This project emerged of the realization that the salinity (~35 g/litre) of the Atlantic Ocean corresponds to the ideal salinity needed for sourdough breadmaking. Consequently, it is possible to take water directly from the Atlantic and make bread with it by only adding starter and flour to ocean water.

This project documents the aestethic qualities of bread parallel to those of the coastal landscape where the water came from. Additionally, it provides room for a critical reflection on the entanglments of human and environmental health.

In a sense, unrestrained creative interactions with our food provide food for thought. Baking with an ingredient that one directly sourced themselves in an unruly manner disrupts established behavioural relationships with food and allows us to build different pathways of food interaction. The water and the salt that one would add intuitively to a bread dough as mediators become the centrepiece. Perhaps this is a result of the physical gathering of the salt water from the shoreline, which makes the bread that is then consumed all the more rooted in a sense of place and filled with significance.

Upon baking this bread, I was warned by several people about the risk I was taking in willingly consuming water from the ocean, mainly because of pollutants due to agricultural runoff and microplastics. The tragedy of these concerns are often lost on people; the fact that we have polluted one of the largest bodies of water so much that it is potentially harmful to ingest. By baking with this water and then ingesting it, I am merely subjecting myself to the same treatment as this voiceless body has been for the past hundred years.

i boil the water because they tell me to
you never know what’s in there
they say, as if we didn’t already know.
plastics floating, the invisible particles leisurely appropriating vital signs
in an ocean of contamination: strangling life under our vigilant gaze.

undetectable to the naked eye, they say,
yet as I swim within these fraught waters enveloping my disrobed skin
i cannot help but imagine
that in husking the waters that feed us, we are laying ourselves bare also.

if I eat this bread, will i
absorb nature into the pores of my being
or rather
will I ingest the permanent legacy of my ancestors?