Better Living With Bacteria

I’ve been in a season where I don’t have virtually any moments for writing, but I did write this as a submission to a contest, so my personal consolation prize is that I get to publish something on Substack after a long drought. Thanks for reading if you’re here; I always welcome fellow thinkers as we work toward living in community while consciously uncoupling from the systems that keep us sick, sad, and isolated.

Ivan Illich’s concept of conviviality has been haunting me for a while: I’m certain I don’t understand it perfectly, but from what I can tell, he wrote about conviviality as a way for people to live in joyful autonomy while also enjoying each other’s company, a valuable balance between connection to each other and full reliance on ourselves. He makes some points about the way that cultures throughout the centuries have enslaved other humans (or paid them so little that they were de facto trapped by the labor), and that the industrial age has made humans slaves to technology rather than dependent and joyfully reliant on their own labor and autonomy.

I think about this a lot as a parent of a kid who needs my attention a lot of the time (i.e. most of them below a certain age). I often am thinking about how to make modern life work, when I need and want breaks, both to do other parts of my day-to-day work and to have leisure; stay-at-home parents have to sneak their own pursuits in around household management and childcare, which is quite the multitasking adventure.

I spend most of my time with my kid, other than a few hours of morning preschool when I try to get some paid work done. Being home/at a playground with my kid for so many hours of my life has made me very attuned to ways that I can impact my home, my wider social network, and the wider world without being able to leave. And a surprising amount of those impacts involve cultivation of bacteria and yeast, becoming cultured, if you will, in the yogurt/kimchi/butter sense of the word.

I’m not sure if Illich would see bacteria as a convivial tool or a tool of enslavement, but it certainly feels like what he calls vernacular work: creative, purposeful activity done for oneself and community, not for a wage or commodity. I farm bacteria in the form of sourdough starter, as I mix flour and water in a jar and let the ambient yeasts and bacteria battle it out until a healthy source of leavening emerges.

I get so much joy out of creating sourdough bread, and it’s not a time suck: it’s 5 minutes here and there for feeding, 5 minutes to mix an initial dough, a quick set of sensory-delights with gooey stretch-and-folds, a round of physically demanding and therefore engaging kneading. Scoring bread, monitoring a rise, and slicing into a crusty boule are all pleasures, even if the work is also useful: a fresh-baked loaf of bread is one of the ways I reach out to neighbors and make sure that I’m never empty handed when visiting a family member’s home. I get creative with mix-ins and, of course, my family and I are nourished for our days with the food itself, all because those bacteria do the crucial work I cannot do myself: adding air bubbles to the bread.

The same is true of compost. While a yuckier example, I am so grateful to the bacteria that turn my food scraps into soil. I have an indoor composter, basically a little box that turns and warms my food scraps with some proprietary bacteria blend. I know that a standard compost heap would be cheaper and more environmental, technically, but I live in a place with a lot of bear activity, and I don’t want my compost strewn over the yard due to a hungry ursine visitor.

Regardless, the composter makes it easy to turn my disappointment that my son has snubbed some of my cooking into a source of nutrient-rich additive for the garden. I’ve dumped countless gallons from the composter into the ground, making less trash (thank goodness), and reducing the need to supplement the soil with additional compost from the store. Again, it feels like a chance to close the loop, to reduce the waste in the system that is my life: and it’s only possible because bacteria are in there, working for/with me.

It doesn’t stop there though: the bacteria in the ground are crucial to my garden growing: my garden is crucial to me being happy and healthy, but it also supplies the tomatoes for my sourdough BLTs, the kale for endless crunchy salty kale chips, and the squash for velvety soups in the fall. I swear there’s something therapeutic about the ways my hands interact with the soil, even as I pull weeds that scratch my skin. It’s like my own biome needs a little dirt therapy to stay right. My full humanity, it turns out, is also a set of cultures, and without my interactions with yeast and bacteria, I am just a little too sterile.

Conviviality is all about a flow, a flow that isn’t coerced or unidirectional; it reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s meditations on true reciprocity. I don’t operate under romantic delusions that the yeast or bacteria are getting some kind of fulfillment out of the way we live with each other, but they seem to be doing the work of bacteria and yeast, even as I try to figure out what this work of human-ness is, and these tasks are in turn allowing me to give my little kid a blueprint for what it might look like for him to shut out some of the modern convenience in favor of a cultured existence, lived in balance with his fellow humans and all the microbiota that make us possible.