Katia Porro is
an arts writer,
curator
and
translator.

I had a dream the other night about breaking bread, of coming together around a meal, but instead of eating bread, we were eating money. Not just eating, but bingeing, shovelling bills into our mouths to satisfy our hunger. It felt indulgent, rich. When I woke up, I understood this vision as a pure delusion. The money object has, after all, no value or sustenance other than that donned onto it by a public consensus.

The value of bread is not to be underestimated. Across history, it has served as a metaphor for everything from currency to life itself, a sustenance charged with power. Bread as body makes me cringe. Transubstantiation makes me think of cannibalism. So let’s stick to money: bread, dough.

“She was buttering her bread, pleasurably absorbed.”

This sentence from a short story by Clarice Lispector has puzzled me endlessly. Ignoring the pirouettes that Lispector incessantly performed in language, one could easily understand quite simply: the bread has absorbed the butter. Yet, what follows is the cue for confusion: “She’d escaped again. She’d say yes to everything, without paying any attention.” Perhaps, then, it is not the butter but rather “she” that has become pleasantly absorbed in reverie, that has escaped her reality, as the she in question is a nameless mother confined to the contours of her kitchen. This scene takes place after her son proclaims, “I am not a gambler,” as she brushes him off by saying to “not start with that money talk again.” Read again, “She was buttering her bread, pleasantly absorbed,” feels then like an extravagant scene of someone caressing cash.

It is no surprise that in this short story entitled “Beginnings of a Fortune,” on a young boy seduced by gambling and money that bread and butter would enter the scene as a humbling symbolic foil to all that is excessive. It cannot be divorced from its ritualistic connotations as a symbol of offering or exchange, a transactional tool. And so neither can its value once spoiled.

Stale bread is at times used as a building material– bread, in this sense, literally holds together our society. Abundance, thus, in symbolism and in quantity. Bread is everywhere, even as a victim of its own success. It is a sacred staple of the everyday. So much so that there is so much of it pouring out of bakeries that it often ends up slipping through the fingers of consumption, scattered across cities in piles of forgotten crumbs, broken bread. This object, or sustenance, that has so much symbolical meaning, abandoned in the street. A glutenous surplus spoiled.

Surplus makes me think of decadence, gluttony. Of exaggeration, of getting dressed up, of things-being-what-they-are-not. Bread takes on different roles, sheds skins, transforms into various characters. A chain of French bakeries called “La Mie Câline” in France diffuses odours of freshly baked bread into the streets to lure people into their shops. Artificial bread smells. Olfactory marketing. The idea of bread and artifice is funny. Why take something so pure and simple – water, wheat – and fake it? It’s like making a campy bread all dressed up, drowned in perfume and when you take a bite you are utterly horrified and deeply disappointed. It’s tasteless, in both senses of the term.

Strange and unappetising activities around bread have fascinated me, like a social media influencer addicted to smashing her face against bread, a surprising number of American men aroused by loaves of white Wonder Bread, or, my disgustingly favourite one: the soupeur. Soupeurs are people who get pleasure from eating bread soaked in urine from public toilets. This practice— highly popular in Paris and Marseille in the 1960s and 1970s in a niche gay community— has been alluded to by various French authors, such as Jean Genet in “The Thief’s Journal”, and described by Céline in his 1936 novel Death on Credit (money, again). A devoted gang in the 1970s even named themselves the “papy-croûtenards”— which can be roughly translated to “crusty grandpas”— and would organise feasts together with their daily harvests. Needless to say, my love for finding bread in the street and posting pictures of it on an Instagram account dubbed “painsperdus” – pain perdu literally meaning “lost bread” in French, but also the term for the meal “french toast” as the key ingredient is day old bread – shifted radically when I learned of this practice and realised that the majority of photos were of, in fact, moist, probably pissed on blobs of bread in urban environments. Clarice Lispector’s sentence “Bread is love among strangers,” resonates differently now.

The wannabe design historian in me is simultaneously horrified and fascinated by this practice, linking it directly to the Industrial Revolution, rational design and urbanism as this activity arose hand in hand with the installation of the first public urinals in Paris in 1834 during a campaign for public hygiene. Soon after, the first mechanised bakeries in France sprung up in the 1840s. The demand for the staple of the everyday thus met, and presumably exceeded, as the staple began finding itself in the street. I’d like to imagine the soupeur’s kink almost as a means of defying surplus. Siegfried Giedion did, afterall, write about how mechanisation changed taste.

The mechanisation of bread making dates back to the eighteenth century, with a boom after the industrial revolution on the scale of mass production, and eventual transformation of the domestic sphere with the invention of electronic mixers in the first half of the 1900s. Pasolini wrote about how industry made drastic changes to our social fabric, comparing the rise of capitalism to the “age of bread”— a pre-capitalistic time in which necessity trumped superfluousness. We can now add wisdom to bread’s basket of metaphors. In 1845, Catherine Beecher even wrote in her Treatsie on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies At Home and At School, “The mightiest efforts of Sir Isaac Newton, were performed, while nourished only by bread and water. Many other men, distinguished by intellectual vigour, give similar testimony.” Bread, in this case, is also the sustenance for power.

In a 6 minute and 30 second video made by designers Ray and Charles Eames in 1953, the power of the image of bread is explored. Beginning with a scene of a 19th century realist painting of wheat harvesters in the vein of French painter Jean François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), a montage of images of bread being baked, broken, consumed and tossed out investigates how, as they described, “bread is used in nutrition, bread as an art, bread as a political tool, bread as a symbol.” In a curious homage to the sustenance, the images are like an erotic exploration of the material as it is lathered up in butter, dipped into a glass of wine, and passed from one hand grazing another, before its crumbs are plucked at by pigeons. Bread is thus an exaltation of the symbolic and emotional significance of the element in culture and tradition. And if Charles Eames believed that “(…) one can judge the state of culture in a country by the quality of the bread and soup,” the power of bread and its image can almost be read as propaganda.

Power, for some, means wealth, money. However, I mostly like considering bread as part of a transaction, a social transaction, a form of currency that we share. Perhaps one of the most exciting mechanisations in sharing (selling) bread is the baguette distributor, widely popular in small cities and villages outside of metropolitan areas in France, making bread available at all hours for all classes. (I picture Giedion rolling in his grave).

So if bread is the symbol of life, and life is a gamble, then is my baker the croupier?

After the haze of my delusion of eating money, I dreamt I won a baguette from such a vending machine. As my trembling hand approached the slit with my worthless coin, the scenery around me completely transformed. The facade of the bakery started flashing an array of colours and lights. I rubbed my eyes and as the blur lifted, I realised I was in a casino. I pulled down the lever on the slot machine, and as the reels turned, I understood they were heating up, baking something inside. Three chimes sounded to the image of three dancing loaves before a beautiful clinking resonated around me. I’ve never heard a baguette hit a coin tray so beautifully. Jackpot: breadwinner. All that is gluten is gold.