A Toast To Old-Fashioned Bread

Good Old-Fashioned White Bread

A Toast To Old-Fashioned Bread

I have discovered that eating toast and jam is not a good idea while I am trying to type out a little something for this piece on my blog. It's not the crumbs that are so bad. A good upside-down shake of my keyboard seems to be pretty effective at removing those little bits of burnt bread from between the "Y" and the "U" or the "O" and the "K." But the jam. Well, that's a whole other issue.

True to its name, the gooey, red-dyed strawberry confiture likes to "jam" up the space bar, which then sticks and leaves a trail of blank spaces across the screen like this                . See what I mean. It's like my computer has flat-lined.

Now, it's true that some days, I'm better off writing nothing than writing about some of the moronic things that seem to capture my interest. Today might be a perfect example.

You see, I got to thinking about toast 'n' jam and all, and I started remembering how it was when I was a kid, and the breakfast table included a mountain of toast. In those days, we ate the simplest of breads — white in a plain brown wrapping of a thin crust — nothing like the bread you get today.

Today, it seems almost a sin to buy plain white bread at $1.49 a loaf. In fact, most people have been convinced to eat only bread that has a million ancient grains in it, is charged with flax seeds, or is in some way organically reprogrammed to ensure that your body won't really digest it. In the name of fibre, and in a society preoccupied with the anus, today's high-end/rear-end bread pretty much comes out of your body more or less the same way it went in, kind of like the journey of corn.


New Age Bread
I've found that this "new age" bread no longer really tastes like bread. OK, to be honest, the bread that I ate as a kid had no real taste at all. This absence of taste, more bland than grand, was designed, I believe, not to interfere with the high fructose sweetness of jam, not to overpower the syrupy ambrosia of honey, and not to confound even the bittersweet flavour of that rind-full concoction called marmalade. At one time, what we gobbed on our toast was what mattered. We valued the spread over the bread.

So what happened? I suspect that some 9th Avenue, New York City baker missed the irony of that age-old pronouncement that "If the poor have no bread, then let them eat cake" — you know, that flip little remark attributed to Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution. So instead of baking simple white bread, the trend has become to produce genetically altered slices of bread that taste like cake.

Don't get me wrong. I love cake, despite the fact that people are always saying, "You can't have your cake and eat it too," which I've always thought a pretty dumb thing to say. After all, no one eats a whole cake. So, you can have a piece of cake and still have cake. It's only when you get to the last piece of cake, that things get a little iffy, and my answer to that dilemma is just to go out and buy another cake, for goodness sake. Even in the worst case scenarios, you will probably be able to find an old Jos. Louis or a Little Debbie Snack Pack under one of the couch cushions.

I know, I know, I'm rambling.

You see, the problem is that I don't want bread that tastes like cake. I want my bread to be nothing more than a flour-power mosaic of yeasty air bubbles that has no flavour whatsoever. Tasty bread leads to tasty toast, and I don't want tasty toast that interferes with the gooey flavours of trans-fat-rich spreads like Nutella or Cheez Whiz, or as is the case this morning, Smucker's Pure Strawberry Jam.

The hell, I say, the hell with this nuts-and-berries mentality that promotes bowel regularity as if the ability to poo-on-cue is the thirteenth commandment. No, give me back that old-fashioned bread and some real toast and jam, and if I get jammed up and space-barred-out as a consequence of my ass-backwards thinking, then so be it.

After all, can a colonoscopy be all that bad?