Woman in Sardinia holding wafers that have been blessed by the priest. The wafers will crumbled on her field to promote fertility.

The wafers in the hand of this Sardinian woman were blessed by the priest. She will take them to her farm and incorporate them into the soil — and thereby bless it. We could easily make these wafers at home. The recipe is simple. There is nothing in these wafers besides flour and water and there is nothing challenging about their productio. But, then, the wafer we make at home wouldn’t have been blessed by a priest, and so, in a fundamental way, they wouldn’t be the same as the ones held in this Sardinian woman’s hand.

For me, these wafers illustrate the problem of authenticity. Even when one can technically replicate a recipe, one has often left out the invisible parts — the invisible aspects of the recipe that had orginally given it meaning.