air | water | flour

[image: wikipedia | san francisco's boudin bakery has used the same starter since the time of the california gold rush.  bread has significantly shaped our social vocabulary]

sourdough starter- an indelible, edible narrative not yet patented, kernels of substrate, encomiums of tradition, and matronly vector.  today, a starter is a charged currency with causal agency, where in bakeries worldwide, the days' ends are punctuated by burning any remaining dough, rendering any remaining possibility to an inert meme- a seeded, tartuffian ritual born from a by-product, and born to preserve the intellectual and biological capital of our culture.  using starter as meme, then, we seem able to transpose certain values upon this meme, kneading into these continuous precursors, discrete ideas of ownership and privacy before they meet the hubristic flame.

[image: www.wisconsinhistory.org | the spring green, wisconsin home of frank lloyd wright- taliesin was the name of a welsh poet and means, shining brow.  the home stands as a brow on a hill and pays homage to his family's welsh ancestry.  this image is believed to be from taliesin before tragedy struck in 1914, when the living quarters burned to near completion] 

this philosophy is in stark contrast to the social starter culture of amish friendship breads and ideas like the family pastoral of frank lloyd wright's linear-horizon hearths- both means of unifying the continuous maternal ancestries of bread through gift and metaphor, respectively.  the succession and transmissions of starters, like a culture's folk tales, are, in a sense, epiphytic narrators pollinated by one individual to another- intimate microcosms of a cultural lexicon and capable interlopers- and are modeled on relatively fixed structures.

[image: budding yeast cells of candida milleri, one of two yeasts commonly populating sourdough starters, along with lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.  budding is the reproductive means of these eukaryotes] 

the structure of a traditional sourdough is a remarkably simple culture- flour, water, & air.  mixing water and flour creates glucose and fructose for yeasts in the air to metabolize, whose metabolites feed the bacteria in the flour.  this symbiosis is now a dough- an ancestral form of pre-ferment, whose matriculated gluten proteins will lend support once the yeasts begin releasing gas in response to heat.  like the breath of the baker gives rise to yeasts, the yeasts give rise to bread.  and like geography gives rise to the constituents of an environment, so the environment gives rise to folk tales- both systems growing from the unseen.