes t i m e. A luxury of both bougie women and our ancestors. All that grinding, feeding, culturing, mixing, the kneading. The baker's hands ‘listening’ to the dough as it comes together, the yeast of the culture and on the baker's skin mixing, becoming co-colonies. The firm and elastic resistance of a final boule ready to rise. It feel like nothing so much as as woman's breast.

The rule is true whether you're a capitalist or not. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can it well-made, but you have to pick two. If you're a poorer person through much of history, you can have cheap delicious bread if you just trust the natural born witchcraft of yeasts. They and the wheat die into our great metabolizing maws to be regenerated into our joy and labor, and even born into more of us women – feminist and/or witch – who will grow another culture.

As Gaia intended, so be it.