The Endorsement: Toast

Sometimes I eat toast for breakfast. And then again for lunch and dinner. I think toast is yummy and there are parts that get stuck in my teeth, therefore it is also healthy. By this reasoning I should eat Butterfingers for every meal, but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about toast!

First, let's discuss the substrate*. There are classes of toast, from fresh challah to week-old Wonderbread, which has the consistency of the dingy plastic food you find in a box of toys at the pediatrician's office. Each has its place and time, none more important than the other because even dry wheat toast, the boring know-it-all of the toast world, has a niche. If you think about it, there's a caste system to toast, which leads us directly to the epitaxial layers.

Challah gets special treatment - no margarine or jam from tiny foil packets for him! We're talking ricotta with honey and cinnamon, or fresh whipped sweet cream butter and homemade marmalade. Stale Wonderbread gets the crap jobs - kids' grilled cheese sandwiches that won't be eaten because kids (in this house) hate food. And margarine. Margarine, I'm convinced won't cling to anything except nice dress shirts and cheap white bread. The upper echelon toasts shun margarine like the plague. I rather like that analogy, actually. Margarine equals The Plague.

Toast can be a meal at any hour of the day. It can soothe, nourish, tease, or compliment. It's eaten by children in between vomiting up pink jelly beans, it's eaten by fancy guys of ambiguous sexuality in exclusive clubs. From beans and toast, to toast with images of the Virgin Mary. There's a reason the penultimate moment of a wedding or joyous feast is called The Toast. It's the water and wine of food.

So let's hear it! Three cheers for toast!

*That's a fancy word for toast that I've dredged up from my past life. I've decided to recycle some of these useless syllables, otherwise I just picture them hanging around my brain like engineers hang out at company parties. Which is to say, antisocially because they talk about things like substrates and epitaxial layers.