Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

Repetition was the enemy of creativity, he said. Repetition belonged to robots. We were on a quest to end work.

Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities.

I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something.

It was a baker’s bildungsroman,

In an oven like this, it was the bricks, not the fire, that baked the bread.

Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

I had never watched him this closely. Passing through the cafeteria, he left a wake of keyed-up expressions—smiles and grimaces. He was a walking amphetamine.

I feel a sense of awe, because from your starter to mine to my mother’s and her father’s, it’s all the same stuff, and it goes back a very long way. Immortality is stranger than singing, if you ask me.

I was preternaturally productive in those hours. At first I theorized it was something about the rhythm of baking, the quick bursts of attention alternating with mandatory pauses, but then I decided it was probably something simpler: I was happy.

on. I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice—and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium. There are histories of food, of course.

but mostly, I’m proud of my brother for making something that’s truly his.

“Oh, gosh. She lived in this little apartment overlooking an alley … she had a balcony where she grew herbs. She knew everyone, and she was always helping people. Little favors, and big ones, too. I was smitten.

How do you even get started if you can’t woo the other person with your spicy soup?

I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

“I think I want to get a little labor in while there’s still a chance.”

I want people to have time to do the things they want, rather than work to make money to buy food, or scrounge around in the kitchen.”