Paper Short Abstract:

Sourdough baking fosters a slow, reciprocal relationship between humans and microbes, resisting industrial food norms. This paper explores how homemade sourdough challenges capitalist values, reconnects us to nature, and offers a model for sustainable, community-driven food practices.

Paper Abstract:

Sourdough baking revolves around a symbiotic relationship between humans and microbes. For around 6,000 years, people have baked sourdough bread in collaboration with the living cultures within the dough. This paper explores how this seemingly mundane object—a loaf of homemade sourdough bread—embodies resistance to industrialized food systems and dominant societal norms.

Modern food production has distanced us from nature, prioritizing efficiency, profit, and control over care and sustainability. In contrast, sourdough baking fosters a slow, reciprocal relationship between the baker and the microbial world. This process resists capitalist logics of speed and productivity, embracing patience, care, and collaboration with non-human agents. Furthermore, sourdough culture thrives on a gift economy, where bakers share starter cultures and knowledge freely, reinforcing values of community and mutual support over financial gain.

This paper considers how sourdough baking serves as a quiet yet powerful resistance to the current food system’s unsustainable practices. Through a more-than-human perspective, it examines how this practice reconnects us to ecological cycles, traditional knowledge, and alternative foodways that align with sustainable futures. In a world where food heritage is often commercialized or reduced to nostalgia, can sourdough offer a model for a regenerative, community-driven approach to food? How might its principles inspire broader dietary transformations that move beyond extractive consumption towards more ethical and ecologically attuned food practices?