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Hardtack Preservation
Bread is a fundamental substance within the Western diet, especially in times of hardship. Here I am thinking of my grandfather, a smooth talking Newfoundlander, who would often eat hard biscuits referred to as hardtack, which would need to be soaked overnight before eating. This fusion between bread and crackers was eaten on long ship rides. It was a staple of soldiers, sailors, and migrants. My dad once bought my grandfather some as a gift. In response, my grandfather politely thanked him but said he hated the stuff and only ate it out of habit.
Fig 16. Screenshot of 150 year old hardtack from Minnesota Historical Society’s Youtube.
Presently, hardtack is eaten across the world in communities ranging from factory workers in Japan to Russian military rations to Canadian East Coast communities like my grandfather. In St. John’s Newfoundland, Purity Factories specializes in the commercial production of hardtack. When hearing this name, I can’t help but think of Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity. The purity in Purity Factories comes from the refining process of the flour - it is consistent and fine textured. However, this process does not make something pure. Flour is prone to spoilage and can last, at best, eight months. This spoilage occurs through the microorganisms that feed on it over time. Alternatively, hardtack can keep for upwards of a century, as long as it is kept dry and sealed. Still, there is nothing pure about hardtack. We are contaminated physically within our microbiomes but also through generational histories (Shotwell 23). The histories of colonialism and upheaval live within hardtack through its use as survival food for colonial settlers and displaced communities alike.
The rise of the cultivation and preparation of sourdough bread during the COVID-19 pandemic is an instinctive act of preservation within a time of sterilization. It is a tangible artifact of times of great uncertainty that have come and gone, containing multitudes of history and concurrent micro-life. While working in the basement of the church, documents were uncovered revealing that the land within two kilometers of the church was the site of another quarantine in the 1830s. Irish immigrants came to escape the potato famine, but contracted cholera. They came to dock at Burlington Heights, but were denied treatment and forced to quarantine on the shore until death. I think of this when I bake the hardtack used in Purity Factory, salting it with the saline crystals leaching from the basement walls which I then combine with lotions, syrups, and sanitizers and vacuum seal.
The hardtack is made in either the shape of yeast clusters or lime efflorescence, another chemical coming from the walls, referencing the way the Irish migrants’ bodies were dosed in lime before being covered with gravel in mass graves. Just like we need to metabolize the ways we have mistreated the earth, we need to be able to process the ways we have mistreated groups of humans, their microbiomes, their cultures and histories.
In order to pursue non-human collaborations and living, we have to examine what it means to be contaminators within a precarious system. We occupy a space of being both contaminators and the contaminated. To be a contaminator isn’t necessarily positive or negative, it is a fact. According to anthropologist Anna Tsing, “everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (27). Whenever there is interaction there is contamination, therefore whenever there is collaboration there is contamination. Where there is contamination there can be decomposition, which is the driver of sustainable life. Collaboration is essential for life; therefore contamination is essential for life. This idea of embracing contamination extends to all forms of encounters: “we are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutualistic worlds – and new directions – may emerge.
Although I have been viewing contamination positively, contamination means that something is being significantly altered. Its state is being forever changed as an effect of interaction. Some things are more easily affected by contamination than others, we are also being changed through these encounters. Tsing refers to this as being the condition of being vulnerable. We must remind ourselves that our world is constantly in flux:
Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible. (Tsing 20)
Although Tsing does not reference Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action, the two ideas are intertwined as the foundation of our universe is based on phenomena and intra-action (827). Intra-action involves fusion and contamination; a becoming-with that means nothing is separate. If intra-action is foundational, so is collaboration and contamination. It switches the base state from purity, which is a myth, to contamination. If contamination is our base, then our definitions and ideas of contamination must change. We are collaborative beings. Our world is collaborative.
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