The Initiation

The science behind the song

"The Initiation" opens the album as a welcome kit for new members: a jar of nutritional yeast, a bowl of hummus, and a trivia card asking which legume has been domesticated for longest (chickpeas, for more than 7,500 years, first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent). Nutritional yeast earns its place in the bag for a practical reason rather than a flavour one: most fortified brands are a reliable source of vitamin B12, a nutrient that isn't reliably present in plant foods and one that people following a whole-food plant-based diet need to source from fortified foods or a supplement.

Chickpeas, meanwhile, are one of the older domesticated crops in human agriculture, valued for their protein and fibre content and for storing well across seasons, which is likely part of why early farmers kept cultivating them. It's a fitting opener: the rest of the album's society is built on foods with a very long track record.