Do You Even Bake, Bro? How Silicon Valley Fell in Love with Sourdough
I feel conflicted about this piece.  On the one hand I&#x27;m excited to see someone do an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of engineer-types gravitating toward sourdough baking (which is something I&#x27;ve been noticing for a few years now since I myself picked it up).<p>On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of unnecessary negativity and shaming going on here toward the male engineer-types (the author uses the term &quot;tech bro&quot; at least a dozen times -- really?) who are getting into sourdough, implying that we are somehow ruining a pure and ancient craft for the sake of fashion and &quot;disruption&quot;.<p>I get it to some extent.  The pseudo-celebrity status of Chad Robertson of Tartine, the ubiquity of Instagram shots that emphasize only the visual aesthetic of breads, etc... those things definitely do tend to convey shallowness and egotism.<p>I just don&#x27;t think we should be stereotyping and shaming people for picking up a hobby that brings them joy and yields direct benefits to others with little-to-no downsides.  Anything that helps techies (or anyone really) un-plug and reconnect with their physical environment is a huge net-positive for society IMO.  Plus, when people you know make good bread, you get to eat good bread. It&#x27;s a win-win people!<p>I also don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to scoff at the recent trend in the scientific approach to bread as a futile endeavor:<p>&gt; <i>Bread has been around for 6,000 years and the process of making bread has fundamentally not changed ... I think it’s funny that people would think they’d disrupt something that has this 6,000-year history to it. It’s not that easy to step into the river and change its course</i><p>The fact of the matter though is that some of these folks <i>are</i> actually making significant innovations in bread-making.  The bread that results from these new methods is really, really, really good in ways that their predecessors simply were not.  Just because something has been around for that long doesn&#x27;t mean there aren&#x27;t many new discoveries to be had.  Hell, it wasn&#x27;t until a couple <i>decades</i> ago that people picked up on the fact that you don&#x27;t have to knead the dough to make great bread.  Sometimes little things like this go undiscovered because <i>no one bothered to look</i>.<p>My final critique is that I think the author is blowing this a bit out of proportion.  There is definitely a growing interest in sourdough from <i>many types of people</i> all over the world.  Yes, an unusual proportion of them seem to be men working in tech.  But this is not some panic-inducing mass-epidemic of &quot;tech-bros&quot; suddenly swarming every supermarket by the thousands for artisan flour and baking tools.  Three years in, I&#x27;m still the only person I know who makes bread on a regular basis.  People are getting more interested and trying it out, but it&#x27;s still pretty rare for someone to commit to it at the same level as myself or the author&#x27;s partner.<p>These days it&#x27;s fashionable to blame &quot;tech bros&quot; for a wide variety of societal issues, sometimes justifiably so, but I think going after them for thinking bread is cool is a hell of a stretch.