Toast

I thought yeah, I’ll have toast.
There’s brown bread, white bread,
all sorts of wholemeal bread;
It comes in funny packages
with writing on the side.
I?ll have toast, a little bit of toast.

Toast by Streetband. Released 1978

I?m about to eat toast. I love toast. When there?s nothing else in the house to eat, there?s always toast. I don?t know how it happens, there just is. I have a long and happy relationship with toast. When I was a kid, it was the base for all kinds of meals in a tin — Heinz baked beans, Spaghetti Hoops, Alphabetti Spaghetti, Pedigree Chum.

Later, when I was in college and totally broke, I moved into a house-share with 3 guys. I could barely make the rent and had virtually no money for food, but we all contributed to a kitty so we could buy the basics — milk, coffee, fake butter and toast. So that?s what I lived on. Given that I was going through my anorexic phase, this all worked out very nicely. And when it stopped working, I started sleeping with one of the guys and rented out my room.

I still find toast a very comforting food and admire its versatility and endurance. Toast has survived many different food fads, been the victim of diet propoganda — BREAD IS BAD — and been all flounced up with flavors and other uneccessary additions. But it?s still here.

Perhaps you don’t realize, but making toast is a game of skill and strategy. It can be tricky to get the toast to that point just before it goes all black and smoke rises from the toaster. But it?s worth it because then you get the charcoal flavor but it still holds together when you try and spread stuff on it. Yes, it?s that precise. Oh sure you say, you can just pop it back in the toaster for a few more seconds if it isn?t right. I say that?s just a fine metaphor for your life.

And how many other foods can claim a song that’s all about them? Not Strawberry Fields, or Life on Mars. Maybe Rock Lobster, but only in a surreal way.

No. Toast stands alone. A beacon to the poor, the weak, the hungry.