This extract is taken from the essay collection What the Bread Knows by Daniel Hartley.

What the Bread Knows (extract)

Last winter, I spent six weeks learning to bake sourdough. This is not a remarkable thing to have done; millions of people discovered bread-making during the years of restriction, reaching for something tangible in a time of abstraction, something alive that responded to warmth and time.

5 The starter was the difficult part. You feed it; you neglect it; you kill it; you start again. The starter is not forgiving, but it is patient in the way that biological processes are patient: it doesn't hold grudges, it simply requires conditions.

I am interested in this as a model.

There is a version of learning, and of living, that resembles starter culture: slow, dependent 10 on conditions, responsive to temperature and attention, producing nothing dramatic, nothing on demand, but accumulating over time a complexity that cannot be rushed and cannot be faked.

We live in an era that finds this model frustrating. We have engineered the waiting out of most things and are surprised when the things that resist this engineering are the ones that matter most. We have bread that rises in an hour. We have relationships that can be 15 established in a swipe. We have education that can be accelerated, compacted, assessed in units.

The bread that rises in an hour is not sourdough. The bread that rises in an hour does not have the same taste, the same keep, the same history in its crumb.

I do not think this is only about bread. 20

How and to what effect is structure used in this text?