Bread

Is nothing sacred?

I love bread. Anyone who knows me well enough can attest to that. I love the honesty and simplicity of it. I like how a few simple ingredients can through attentive kneading and heating become a satisfying meal. Perhaps I am reading too much into the baking process as I supposedly do with most things. After all, much of the bread we eat these days come from the mechanical arms of computers and machinery rather than through the expansion and contraction of sinew and muscle. Call me a luddite but I can always taste the lack of human input. And I bemoan the absence of sweat of the brow (possibly in a literal sense) from most mass produced loaves of bread. In some Middle Eastern societies where bread is still made in the kitchen, bread is sacred, to be revered, savored and never wasted. When served at the table in the home, only one of the family members, usually the woman of the house or a daughter distributes the bread as needed.

"In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapati or a 'slice', which was our word for a triangle of buttered leavened bread, the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was as careless and butter-fingered as any child and accordingly, during my childhood years, I kissed a large number of 'slices' and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained and still contain persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that too. All this happened before I had ever kissed a girl. In fact it would almost be true, true enough for a fiction writer, anyhow, to say that once I started kissing girls, my activities with regard to bread and books lost some of their special excitement. But one never forgets one's first loves. Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?"
~Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred?