The covenant’s most painful exclusion.
There is a particular cruelty in loving something you have deliberately chosen not to eat. Not because you can’t. Not because of allergies, or intolerances, or some doctor wagging a finger at a chart. You could eat it. Your body would process it just fine. It would, in fact, be delicious. This is not a medical situation. This is a philosophical one, which is considerably worse.
riclib loves sourdough. Loves it the way you love a city you lived in once and can never go back to. The smell of it baking — that warm, yeasty, slightly sour exhalation that bakeries release into the streets of Riga like some kind of olfactory warfare against people with principles. The crust, which crackles when you press it, like the bread is talking to you. The open crumb, all those irregular holes that took someone three days and seventeen temperature adjustments to achieve. The tang. The chew. The way a good sourdough makes butter into something transcendent.
All beloved. Deeply appreciated. Not eaten.
The Covenant Does Not Negotiate
The Nutrition Covenant has a simple rule: nothing that couldn’t have been hunted or gathered in the wild. You cannot hunt bread. You cannot gather sourdough. You cannot chase down a baguette on the savanna. Grains are an agricultural invention, roughly ten thousand years old — which sounds like a long time until you remember that evolution works on a timescale that considers ten thousand years to be “just now” and “barely worth updating the firmware for.”
The covenant predates agriculture. That’s the whole point. And sourdough, for all its ancient mystique and its carefully cultivated starters passed down through generations, is still fundamentally ground-up seeds from a grass that humans spent millennia selectively breeding. It is agriculture’s greatest hit. It is also, therefore, excluded.
This is the one exclusion that hurts.
riclib can walk past seed oils without a pang. He can ignore margarine without regret — margarine deserves to be ignored, frankly; it has the culinary dignity of a spreadsheet. He can pass an entire shelf of processed food and feel nothing but the mild contempt one reserves for things that contain ingredients you need a chemistry degree to pronounce. But walking past a bakery with fresh sourdough cooling on the rack — the warm, slightly sour, deeply yeasty smell drifting out through the door like an invitation to betray everything you stand for — that is the covenant’s cruelest test.
It happens weekly, because riclib lives in Riga, and Riga has bakeries, and bakeries have no concept of mercy.
The Lizard’s Position
The Squirrel, naturally, suggested engineering around the problem. What if you made a bread substitute from almond flour and psyllium husk and fermented it with a wild yeast captured from—
No.
The Lizard, who understands the difference between having something and replacing something with a worse version of itself, offered a more honest perspective: the covenant does not require you to not love the things you don’t eat.
This is important, so it bears repeating.
You are allowed to love sourdough. You are allowed to appreciate it. You are allowed to stop outside a bakery and breathe in and feel the full weight of what you have chosen to set aside. The covenant is not a programme of emotional suppression. It is a dietary framework. It governs what goes in your mouth, not what goes in your heart.
The Lizard loves warmth. The Lizard does not live in the tropics. These two facts coexist without contradiction. The Lizard does not build a tiny tropical enclosure and pretend Latvia is Borneo. The Lizard simply acknowledges: warmth is good, Latvia is cold, and life contains trade-offs that cannot be optimised away.
Sourdough is warmth. The covenant is Latvia.
The Fermentation Problem
Here is an additional cruelty that the universe has arranged, presumably for its own amusement.
riclib cannot do Fermentation. This is a separate and well-documented failure. The SCOBY left. The kombucha became a science experiment in the wrong direction. Every fermentation project riclib has attempted has ended with something that looked like it belonged in a hospital rather than a kitchen.
Sourdough is fermentation. A sourdough starter is a living colony of wild yeast and lactobacillus bacteria that you must feed regularly, keep at the right temperature (around 21°C, give or take), and generally treat with the kind of attentive care that riclib has demonstrably failed to provide to every other fermentation project he has ever attempted.
So even if he broke the covenant — even if he decided, one cold Tuesday in Riga, standing outside that bakery, that principles are overrated and bread is eternal — he would then need to maintain a starter. A living thing. A colony of microorganisms that requires consistent feeding schedules and temperature management and the kind of patient, routine domestic attention that is, frankly, not riclib’s strongest suit.
The starter would probably pack its bags and leave, like the SCOBY did.
This is not a consolation. This is just the universe making absolutely sure.
Rye, Too
It should be noted, because honesty demands it, that this exile extends beyond sourdough proper. Rye bread. Dark bread. The heavy, dense, slightly sticky Latvian breads that come wrapped in paper and smell like a forest that learned to bake. All of it. All grains. The whole family.
riclib moved to a country whose national identity is partially expressed through bread, and then adopted a dietary philosophy that excludes bread. This is either ironic or very on-brand, depending on how you feel about self-inflicted suffering as a lifestyle choice.
Classification
Type: Exile — specifically, the voluntary kind, which is the worst kind, because you cannot even enjoy the drama of having been cast out. You cast yourself out. You hold the key to the gate. You simply choose, every day, not to use it.
Severity: Emotional. The body does not need sourdough. The body has never needed sourdough. The body got along perfectly well for two hundred thousand years without sourdough. The soul, however, has filed a complaint.
See also: The Nutrition Covenant (the agreement that caused all this), Fermentation (the skill deficit that seals the deal), BBQ (where riclib channels his food energy instead, with considerably more fire and considerably less patience)
