THE UPPER CRUST

SA’s elites gobble ‘artisanal’ bread as a doughy antidote to the alienation of post-rainbowism, writes Wamuwi Mbao

Bread is full of meaning, a dependable and simple staple. It carries emotional weight in every crumb I tell myself there has to be something wrong with bread that shows no sign of deterioration after three days

“PEOPLE know what they want because they know what other people want.” So said the sociologist Theodor Adorno — and his insight has never been keener than in the past 20 years in South Africa.

The era has ushered in a commodification of wellbeing: an accommodation of the rainbow mindset to the fetishisation of aspirational living. What we want or should want is dictated to us by the slick humanities graduates of our generation.

We know that shameless consumerism is bad. We know that our desires are shaped by an industry that spends a fortune on creating want, on feeding our desires. We want to be fed. We want to be assured we’re doing the right thing. We want comfort. We want bread.

Few things symbolise our submission to the culture of want more strongly than the elevation of artisanal bread. Bread is full of meaning, a dependable and simple staple to be found in every home. It carries emotional weight in every crumb. And yet, inevitably, the salt-flourwater mix that so many associate with matriarchal wellbeing has been brought wholesale into South Africa’s polarised have and havenot society.

In the fluorescent supermarket down the road from me, the divide is clear: the breads on offer are desultory plastic-wrapped things with a white clasp maintaining the cynical illusion of freshness. I stand among spongy, plasticised loaves advertising wellbeing for the less well-off. There are the bland blondwhite loaves, the endless corrugated wholewheat options, and types that promise to aid digestion or to lower my GI. Soft, tasteless convenience is what this is, because that’s what we thought (or were taught) bread should be.

Sliced bread originated in 1928, in an America that was beginning to fall in love with convenience. Here was the opportunity to have one’s daily bread without the cost of having to slave away. Bread has always found ways of fitting into our lives, and the development of industrialised labour brought with it industrialised bread that fitted into our work and non-work lives. The basic idea remained unchanged for decades, but was refined to become simpler, cheaper to produce, and longer-lasting.

I say longer-lasting because sliced bread of the kind I was looking at runs parallel to the idea of freshness that we speak of when we talk about “fresh bread”. The images conjured by that phrase — steaming loaf cooling, to be served in hunks with a simple jam, or cheese if it came to it, were at odds with the curiously pliant creations before me. In the same way that long-life milk inspires a certain revulsion, I tell myself that there has to be something wrong with bread that shows no visible signs of decay after three days. I’m nagged by discontent. It seems so inauthentic.

But there it is. Bread as it exists here is bread as millions of South Africans use it. It is the stuff of humility and hard work. It is, and has always been, a mirror of a relationship with the world that is premised on the needs of capital. Capitalism dictates that even our free time be structured to best suit productivity, and sliced storebought bread fits into our wellpackaged lives like it was always meant to be there.

Until recently, there was little to be done about this. But then, imperceptibly, something started to change in the way we saw ourselves. Our naïve belief that our nation was exceptional mutated into a belief that we as individuals were bound for something greater. As the optimism of our ostensibly collective national vision began to expose itself as the fiction it always was, we turned inward, abandoning that rainbow prescriptive with its requirement for social co-operation on an uncomfortable scale.

In its place we installed a more individualised idea of progress. Progress, in the glossy world of middle-class South Africa, is code for a particular kind of acquisitiveness, one which rejects the homely sliced loaf and the chemical-laced production-line aesthetic it represents in favour of a lifestyle in which use value is transcended or done away with completely.

Rather, enjoyment is the energy behind our movement through the world. The reification of wellbeing has meant that the term has come to stand for a very narrow form of enjoyment. It’s an enjoyment that is almost always excessive when it occurs, a sedating shutting-out of the world’s troubles for the delights of sunshine in exclusive places.

With the supermarket proving a disappointment, I head down the road into the centre of Stellenbosch, where there sits a different take on the idea of bread. It looks, troublingly, like a Dutch East India Company trading post, and it houses within its walls a boutique butchery, an artisanal ice-cream parlour, a wine outlet and a bakery. The A-word is bounced around a lot in this sort of place. It implies smallscale, uncynical production by a craftsman (as opposed to a ma- chine). It implies a made-thatmorning freshness that seems the perfect antidote to the alienation we feel in our pre-packaged lives. It implies exclusivity.

Artisanal bread — savour the sourdough irony of that term. It’s the promise of authenticity, a pledge that we’re OK because our bread is fresh and the olive oil we’re dunking it in is organic. Our desire for wood-smoked ciabattas, dark and weighty rye loaves and scin- tillatingly crusty baguettes is a displaced yearning for the simple pleasure of wellbeing in all the forms we’ve been told ought to matter.

My order of elsewhere arrives at the table served on a rustic slab of wood; three quite pretty hunks of sourdough, stacked between ramekins of sun-dried tomato, basil pesto and pepper jam. Looking up, I see eager would-be entrants queuing at the counter (the enjoyment). The room and the tables outside are all occupied, even though it’s 11am on a Tuesday (there’s the excessiveness).

Artisanal baking has been around for ages, but the professionalisation of farm-style bread as a genre of food to be consumed as music or a series is consumed speaks volumes about the ways in which every experience has been co-opted into the corporate-industrial realm. The pleasures of farmstyle loaves, rugged crusts browner than a Wellington farm worker, have been brought into the arena of fine dining. Bread is here no longer the means to an end (I’m hungry — I’ll have some bread): it’s the end itself. Around me, appreciative patrons “ooh” and “aaah” at the French-style loaves. Surrounded by all this wellbeing, it’s easy to forget that you’re paying triple the price of a full supermarket loaf.

Except, of course, that you’re not buying the bread itself. You’re buying the lifestyle, paying over the odds for the privilege of living the life (advertisers say) you’ve always wanted to live. At the weekend markets that have come to dominate the leisure time of the middle class and its aspirants, artisanal bread (and artisanal everything) is the ultimate expression of wellbeing. Wash down your artisanal bread with a craft beer, and marvel at how good everything is.

The creation of want is a simple enough business, on the face of it. Create the illusion that all of life’s perverse impositions on our time can be done away with, and then deliver the artisanal coup de grace by inviting us to believe that these corporatised commodities are expressions of our authentic selves. Every new expenditure feeds our fantasy of self-growth. We’ve never had it so good, we think, and we pass the bread. LS