Sharing Food While Being Apart:
Synaesthesia in the time of COVID-19
By Andrea Caroní Schweitzer Gil
The perfect loaf of homemade sourdough bread has a tan and crispy crust. Cutting into it reveals a tender interior filled with pockets of air achieved through an arduous process of fermentation, which also gives the bread a signature sour taste. The flavour of sourdough bread has permeated my thoughts for weeks, yet I have never made it, and I do not recall when was the last time I ate it. Recent and constant exposure to mobile media depicting a myriad of freshly baked loaves precipitates this savouring in the absence of taste. Whereas I have not physically experienced the taste or smell of sourdough recently, this media has engaged other senses, which are also present in the act of consuming food. The sharing of media allows me to engage in sensory forms of connection with people who are physically distant through the synaesthetic qualities of food.
The physical distancing measures produced by the COVID-19 pandemic have motivated many people to fill their time at home with new projects. More free time at home has also led some of us to pay more attention than usual to social media platforms such as the image-sharing application called Instagram. Photos and videos of people preparing sourdough, sharing tricks on the process of fermentation, or simply displaying their final product currently saturate my Instagram feed. The kind of engagement required to produce a loaf can explain this sudden interest in sourdough bread. The preparation from scratch requires the production of a leaven through the fermentation, which takes several days to achieve. The baker must attend to this leaven and “feed” it with fresh flour every twenty-four hours. Once this is ready, it is used to produce a dough that is subsequently proofed (left to rest and rise for several hours) and kneaded in intervals. The discipline required to make sourdough bread can be a welcome routine during this time of uncertainty.
An aspect of this process that I am most interested in is how the fruit of this labour encourages social interaction through the sharing of images and recipes. Our experience of food is inherently synaesthetic; it requires the engagement of multiple senses (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 470; Sutton 2010: 217). Synaesthesia, the “union of the senses,” is a culturally-informed practice that happens concurrently with the process of socializing (Sutton 2010: 218; Howes and Classen 2014). Given the impossibility of sharing the taste of food with others, digital media provides another avenue for synaesthetic experiences between people. Carolyn Korsmeyer writes that media such as still-life paintings or written descriptions of food are a good example of synaesthetic exchanges, as these media can arouse our appetite through their aesthetic qualities. For Korsmeyer, succulent images have the power to anticipate flavour, which stimulates our desire to eat even in the absence of hunger (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 467). I contend that, as media depicting food arouses our senses, it also excites feelings of intimacy by making shared food consumption imaginable even across distance.
Mobile phones and social media platforms provide an opportunity to engage in sensuous forms of connection between people across distance. As the members of Miyarrka Media explore in their work Phone & Spear, the aesthetics of media produced and shared through phones can guide people to calibrate their feelings in such a way that they become palpable to others (Gurrumuruwuy et al. 2019: 15). This media becomes a vehicle for people to feel with each other by constituting a space where they can co-create their reality across distance (Gurrumuruwuy et al. 2019: 17). The dynamics of feeling rendered possible with mobile phones can encourage people to experience the synaesthetic qualities of food through a new medium. But, if we consider the senses to be channels of communication themselves (Howes 2009: 49), then we can understand that connecting through food across distance is a process that requires active and intentional engagement.
Sharing recipes along with images is a way to actively engage in the creation of a community through food. In his ethnography of food practices in the Greek island of Kalymnos, David Sutton describes how, in this context, sharing knowledge such as recipes and cooking tips parallels the sharing of food itself, in that it constitutes an act of generosity which is valuable to the community (Sutton 2014: 129). In the context of the sourdough craze in the time of COVID-19, sharing tips on how to create a successful leaven or obtain the optimum proofing conditions for an airy dough can have a purpose beyond just achieving a tasty loaf. The process of joint iteration and experimentation allows people to share a sensuous way of interacting with the outside world while staying at home. The process of making the loaf itself, though the bodily practice of kneading or the exercise of feeding the leaven can also be conceptualized as a technique to relate to the world through the senses beyond the temporality of confinement (Howes 2009: 42).
A crucial quality of the process of sourdough baking during the time of COVID-19 relates to the capacity of the sensory experience of food to conjure up comforting social memories. In his ethnography, Sutton explores the idea that preparing food can be seen as a way to exercise memory, not only as a way of learning through action but also of honouring traditions (Sutton 2014: 149). Similarly, sharing the process of sourdough baking through social media allows home cooks to engage with an imagined traditional past when our ancestors were more involved in the process of food production. Perhaps things were simpler then, or maybe the idea of an uncertain future was less disconcerting. Sutton suggests that the process of remembering is shaped by the social environment in which we encounter ourselves. Memory, in turn, shapes our interactions with others (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 471). The memory-work engaged through the process of baking creates a fertile environment for social interaction.
The synaesthesia of food can call to mind memories that provide a sense of comfort otherwise absent during times of uncertainty. A memory provoked by sensory engagement might encourage the present self to imagine possible future encounters (Culhane 2017: 51). Sensuous memories become layered into the present moment, creating a channel of communication between the past and the present (Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 472). Although I have not yet attempted to bake my first loaf of sourdough, I have spent more time experimenting with recipes that remind me of my childhood. I often catch myself fantasizing about how I will prepare some of these dishes for my friends when we can meet again.
The collaborators of Miyarrka Media imagine the possibility of the senses to connect people across a particular space and time as a hum (Gurrumuruwuy et al. 2019: 32). This hum uses distance and separation between people as an opportunity to “orchestrate (…) a generous kind of unity” (Gurrumuruwuy et al. 2019: 35). In Sutton’s work, he characterizes the hum as the quality of polytemporality, with the present moment seeming to hum with memories of times past (Sutton and Wogan 2009, in Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011: 472). In the context of COVID-19, we can also think of the hum as a portal where other desired realities are accessed through engagement with a plurality of senses (Hume 2006, in Howes 2009: 44). Ultimately, the hum is a product of a commitment that requires people to generate layers of synaesthetic rapport through the use of media and engagement with food. When tapped on the bottom, fully cooked sourdough bread produces a hollow sound. Perhaps this hollow sound is the hum of all the memories summoned by its existence.
References
Culhane, Dara. 2017. “Sensing.” In Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, eds. A different kind of ethnography: Imaginative practices and creative methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 45-68.
Gurrumuruwuy, Paul, et al. 2019. Phone & Spear: A Yuṯa Anthropology. London: Goldsmiths Press
Howes, David. 2009. “Introduction: the revolving sensorium.” In The sixth sense reader. Oxford: Berg: 1-51.
Howes, David and Constance Classen. 2014. “Synaesthesia unravelled: the union of the senses from a cultural perspective.” In Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. London: Routledge.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, and David Sutton. 2011. “The sensory experience of food.” Food, Culture & Society 14(4): 461-475.
Sutton, David. 2010. “Food and the Senses.” Annual review of anthropology 39: 209-223.
Sutton, David E. 2014. Secrets from the Greek kitchen: Cooking, skill, and everyday life on an Aegean island. Berkeley: University of California Press.