I DON’T KNEAD YOU NOW

D ear Bread, as I write, I imagine you sleeping. There on a plate, your brown flesh pitted with seeds, wearing your butter like a loose silk shirt. How I loved you, Bread. All those Marmite mornings, all those sardine nights. The way we shared the Nutella from the knife — a smear for you, a lick for me. How I loved the way you clung to the roof of my mouth when you were white and peanut buttered, and the way you leapt from the toaster like a dog whose owner has returned from war. So it is with great sadness that I read you are dying.

Bread, the papers say, is toast. Nobody is buying you. You are being shunned in supermarkets in favour of a new wave of “morning goods”. Things like the brioche, with its smell of distilled headaches. And the croissant, with its greasy flakes that you find sealed into the crevices of your inner elbow, its flakes that cascade from the lap when you stand, caught out by a customer at five to 10. Bread. You were honest. You were crumbs. You were crust. You were breakfast and lunch. On long days, you were dinner, too. How, Bread? How did it all go wrong?

There were some signposts, I see now. I remember that year. That terrible year. Annus Atkins. People refused to use your real name, spitting “carbs” at you in crowded cafés. They’d shake their heads as you passed; there were whole days when you wouldn’t leave the larder. When you’d self-harm by inviting airborne spores to multiply on your surface, when you’d welcome those first mossy speckles of mould. “Compost me!” you’d croak. “I am but fungus.”

It wasn’t until the farmers’ markets moved into the suburbs that I began to see the old you again. People would queue to buy a loaf that would later be presented like a floral arrangement in the centre of a dining table. You would be sliced reverently, served naked on slate, beside a ceramic ashtray of extravirgin olive oil. You’d see your reflection in its greenish mirror and you’d visibly flex. Your arrogance over that period was, I can say this now, unattractive. I remember telling a friend you were (forgive me, darling) acting “dickishly”.

For some heady, bready months you were everybody’s sweetheart. Those breadmakers that had lain cold for so many years, taking up two-thirds of a kitchen surface, revved into action, birthing hundreds of breast-shaped rolls. Hundreds of loaves slightly damp in the centre, vaguely digested, masked in mackerel pâté and artisan jam. But though you didn’t know it — I kept it from you, hoping it would blow over, like the “wrap revolution” — I had become aware of another scandal waiting to break. Yes. Gluten. It was the same people who pushed you from the table. The same clean, quiet people who use food as a shorthand for values, who would hold you up in the supermarket and read the information beside your barcode as if instructions for living. They defined themselves by what they didn’t eat, and what they didn’t eat was you.

Whether you changed or I did I can’t say for sure, but our relationship had gone stale. Repetition leads to tedium. And while I still eat you daily, sometimes under an egg, often over-toasted and scraped slightly into the sink, you understand as well as I do that we have grown apart. I know you saw the gluten-free flatbreads in the top cupboard. Thank you for not mentioning them — they’ll be gone by Monday. It’s complicated.

But Bread, despite our differences, it gives me no pleasure to learn of your slow decline. Despite the bloated feeling you give me around 4pm. Despite the way you seemed to stand for so much, while being so . . . bland.

I have always wanted only the best for you, Bread. I never meant for it to come to this.