When I speak to artist and breadmaker Lexie Smith, we are much further than six feet apart. She has fled her home in Ridgewood, Queens, to Sky High Farm, her boyfriend’s 40-acre property in the Hudson Valley dedicated to harvesting produce and raising livestock to donate to underserved New Yorkers. It’s the first stormy day of quarantine and the power on the farm has gone out. Smith can’t bake, or respond to emails on her laptop at the moment—for the time being, she doesn’t mind either.
For the past month, Smith has been spending most of her days fulfilling farm duties like seed planting and livestock maintenance. She’s also been giving meditation a shot every morning. “I’m horrible at it but I try,” says Smith. But it’s filling hundreds of orders for sourdough starter that occupies most of her time. “This project has become a full-time job,” says Smith.
An artist and baker by trade, in 2017, before we all started stress baking, Smith founded Bread on Earth, an initiative that, as she puts it, “[aims] to restore value to an ancient and basic necessity, outside of the marketplace.” It’s here, and on her popular Instagram account, that Smith shares her uniquely practical bread recipes like her slow and steady guide to making challah entitled, “Challah However You Can.” Through these practices she utilizes bread as a “cultural, political, and economic thermometer.”
When flour and yeast shortages started happening around the country in March, as millions of people sheltering in place decided to try their hands at bread making, Smith began offering to share her sourdough starter for free.
“I can’t feed everybody but all of a sudden all of these people I know are losing their jobs, millions of people I don’t know are losing their jobs and what does that mean? It means we’re going to have a harder time feeding ourselves,” Smith said. “If I can’t feed everybody bread, the next best thing I can do is offer them this culture that will allow them to feed themselves.”
All anyone had to do was send her a DM or email and she’ll ship the dehydrated culture and user-friendly instructions straight to their door.
For many people, as Smith points out, making their own bread is a necessary part of feeding themselves and feeding their families. But it also checks all the quarantine boxes: a long-term project that’s visually appealing enough to share on Instagram, which is the closest thing anyone has to a community these days. It means practicing patience, a skill in short supply even before the pandemic, as your dough rises. It means gratification when you finally break bread and watch the likes come in on your perfectly lit, fresh-out-of-the-oven loaf. And, perhaps most importantly, it also means not having to go to the store.