Let Them Eat Bread!

I loved a Frenchman once. He also happened to be a Parisian trained chef.

Food life was good in those days…

Being that his family was from West Africa, and his parents split their time between Africa, France, Guatemala and Florida, we hosted them rather a lot. His mother was a lovely and sweet lady who adored my daughter and treated me with grace and kindness. His father was a grumpy old coot who had moments of really sweet largesse—but heaven forbid you ever commented on that. A simple “merci” was plenty. I think he liked being the tough guy….although it is entirely possible he simply was the tough guy.

Even though the entire family liked to eat, and there were many nights of extravagant paella and “American beef” as they called it, my fondest memory is of Big Andre—as we called him—sitting at the kitchen counter every morning with a cup of coffee, a baguette, and a stick of butter. There was never any other breakfast to be had for the man. Bread. Butter. Coffee.

In that fashion, he was a man after my own heart.

When I was in college, I would stop every single day and get a bagel from the food truck outside Main Hall. Bagel. Butter. Coffee. There is just something so gratifying about the combination. There is no fuss. You can take it anywhere. You can afford it if you’re broke. You can buy artisan if you are flush. You can eat it really quick if you have to run. Or you can sit slowly at the counter and let the crumbs fall where they may. To quote the great Martha, “Its a good thing.”

So now imagine my horror and dismay to be living in a time where bread is literally the enemy. Like, literally the enemy. If you don’t want to be fat, give up bread. If you want a healthy gut, give up bread. If you don’t want to be poisoned slowly by glycophosphates, give up bread. 5000 years we have called it the “staff of life” and now it has been reduced to poison. POISON!

That is ferociously sad. And something that I think I may need to call bullshit on in order to maintain my basic faith in life. I mean, come on. Bread? Now I can’t eat bread? Don’t you know that it was the lack of bread that lit the match of the French Revolution? Where is our revolution? For real. We are the in the middle of an all out war on the cheapest, safest, most versatile food staple in all of time. (Except maybe honey, but that isn’t this discussion.) And that is just dogshit idealogy, right there.

First they came for the fats. No butter, people, it will kill you. Lies. Then they came for your sweets. Sugar will turn you all into addicts. Lies. Then they attack the meat. Saturated fat will give you cholesterol. Lies. They don’t fucking know, and they never have. The only truth is in moderation and self governance, but where is the money to be made in that? And who, I dare you to ask, who decided to make bread the new scapegoat on the block?

Truly, the best lie of all is that you must—under any and all circumstances—stay skinny. We call it “healthy” right now, but lets all just be frank here. What is implied is “skinny”. To fail to strive for skinniness is to abandon the core principle of Western life and to choose the anarchy of fatness. No, no, we can’t have that. We cannot have all of you fat and happy; we must have you hungry and frustrated. Because then the machine keeps rolling. Heaven forbid your body do what it needs in order to protect your soul as it transitions through whatever it is experiencing on the material plane.

Maybe right now you need to be fat. Ever think about that? What if your soul knows that there is one wicked bad illness in the pipeline and those 20 lbs are going to save your ass? Did you ever think about that? Maybe life is about to get a little complicated and you need the simple things to give you comfort, or maybe you are the rock that holds everybody together and you need the basic mass to keep you from breaking down. Who knows? But 3D life takes its toll on all the matrices of the body complex and how we nourish the physical body determines how well the soul body does its job.

So maybe we lighten the fuck up and listen to it instead of the culture.

Eat the bread, people, eat all the fucking bread. Put butter on it. Melt cheese all over it. Spin it flat and cover it with sauce. Braid it up and sprinkle it with cinnamon. And as you are enjoying every single crumb really try and understand why they call it the “staff of life”. Because it doesn’t get any more basic than this.