29.04.2020 2.0 - between you and the pineapple

It’s a race between you and the pineapple

That’s what my dad used to tell us every time we ate it. The enzymes in pineapples can dissolve flesh, so it’s a race between you and the fruit as to which will digest and consume the other. I have since found out this isn’t actually true, the acidic enzymes in pineapples actually help digestion, but it’s a good goof to spook the youth.

I was thinking about that in terms of sour dough, at what point, as we feed and grow it, does the yeast go from serving us to us serving it? The purpose, or driving force, of all life is to replicate itself, to copy and proliferate the DNA that creates it. That’s why the virus, which technically isn’t alive because it doesn’t replicate, it takes over cells and tricks them into reproducing them, whereas bacteria reproduce itself, spreads itself through the people it feeds off. This virus is particularly nasty because it spreads for a week or so before the carrier has symptoms, and if it kills the host it doesn’t care. Sour dough is the same, the yeast just wants to take over everything, which is great because we can make beer and bread with it, but it doesn’t care. It’s symbiotic relationship, we both benefit. But at what point does it become insidious? It demands more and more of the space in your kitchen, starter dough infesting jar after jar, demanding more and more of your time and energy to keep it fed. When is the yeast in fact, consuming us?  

Yeast found a neat trick in bread. It gives us a reason to spread it all over the city. My dad made one culture, which my sister and I are both also growing, and I just drove across town to give my partner’s friend some of, who will probably do the same. It’s using our energy to grow and spread. What if it suddenly becomes sentient? There’s probably some Stoke Newington Stephen King already plotting this novel. Call it something like The Bread… Rises!

I wonder when you could say the same for money? The economy, it's purpose should be to serve us, but more and more it seems like human life is being sacrificed to it. It is using our energy, and now our actual bodies as raw material to replicate itself - in the process making most of us, and the planet itself very very sick. Could you call money a virus?

Arguably, dogs are the same, they’re one of the few parasites the host welcomes. Ok, maybe not dogs, they are undoubtedly useful, you couldn’t say a guide dog was a parasite, or one that rescues people from seizures, or aids disabled people, putting their washing on, or a sheep dog, any dog really, they give immeasurable benefits and we wouldn’t exist without each other. Cat’s on the other hand…

Yuval Noah Harari talks about this, when we use the word domesticate we have a habit of misunderstanding it. Domus of course means home. Like dominion, domain, the legal term non-dom (doesn’t live/reside) you also get kingdom, although that apparently has an Old English root, meaning judgement, authority, which is where we get the word doom from, and the German word for cathedral, Dom (the Hamburger Dom is now just a car park thanks to the RAF), which may or may not relate to our word dome, which does come from Latin domus via Italian duomo, so maybe in a roundabout way, the dom in kingdom is also a home. Not sure. It would make sense if it was because Latin dominus means lord of the house, you can see how that would get to authority, judgement etc.

So really domesticate is all about putting in a house. We didn’t put the wheat in a house though, it put us there. When we settled down to agriculture, we needed to stay by the crops we grew to look after them. So rather than living in tents as nomads as we did when we were free hunter gatherers, we built houses. The wheat domesticated us and it’s been downhill ever since.  

Maybe when we evolve into our next phase, as purely energy based, discorporate conscious entities, or maybe as pure information, digital DNA suspended in an electronic afterlife, souls on a hard drive, we’ll finally be free of these cages we’ve locked ourselves in. I just hope the dogs come with us.