Jackie Takes a Terrible Photo + See the New Recipe Archive!
Jackie Takes a Terrible Photo + See the New Recipe Archive!
Issue No. 85
We’re back from summer break! This week, Jackie asks her freshly baked bread to strike a pose 💁♀️; the trendy career that all the kids are flocking too; what ever happened to Dunkaroos?; and a 101-year-old lobsterwoman
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I fancy that I have a strong visual eye. Unfortunately, that aesthetic instinct doesn’t seem to translate into the ability to take a good photo. I understand the elements of composition and lighting and color theory, but I can’t seem to put them into practice. The photos I take are just, well...average; they’re missing that captivating sparkle.
If that just meant blurry, boring photos of my most recent vacation, nbd. But unfortunately, a vital part of my job is taking pictures of the food I make. Being a small business owner means constantly having to self-promote. I wish I could just upload a square of text that says “TRUST ME. YOU WILL REALLY LIKE THIS BREAD. IT IS VERY DELICIOUS.” But customers want a sensorial approximation of what they’ll be spending money on, and since I can’t teleport little samples of hot bread directly into people’s homes, a photo will have to do. The more beautiful the photo — with effective lighting and a retro pattern tablecloth in the background and definitely no crumbs and dust on the table or grease smudges on the camera lens — the better it will do on Instagram, my social media platform of choice.
For some reason this photo I took of a plastic tub of sourdough starter didn’t go viral...🤷
And because of the way the algorithm works, it should really be two very beautiful photos a day, plus a reel and stories on the hour. If you want a platform like Instagram to work for you, you have to work for it — like a second full-time job. It’s a real energy suck, and succeeding requires a skill set much different than knowing how to properly ferment a loaf of bread.
Eating freshly baked bread is an incredible, ephemeral, multi-sensory experience. The nutty, grassy flavor of the grain and tang of lactic acid from the sourdough, the textural juxtaposition of the crust’s crunch and the crumb’s pillowy softness, the faint sound of the crust crackling, and the smell. Oooh! That smell! (Can’t you smell that smell?). And then it is gone.
Savored and consumed and disappeared. Turning all that complexity into a 2D image feels incorrect to me somehow. A faint shadow of the real deal.
Maybe it would feel different to me if I was, ya know, better at taking photos. When I look at baker Christina Balzebre’s sumptuous, sun-dappled photos on Levee Baking Co’s instagram, I think perhaps a beautiful image really can serve as a placeholder for the act of eating and enjoying something. But mostly I just feel bad that the photos I take of my baked goods don’t look like Christina Balzebre’s visual delights.
Can someone please explain to me how she is achieving this lighting?! Look at the shadows! 😍
I’m a mess of contradictions when it comes to self-promotion. It’s tedious to have to constantly document my work, and frustrating that the documentation (crappy photos) isn’t nearly as good as the real thing (yummy bread). But I want the validation and very real dopamine hit that comes when those likes 👍 start rolling in. I want to be good at Instagram, but I also don’t want to dedicate the time and energy needed to be good at Instagram.
I’m not naive. I know that social media and our culture of self promotion is here to stay, and I can’t remove myself from that entirely. But I will try and take a bit less stock in it and put less pressure on myself to succeed in that sphere. Every year I tell myself this is the year I’m going to learn about food photography. I’ll buy the light diffuser disc thingies and take an online course and really dedicate myself to improving this skill.
But this year, I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to accept that photography is not where my heart lies. I’ll spend that time trying to become a better baker, and doing more events in the community where I can get potential customers to actually try the bread. On Friday night I’ll be doing a pop up at Gilbert’s Coffee Bar, giving away free samples and talking with folks about my passion for delicious carbs. I may not be able to teleport the bread, but I can still share what I make with my community.
love,
jackie
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‘No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers | The Guardian
Plenty of young folks (like Sunshine + Microbes interviewee Lauren Maunus) can’t see much of a career or a future for themselves unless it’s in one specific field — saving the planet.
Surveys show that large swathes of Gen Z focus on bringing sustainable practices into their lives and engaging in climate activism. There’s been an upswing in the number of students choosing environment-related degrees over traditional career paths in business, medicine, or law. Those latter industries might not be so stable in the future anyway if the planet continues to deteriorate. Plus there’s a persistent myth that working on environmental issues won’t pay well that’s starting to dissipate.
“We grow up being told that working in environmental fields is a dream that is not accomplishable. And there’s no money in it,” says [22-year-old Matt] Ellis-Ramirez, who volunteers for the youth-led Sunrise Movement. “But as we start to realize that the world that we live in isn’t sustainable, and that corporations will stop making money if we lose the planet, then that funding is going to start showing up.”
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2020 median pay for “environmental scientists is $73,230 per year, while environmental lawyers earn a median yearly salary of $122,960. Urban farmers, a career path that doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree, make roughly $71,160 a year.” Those numbers are expected to grow over the next 10 years.
The existential threat of climate change has moved sustainability from the fringe to the mainstream. Students pursue majors like restoration ecology and learn about regenerative agricultural practices like how to restore soil biodiversity. People entering their college years hope older generations will join them in the fight. Rachel Larrivee, 23, a sustainability consultant based in Boston, says Gen Z understands that they may be “the last generation who may be able to do anything about [climate change].”
🍬 Inside the Desperate, Dedicated World of Discontinued Snack Obsessives | Jezebel
A powerful form of nostalgia: Your favorite childhood snack — that’s now extinct. Like-minded snack food connoisseurs will come together online to petition for the return of a classic treat, such as a discontinued cereal or an oddball chip flavor like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos.
These foods usually aren’t easily replicated at home. Often because they’re highly processed. But Proustian memory outweighs health concerns on these campaigns:
On Facebook, there are campaigns crying for the return of the twisted chocolate Cadbury Spira bar (which has over 34,000 likes), Keebler Pizzaria chips (over 6,000 likes), and Carnation Breakfast bars (over 9,000 likes). There are campaigns for everything from grape Swedish fish (alluring) to a Subway seafood sandwich (terrifying). Some pages, even with their minuscule “like” counts, still update regularly, while others appear to have jumped ship, the dream of rallying enough support to win back this one, weird, long-forgotten food item dead on arrival. “I mixed a package of imitation crab meat with Hellman’s mayo and Mrs. Dash,” one commenter wrote on the Subway “Seafood Sensation” page a few months ago, an offering to fellow fans looking for a dupe in the absence of the sainted original. “It was absolutely delicious!”
Sometimes these campaigns are even successful. The notorious soda Crystal Pepsi has made multiple comebacks, and so have the ultra sweet 90s snack Dunkaroos. It makes sense for food companies to occasionally bring back these items, even if they originally sold poorly. By creating a scarcity model, with a temporary return of a prized snack food, they can earn tons of free advertising and sell a glut of products in a short period of time before making it disappear again.
But for consumers, it can be hard to resist a well-timed marketing scheme on top of the pull of nostalgia. Not when that special childhood snack food can bring flooding back cherished memories. Says Ariana Gunderson, a food researcher and artist exploring food nostalgia, “when you’re a child and someone that you love gives you food, whether they cook it from scratch or bought it at the store, that’s an act of care.”
👵 🎣 At 101, she’s still hauling lobsters with no plans to stop | Associated Press
Virginia Oliver, who’s 101-years-old, doesn’t need to be out catching lobsters when she could be enjoying retirement. But as she puts it, she likes to be out on the water. An image of Oliver tossing a lobster over-her-shoulder back into the ocean went viral this summer, but she’s been in the business since before World War II (when few women did lobstering work).
She started trapping at 8, and still checks her traps in Rockland, Maine in a boat named the “Virginia” that belonged to her late husband. She does the work with her 78-year-old son Max, and Oliver still enjoys a lobster dinner at least once a week.
She expresses more concern about the health of the local lobster population, which is suffering due to overfishing and climate change, than her own well-being. A family friend told the AP that a doctor once asked dismayingly why she kept going out on the boat after a crab had bloodied one of her fingers. Oliver just said “Because I want to.”
New and Improved Recipe Archive
We’re still easing back into things after our summer vacation. Next issue will have a fresh new recipe. Over the summer, we revamped our recipe archive, and you can find all of Jackie’s homemade treats here:
Check out these issues with some of our fall favorite recipes, including the much-beloved Orange and Olive Oil Cake:
How to Achieve Doggy Nirvana
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She runs Otto’s Bread Club and is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications strategist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.