In the second chapter of Genesis, God creates Adam by forming him out of dirt and "breathing" life into him. One way to talk about this is by saying God inspired Adam.


At its root, the word inspire means to be filled with God's influence. I'm not one of the faithful, but I often find myself thinking about the story of Adam's creation while I make bread. You start with a lumpy substance not unlike dirt. You work it with your hands until it's the right shape and then you leave it alone to become inspired. It's like magic.




Discussing the eighteenth-century English disdain for the potato (and most other things Irish) Michael Pollan writes:

Like the potato, wheat begins in nature, but it is then transformed by culture. While the potato is simply thrown into a pot or fire, wheat must be harvested, threshed, milled, mixed, kneaded, shaped, baked, and then, in a final miracle of transubstantiation, the doughy lump of formless matter rises to become bread. This elaborate process, with its division of labor and suggestion of transcendence, symbolized civilization's mastery of raw nature.1

I think Pollan is right, within the context of the English imperial world view, but today bread and its amazing transformation more aptly signifies a sort of ecstatic joining with the non-human. Approaching it more along the lines of Buddhist transcendence of self than western ideas of conquest or mastery, that moment of inspiration during which dough miraculously becomes bread serves highlights our limitations--reminds us that without the aid of yeast one of our most basic foods simply wouldn't be available to us. We do not make the bread, Saccharomyces cerevisiae does and none of our base mixing and squeezing and kneading can ever replace the spark it provides.