Sourdough Bread

is like the Olympics.

If you make sourdough bread, you are trying to be someone.

That isn’t a criticism. I think trying to be someone is a very good thing. If we aren’t trying to be someone, then what are we doing? Alasdair MacIntyre talks about how the moral life is rooted in understanding ourselves as a character within a narrative. Everyone in life who is getting anywhere, who is paying any attention, is trying to be someone.*

Just who that “someone” is varies among sourdough-bread-makers. The person most commonly associated with sourdough bread is the “tradwife”—a modern name for what we should all admit is also a modern phenomenon. Tradwives are the women on Instagram who can be seen hanging their ankle-length dresses on a clothesline or taking freshly baked bread out of the oven or monologuing in a kitchen about how they like being submissive to their husbands (to a background of trending audio). (A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Hannah Neeleman, generally perceived on the internet as the foremost “tradwife,” with nearly 10 million social media followers.)

When writing commentary on these accounts, people are fond of pointing out the obvious fact that spending a lot of your time on Instagram and TikTok is not a traditional way of life. But tradwife accounts captivate our imaginations for some reason. They symbolize something.

I follow most of the Instagram accounts I follow because they are aspirational for me in some way—they symbolize slow living, or beautiful clothes, or fitness, or healthy food. They play into my desire to become something. It’s easy to say that the people I follow on Instagram are not really what I think they are, not really what I’m trying to become—but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is the amalgamation of these inspirations that I am trying to become—the vision in my mind that borrows imagery from Instagram’s endless image bank.

My best sourdough bread (didn’t have enough salt though)