Last year, around this time, I wrote a post examining in a fairly technical manner the three types of leavening [1], and while it is time to talk about leavening again I do not merely wish to retrace my steps over familiar ground, but rather examine a slightly different aspect of the topic of leavening. It is around this time of year that many people become experts at reading ingredient labels, looking for yeast or different kinds of baking soda or baking powder. More savvy people yet will look for ingredients like cream of tartar in breaded products.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Chemical leavening, though it is obvious to us as a type of leavening that is added to food, and easy for us to think about as making up the bulk of leavening, is only one part of leavening. When we think about leavened bread, let us not be as foolish as people who did not realize that beer bread was leavened and advertised it as unleavened bread [2]. Chemical leavening is the most obvious type of leavening, but it is far from the only type of leavening. To rely on looking at ingredients to tell us if yeast has been added is immensely foolish, because most of the world’s leavened bread has been made throughout history without adding any yeast from a container or chemical leavening.

Why is that? Because yeast is in the air. You don’t have to do anything special to bread to make it leavened. All you have to do is make some bread dough and leave it out in the air and the natural processes of the air will do all of the leavening that is necessary without any ingredients that needed to be added. It’s not that complicated. Yeast is in the air, and it will naturally “corrupt” or leaven any kind of dough that is around without us needed to do any work. That’s not even taking into consideration various methods of “creaming” or whisking items to take advantage of the leavening properties of air, but just lazily letting bread dough rise on its own. We seem to forget this simple fact every year, that as much as we try there is no way we can entirely deleaven our homes, because the leavening is present in microscopic (but real) quantities of the very air that we breathe, and that every time we open a door or a window we let more yeast in.

That lack of understanding is emblematic of a larger problem with our mindset. In our usual view, leavening is something that has to be added. We don’t realize that it’s already there, all around us, and all it takes is the process of time to leaven something, or to corrupt it. There is something deeper in the symbology of leavening that we often miss in our present times with our focus on chemical leavening and ingredients. Sure, we get out a lot of leavening (our society is full of a lot of it), but we miss a deeper point by only looking at ingredients and not looking at the air around us. We forget something vital about the nature of corruption.

Corruption is in the air. We don’t have to do anything to suffer from it. It happens naturally. People grow old, institutions falter and decay. Entropy and corruption and decay are hard-wired into our physical existence. All of our efforts can only slow down the process of decay–only the miraculous involvement of God can prevent it altogether. That is why we ask God for our daily bread (not coincidentally), because every day we have to renew our path with God, renew our focus, keep an eye out for problems. If we drift, it does not take long for us to lose sight of God’s ways. Corruption and sin are in the air, all around us, and we don’t have to add anything externally to fall prey to it. Mind you, that speeds the process along, both in cooking leavened products and in sinning, but it isn’t necessary to add anything external to become leavened, contrary to our thoughts.

Again, to properly understand the reason why leavening is considered, for one week at least, to be symbolic of sin, we have to recognize the corrupting nature of leavening. Just as the yeast in the air ferments and corrupts bread, so sin corrupts our lives, our relationships, and our institutions. But the corruptor doesn’t have to do anything but let time and weakness show, if he is patient. Sure, a leaven starter or chemicals make leavening easy and effective, but there are many ways to corrupt an organization or a person or a society, just as there are many ways to leaven bread. If all of our focus is on stopping just one way, we will be entirely blind to the many ways our bread can be leaven and that we can be corrupted by sin. Do we wish to be self-deceived, telling ourselves that we are acceptable when we have only dealt with one small section of what is leavening, that which we can read on the ingredient box, neglecting the ways that our mechanical processes can embed the leavening in the air in the structure of food and create leavened bread without adding yeast or baking soda or baking powder?

This is one type of error. And surely there is another type of error as well, when people go to the other extreme, thinking that wine or popcorn are improper or tossing out their baking soda toothpaste [3]. We are preparing to keep the Days of Unleavened Bread. Popcorn and toothpaste and wine are not bread. Beer itself may be counted as bread, because it is made from barley as well as fermented with yeast (making it a leavened bread product). This was even more the case in the past than it is now, where beer was commonly used in cooking and where beers contained a great deal of heavy nutrients, making it an important food for lower orders of society throughout much of history, rich in caloric value and nutrients. Beer or mead as food is not something we generally think of these days, but it is worth paying attention to anyway.

But we need not seek to make a war against anything that is leavened, because we ought to remember that we cannot thoroughly unleaven our world, even if we might wish, because yeasts are in the air. The threat of corruption is something we have to deal with on a regular basis; we cannot eradicate the threat altogether. There is a lesson in this also. As an interesting note, yeast extract is the main source of monosodium glutamate (msg) in the food industry [3], and therefore its avoidance may be a more generally useful one in terms of health rather than for its leavening purposes alone. If we are concerned about msg in our foods, getting rid of yeast extract is one of the easiest ways to do that, a recognition that ‘corruption’ is about more than leavening alone.

But at the same time, we need to recognize that the point of the week is to avoid eating leavened bread while replacing it with unleavened bread. We are commanded to eat unleavened bread for seven days (see Exodus 12:15), and for those of us for whom leavened bread is a staple, we need to be careful to replace this with unleavened bread, without trying to skirt the law by replacing leavened bread with what we think is unleavened bread, but usually isn’t [1], that simply goes about leavening in a different fashion to get to the same destination via a different route. We are neither to leaven bread by any means nor are we to delude ourselves into thinking we should get rid of anything that is remotely close to leavening (which would be a Pharisaical action) in order to completely remove leavening from our lives. We are to do what God’s word says, and leave it at that, even if the answers as to what is and what is not leavened are not always very clear cut, especially since the way we leaven products is far different from that which has been done throughout most of human history. We should do our best regardless, though.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/on-the-three-types-of-leavening/

[2] http://www.postponements.com/unleavened_gooooodies_part_3.htm

[3] For a similar commentary on such practices from a Karaite Jewish perspective, see:

http://www.karaitejudaism.org/talks/Leaven_Leavened_and_Unleavened.htm