I’m always stacking bread. And I don’t mean to suggest that I’m flush with dough — far from it — rather, I can never have just one slice of good bread. Whether soft and sweet or crusty and sour or the entire world of options in between, bread is as delicious as it is ubiquitous. We need bread, it seems. It is the “staff of life” to many Europeans, while, in Egyptian Arabic, “eish” (bread) originates from “y’eish” (to live). Peering through the thick crust of this universal, life-bringing force and appreciating all its wonder seems to be the yeast we can do.
The humble loaf, through years of human attachment and cultivation, has become an institution unto itself. Juvenal saw it, along with circuses, to be the foundation of a stable, complacent society. Feed the people (and entertain them with brutal fights to the death), and they will remain happy. This has certainly proven true throughout history, as the French Revolution began with the 1775 Flour War. The “First Baker of the Kingdom” King Louis XVI faced upwards of 300 violent riots marshaled by working-class families incensed by the government’s failure to bake enough bread for the French populace.
Egyptians, who rely on bread for 52% of their calories, have revolted on multiple occasions against threats to government bread subsidies — in 1977, 2011, 2017 and 2019, just in recent history. The strength of a nation’s currency can be measured through the infamous Big Mac Index, naming the sandwich as a baseline representative of economic output. Gluten seems to undergird entire societies, governments and countries, strengthening institutions through efficient nourishment so that they can continue to expand, much as tight gluten networks allow a loaf of bread to balloon from its doughy origins.
Given the advent of bread slicers and dough conditioners, it’s really not necessary to break bread anymore — Moses only “broke” bread because it was literally too hard to tear and the Sabbath forbade the use of knives. However, the sentiment behind “breaking bread” still remains. There is an intense power in sharing food, the very foundation of life, the basic unit of sustenance — our very livelihood and life force. Given the connotations of “bread,” to nourish another human creates a deeply personal, intimate bond. A “companion” is bound to you “with bread.” Thus, friendships, partnerships and loves can bloom and flourish fed by only flour and water.
Bread is mundane. “White bread” is a synonym for the banal — there is nothing less remarkable than a plain loaf of bread. Yet, this is inherently untrue. Bread is simultaneously sacred. Its substance is the very embodiment of Jesus Christ according to the eucharistic doctrine, the crusty outward form purely an “accident.” Moreover, by its ordinariness, bread becomes alien — it is an inanimate object beyond the human; our understanding and perception cannot realize themselves through its obfuscous staleness. That a quotidian “thing” can feed, sustain, inspire and transcend us is amazing. A product of life, the living yeast that spin flour into glutenous gold, existing in unquestioned symbiosis with another product of life: ourselves. We eat bread, but bread, in a way, embeds itself into the human world and eats a little of us in return. Hungry?
