The Joy Of Bread

How eating bread can help you have balance in your diet

- Tamar Adler

IN HOW TO COOK A WOLF, MFK Fisher gives the best dietary advice I have read. She says: "Balance the day, not each meal in the day." She explains that we can still eat healthfully without trying to get fruit juice, hot or cold cereal, scrambled eggs with bacon, and buttered toast packed into the first meal of the day, and soup, beef, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and Waldorf salad packed into the second, which her contemporaries were.

Here is her further guidance: "Breakfast then can be toast. It can be piles of toast, generously buttered, and a bowl of honey or jam. You can be lavish because the meal is so inexpensive. You can have fun, because there is no trotting around with fried eggs and mussy dishes." She is right. Breakfast can be toast; so can lunch be, or dinner. "Breaking bread" means eating. "Our daily bread" means food. It is also called the staff of life, which I like: bread there, all life leaning against it. Our lives don’t lean against it anymore: we’ve decided that bread is bad for us. Our staff has broken, and that is part of why our diets seem so hard to get in balance.