My first vision for Companion came as I lay in bed in my moldy apartment on Rosehill Ave, the night before my 28th birthday. I was pondering how I could make a living with my degrees in anthropology, gastronomy, and soon, theology—three fields famous for equipping graduates with a clear and stable career path.
What I wanted was to write and to bake and to teach.
What I wanted was to live without financial precarity.
What I wanted was to become a mother, and to feel settled in a city that I could call home, and to feel like I wasn’t alone in holding my life together every second of every day.
What I had were the skills to bake bread.
To think about bread.
To help others draw close to God through bread.
What I also had was a terrible knack for turning away the men I was interested in dating and shame in admitting the intensity of my longing for partnership, motherhood, and stability.
So, I launched a bakery.
Companion Bread Share was a subscription bakery offering two flavors of bread a week. In my final semester of grad school, I carted tote bags filled with loaves to class and gave out the code to my locker for the rest of my customers to retrieve theirs on their own. Years later, faculty that never actually knew me remembered me as “the bread lady”, a name I now have embroidered on a denim ball cap given to me by a friend.
Upon graduation, my vision was simple: I’d arrange pick-up spots at a few churches around the city and offer Communion loaves for the church as thanks. Through the cohesion in flavor, this bread would connect the Communion table to the daily table for all who partook. It would also provide the financial grounding and mental space I needed to write. And hopefully, in time, it would create the network required to teach my workshop on bread baking as a spiritual practice in new places too.
What I didn’t anticipate was a global pandemic that would shut the world down.
What I couldn’t anticipate was that the churches I was partnering with would stop meeting for a year.
In December of 2020, days before I turned 30, I announced that the bakery had to close.
The word companion means “someone you share bread with.”
I chose the name for its connotation of community, but it was also a nod to the Companion Bakery in St. Louis that donated leftover bread to my church in high school. When I pictured Companion bread, I pictured crayon-marked folding tables overflowing with loaves. I pictured eager children reaching for the one they would take home. I pictured church members milling about, only slightly aware of the formational power this table held over them.
I realize now that I loved the model, in part, because it was self-conscious about the role a bakery played in a customer’s life. Rather than market the romantic notion that I, the baker, could create the atmosphere where neighbors became friends, this model allowed the bread to do the work of fostering connection in places where people already gathered.
This same self-consciousness of the limits of parasocial community reverberated into the rest of my work too. I didn’t want to pretend that a deeper connection existed between me and my audience than was really there, so I sought to be honest about the role of my work. I focused on the research, on the curriculum, on the bread. I strategized every possible way to remove myself from the equation. In the process, my desire to keep the bread at the center caused my own thoughts and passions and longings to fade away.
In letting the bread do the speaking, I forgot what I had to say.
Seven years later, I’ve managed to cobble together a living out of writing and baking and teaching. I’m not yet a mother, but I’m settled into this city and working on my knack for turning men away.
Seven years later, my faith is weathered.
My enthusiasm for work is tempered, though I think to a healthy degree.
And now, I am striving to recapture the fearlessness of my youth.
Out of this place, the second vision for Companion—a Substack newsletter—has taken form.
Welcome.
My greatest joy over the last decade has been watching the wonder on your faces as you have learned to bake bread. It’s hearing all of you reflect on the rest, the joy, and the connection you experience through mixing, shaping, and sharing dough.
In recent years, I’ve felt tension between two competing desires: the longing to help as many people as possible encounter this work, and the longing to slow down my travel and to be more present with my community at home.
As I expand my workshops into new contexts—both faith-based and not—I’ve also wanted a path to foster deeper reflections on the themes of tension, rest, curiosity, and joy that participants encounter when they attend one of my events.
This new season of my work is designed to do just that.
If you haven’t yet seen, the former Edible Theology website is now dedicated to Bake & Pray. It simplifies my offerings while also fostering richer engagement for you.
Step 1 — Participate in a Bake & Pray or Bake & Rest event (if you can’t take one in person, you can now enjoy a workshop digitally from the comfort of your home!).
Step 2 — Deepen your reflections and your baking skills through this Companion Substack community
Step 3 — Spread the bread love among your own friends and family by becoming a Bake & Pray instructor yourself. Stay tuned for this piece of the puzzle; information on our digital instructor training cohort is coming soon.
Many aspects of this Substack will remain the same as before—the name and branding are simply catching up to shifts I’ve already begun to make. Essays will still arrive in your inbox on Sundays. These missives will continue to reflect on my own quest to craft a good life for myself as a baker, a writer, and a food and theology scholar, as well as my longing to help you do the same.
Just as before, this is not a Substack for baking enthusiasts per se. It’s for anyone who wants to live at a slower, more human-centered pace. With bread as our guide, we’ll dig into science, history, religion, and the cultural narratives that shape our understanding of a life well-lived. We’ll chase after tension, rest, curiosity, and joy. And maybe, like a baker carefully shaping dough, we’ll be transformed along the way.
There are also two new components you can expect to see:
First, a mid-week thread on Tension, Rest, Curiosity, and Joy. I’ll send you a list of things that are helping me engage with each of these themes. Paid subscribers will be encouraged to leave a comment sharing their own TRCJs too.
Second, a monthly recipe + Zoom baking workshop for all paid subscribers. Each recipe will be provided in both sourdough and non-sourdough form.
I love building connections with all of you during the Zoom calls for Lent Sourdough. And I’ve loved deepening those relationships through Advanced Sourdough workshops as well. This new model–which mirrors the Baker’s Table rhythms of Edible Theology circa 2021-2022–allows me to connect in the same way, all year long, without the need to sell individualized tickets for each event. It also provides a natural next step for those who participate in either a Bake & Rest or Bake & Pray event.
My aim in every aspect of this change is more accessibility for you and more sustainability for me—hopefully a huge win all around. I’m thrilled by the ways this model coheres the disparate pieces of my work, while creating stable ground for the direction I’m longing to grow through both Bake & Rest and Bake & Pray.
To celebrate, this week only Substack annual subscriptions are on sale for $50 (usually $70)!
This annual membership allows you access to 12 Zoom workshops over the next year for just $4 each. That’s crazytown.
As if that’s not enough of a deal, at the end of this week all annual subscribers will receive free access to the Bake & Pray Digital workshop. This includes anyone who has become an annual subscriber over the last year.
Sustaining member subscriptions are also available for anyone who wants to support Companion with a bit of additional love. Those who subscribe at this level will receive access to all of the discontinued Edible Theology curriculum for use both in the church and in the home.
I’ve been itching to share this news with you for weeks and I’m thrilled the day is finally here. Now it’s time to plan the workshops I’ll be teaching in the year ahead—leave a comment with any breads or techniques that you are eager to learn! And let me know how you feel about all of this change.
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