Yeast is Yeast, and West is West, Rudyard Kipling almost wrote. A blogger is facing the interest/wrath of the Internet after announcing that she plans to bake bread using yeast from her own vagina. “Have thrush. Genuinely considering using it to make sourdough,” Zoe Stavri tweeted on Saturday. Well, what else are you supposed to do if you have a yeast infection? She has since posted photos and update on her blog. Although she only used “about as much of it as would lightly coat a single tine of a fork, and no more,” the response on social media was swift and furious. “Thank you for ruining bread for me. Just ew I can’t” was one response, while another reads “You dirty dirty bitch go lob yourself into the Atlantic please”
Stavri is quick to point out to her detractors that she isn’t doing anything especially weird. “Making sourdough starter entails encouraging stuff that’s present in the flour and just sort of floating around in the air in your kitchen and on your utensils to grow. That’s what wild yeast is. If that idea sickens you, avoid all sourdough, because that’s what it’s made of, but remember, people have been making and eating sourdough for millennia, and the human race hasn’t died out yet. All I’ve done is add a little bit of my own yeast.” However, at least one critic feels using vaginal yeast in food is a health hazard. While moulds and funguses have been used in cooking for years, we should never consider eating anything that could contain human genetic material,” ‘s Dr Helen Wedderley tells HuffPost UK. Stavri hasn’t baked any bread yet because, much like the Twitter anger, the dough is still rising.
