Bread is the staff of life. – Jonathan Swift

Atkins faddists notwithstanding, bread has been with us ever since mankind migrated from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, and to urban civilization, its corollary. Bread plays an important role in religious symbolism, from the unleavened bread of Jewish Passover, the transsubstantiation of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer, or Muslim tradition according to which the cause of Adam’s expulsion from Eden was wheat, not apples. The emblem of the Nizam of Hyderabad, my parents’ birthplace, was a “kulcha”, a sort of flat bread. Legend has it, a hermit prophesied the Nizam’s dynasty would last for seven generations because its founder ate seven kulchas while the hermit’s guest.

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. – Henry Miller

The Bay Area is gifted with a plethora of artisan bakers, preparing all sorts of delights from the Noe Valley Bakery cherry-chocolate bread, to the more touristy (but perfectly acceptable) Boudin sourdough bread. There is even a website dedicated to local bakeries (it does not seem to have been updated very recently, however). Indeed, America has San Francisco to thank for the artisan bread revolution, started by Alice Waters and Acme Bread, just as Seattle is responsible for improving coffee standards nationwide. In America, restaurant critics inspect restrooms. In France, they ponder the quality of the bread and coffee served…

How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex? – Julia Child

What’s more, good bread is actually cheaper. The plastery Wonderbread, originally introduced by the ITT conglomerate, retails for $3.69 a loaf at my local Cala Foods, whereas a loaf of Acme’s delightfully nutty “Upstairs Bread” is a mere $2.50. Some bakeries like Southern California’s La Brea Bakery are helping popularize bread by shipping frozen semi-cooked loaves to the large grocery chains, who finish baking on their premises. While purists sniff with disdain at the technique, it is very close in quality to the real thing, and miles ahead of industrial bread.