Sourdough

We passed a shelf where a wheel of cheese had exploded into some kind of fungal overgrowth. Tall, mushroom-like fruiting bodies rose up and swayed slightly in the air disturbed by our passage. I sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that . . . there . . .” I pointed. “Is that all right?” Agrippa nodded. “Oh, it’s fantastic. An empire is rising, lifting up

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice—and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.

In a prime spot just across the yellow-tape road from the lemon trees, he tended his own dark grove of bookshelves, and beside them a field of legal boxes, which held thousands of menus from restaurants famous and obscure. Whenever I passed Horace’s collection, there was someone flipping through the menus with the furious intensity of a DJ digging

Belasco gave me a frank look. “A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread. Naz has been here from the start and he roasts his beans with lasers. Gracie gets me my honey. You might be my baker. But like I said, this is a place for new tools.” She smiled. “I want robot bread.” “I

Clingstone’s gaze turned inward, and more gently she said, “It never occurs to people that maybe I’d like to be the reckless one. The disrupter! As the years have passed, I have discovered in myself this . . . energy. Is it anger? A touch of spite? I’m not sure.” She looked back toward the restaurant. The beans on their strings were rippling on a b

It was only then that I became aware of the depot’s soundtrack: currently an ambient swell so deep it could have been the far-off foghorns that guarded the Golden Gate. Was it the far-off foghorns? “She calls herself Microclimate,” Naz explained. “She samples the foghorns up close, then she plays with the sound, turns it into drums, voices, everyth

Lily Belasco showed me the bathrooms, told me there were emergency exits in most but not all directions, then pressed a flashlight into my palm. She explained that the depot connected to other bygone facilities that were not fully mapped. “But really,” she said, “nothing’s radioactive anymore.”

“Everything’s radioactive. It’s fine. Mutation’s a good thing.” I had no idea if he was serious or not. He seemed like the kind of person who cultivated that ambiguity—who reveled in it. Generally I don’t enjoy those kinds of people.

Gracie tipped the jar toward me. “Try some, baker.” The gesture was solicitous, but her eyes glinted challenge. In every legend of the underworld, there is the same warning: Don’t eat the food. Not before you know what’s happening and/or what bargain you’re accepting. Along the length of the table, wide dishes bobbed up and down, orbiting on curren