In Henry Miller’s damning second volume of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a way ahead of its time indictment of America and its priorities, there is a chapter entitled “The Staff of Life.” A scathing diatribe as only Miller could deliver on how the “goodness” of a country’s bread is its basic unit of measure in terms of overall goodness. If that’s the case, the U.S. has long been a piece of shit, favoring its over processed, over manufactured artificial flavors even in something that should be as pure as bread. Well, it’s an impurity that is all too reflective of the nation’s generally tainted status.
Miller begins, “Bread: prime symbol. Try and find a good loaf. You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without tasting a good piece of bread. Americans don’t care about good bread. They are dying of inanition but they go on eating bread without substance, bread without flavor, bread without vitamins, bread without life. Why? Because the very core of life is contaminated.” With advertising, with propaganda designed to convince its denizens to work themselves to the bone now and think later. To consume as much as possible and give to the machine of the economy. The machine, as a rule, is what Americans live to serve (there’s a reason The Matrix remains a doctrine of the twenty-first century). Bow down to the inventions helmed during the Industrial Revolution that have “freed” us all. Show your respect by stripping yourself of all emotion. There’s no time for that when you’re busy trying to keep up with and perform for the machine. Indeed, this is one of the reasons Americans are known for inhaling their food (e.g. at a lunch counter, a drive-thru/in the car… the very fact that “Gogurt” was invented) rather than taking the time that would be necessary to savor it. Who can afford to “waste” time in such a fashion, after all? Gotta be number one. And winners don’t take breaks. That’s for losers like the Europeans, n’est-ce pas?
This is why, Miller suggests, the horrendousness of American bread is of little note to Americans, for “if they knew what good bread was they would not have such wonderful machines on which they lavish their time, energy and affection. A plate of false teeth means much more to an American than a loaf of good bread. Here is the sequence: poor bread, bad teeth, indigestion, constipation, halitosis, sexual starvation, disease and accidents, the operating table, artificial limbs, spectacles, baldness, kidney and bladder trouble, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, war and famine. Start with the American loaf of bread so beautifully wrapped in cellophane and you end on the scrap heap at forty-five. The only place to find a good loaf of bread is in the ghettos. Wherever there is a foreign quarter there is apt to be good bread.” Perhaps this is at least part of the reason why “foreigners” (most of them born in the U.S.) are so despised, so looked upon with suspicion. “Real” Americans (read: white bread, pun intended) can’t stand that these “immigrants” might be enjoying the secret to a healthy life: good bread. And they certainly don’t want foreigners to have advantages like a longer lifespan or fewer trips to the hospital (therefore fewer expenses). That would be against their inherently us v. them competitive spirit.
At the same time, they can’t stop themselves from eating the slop. It’s just so widely available. And, after all, “Americans are whiskey, gin and beer drinkers who long ago lost their taste for food. And losing that they have also lost their taste for life. For enjoyment. For good conversation. For everything worthwhile, to put it briefly.” This is precisely why, when coronavirus managed to stop the machine in the U.S., Americans, more than any other nation of wealth, were sent reeling. Put into a tailspin that they couldn’t fathom. As it slowly dawned on some of them that work is not life–least of all work as middling as that of the office variety–the notion to do something that was not only more therapeutically time-consuming, but also got “back to basics” seemed to creep in on the citizens all at once (at least those who fled to country houses away from the city to enjoy the fruits of their privileged rediscovery of what it means to be human rather than automaton).
Bread. The very thing that America long ago accepted as being a melange of sulfates, phosphates and high fructose corn syrup. No wonder (bread) the country is a plague. Miller asks, “What do I find wrong with America? Everything. I begin at the beginning, with the staff of life: bread. If the bread is bad the whole life is bad. Bad? Rotten, I should say. Like that piece of bread only twenty-four hours old which is good for nothing except perhaps to fill up a hole. Good for target practice maybe… Even soaked in urine it is unpalatable, even perverts shun it. Yet millions are wasted advertising it.” Consume! No matter how bad it is for you, no matter how much worse it makes your already marginal quality of life. The irony, of course, has always been that America was upheld as a beacon of richness. Something to strive for. But there is nothing rich about American existence, and there never has been. Certainly, Americans have a lot of shit to parade. A lot of things to show off. But what else can they really say?
In discussing how fewer and fewer mothers (yes, the inherently sexist expectation remaining that women should be the ones to prepare meals) are familiar with how to cook a quality repast, Miller posits it is because they are “busy doing nothing all day, which is to say–earning a living. Earning a living has nothing to do with living. It’s the belt line to the grave, without a transfer or a stopover. A one-way passage via the frying pan and the cookerless cooker. A child is an accident–bad rubber goods or else too much drink and recklessness. Anyway, it’s there and it has to be fed. You don’t bake bread for accidents, do you?” No, but you do bake it when you suddenly have the surfeit of free time never in the history of the modern U.S. workday afforded to the typical American slave. You bake it for yourself, when suddenly you wanted to be comforted by something that actually tastes not just good, but at all. The average artificially inseminated (with hormones) piece of bread being so brittle and absent of any flavor, other than that of a “faint” chemical one. When the Americans all at once unearthed this newfound abyssal spiral of time, baking bread came to the forefront of how to occupy one’s hours. And it had nothing to do with paying homage to that I Love Lucy episode, “Pioneer Women,” and everything to do with trying to rebuild the meaning of one’s life, for so long dictated by the false yarn of American “values.”
Miller adds that the American decision to constantly make improvements for a machine to play a role in our everyday lives has led to this utter destruction of the United States resident’s taste buds. He remarks, “Day by day, the morons, epileptics and schizoids multiply. By accident, like everything else. Nothing is planned in America except improvements. And all improvements are for the machine. When a plenum is reached war is declared. Then the machine really gets going. War is a Roman Holiday for the machine. Man becomes even less than nothing then. The machine is well fed. The food products become plastics and plastics are what make the world go round. Better to have a good steering wheel than a good stomach. In the old days an army advanced on its stomach; now it advances in tanks or spitfires or super-fortresses. Civilians never advance.”
If they do, it is for the sole profit of insurance companies and other such enterprises preying upon human misery. And so, as though reaching out over the confines of time and space, Miller urges us, “Let’s not forget, it’s bread we want–and children that are not accidents brought about by defective rubber or bathtub gin. How to get it? Bread, I mean. By putting a monkey wrench in the machine. By going backwards on all fours, like giraffes with broken necks. By praying for life now and not hereafter. By exercising freedom and not inventing four, five or six freedoms won by the slaughter and starvation of twenty or thirty millions. Begin today by baking your own bread. First of all you need a stove. A wood or a coal stove. Not a gas range. Not an electronic apparatus. Then let the flies in. Then roll your sleeves up and get your hands in the dough. Lick your fingers. Never mind if you lose your job. Eat your bread first, then maybe you won’t want to work in an office or a factory.” Of course, asking the modern American to use a wood or coal stove would be asking for far too much.
To speak on a level that the “good Christians” will understand–for it is they who still run the country with their voting tendencies, Miller reminds, “Life begins with bread. And a prayer. Not a begging prayer, but a prayer of thanks… God wants you to enjoy the bread of life. He never meant you to go all day working at a job you loathe so that you can buy a loaf of store bread wrapped in cellophane.” For added eerie prophecy cachet, Miller expounds, “God gave us germs as well as air and water and sun. Germs only attack what is already rotting. Man is rotting in every fibre of his being: that is why he is a prey to germs. And that is why he is allergic to everything that is for his own good.” Namely, unprocessed bread.
This is, at the core of the trend, the subliminal reason for this sudden shift back to an “analog” way of existence (that was never intended to be stamped out in the first place for the sake of “convenience”–and even in Europe baking never gave way to the complete surrender to machinery). Countless American slaves-turned-“bakers” explained that this simple, even if involved act helped them regain a sense of control over their lives, gave them purpose and pleasure in a way that the eight-hour workday never had. The therapeutic process of actually making something was also further heightened by the fact that it could be shared with others (so long as they were corona-free, one supposes). Further, there was the tactility of it, the kneading and the repetitive motion requiring more of your wrist and hands than a mere click of the mouse or clacking of the keyboard.
And yet, do not count on the American sustaining this way of life after “things return to normal” (again, they won’t). After all, “the real American seems born with an indifference to food. One can serve a white American food which would make an Igorot turn up his nose. Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish.” It’s difficult to retrain the U.S.-born brain after so many centuries (at the bare minimum, going back to the cuisine of the Civil War, or further still, to the very first Thanksgiving) of muck-eating, but it’s nice that they could briefly savor what real taste was, if only for a small period in the quarantine timeline.
Miller concludes that the American penchant for bragging over horrendous accomplishments they call progress extends into packing their food with all manner of artificial ingredients. He illuminates the dichotomy, “All the food advertisements boast of the vitamin contents of their products. All the medicaments advertised boast of their cure of everything under the sun. It is obvious that our foods lack the proper vitamins, just as it is obvious that in employing these health foods so rich in vitamins we nevertheless are afflicted with all the diseases known to man. We die young, mortgaged to the hilt, insolvent…” But at least the stale, hard bread of the standard American loaf can be repurposed into a DIY coffin when they all grow tired of baking. Or no longer have “time” for it when forced to “make a living” that leads to their premature death.
