white bread

1990. My best friend Christina sat across from me in the Cherry Hill elementary school cafeteria. From her brown bag she pulled chips in a zipless plastic baggy and a bologna sandwich on Grandma Sycamore’s white bread. Before eating, she spread the flaps on her tiny milk carton so it was ready to go. To drink. With her bologna sandwich. I can comprehend the appeal of drinking milk with brownies or cookies but certainly not with actual food. Milk’s highest purpose is to accompany cereal, preferably Wheat Chex, Quaker Crunchy Corn Bran, or Big Biscuit Shredded Wheat smeared with strawberry jam.

White bread is powerful. In the 1940s, when my dad hopped off the school bus in front of his mother’s house in rural Canada, he often smelled her homemade white, pillow-soft rolls coming to life in the oven. His friends followed their noses to his house, too, where they enjoyed roll after roll doused in butter and jam.

Back to lunch. I can’t bring to mind one single home lunch I brought, so dominant was my white-bread envy. Mine was a 95% whole-wheat family (except Sundays). 

We had simple dinners during the week, but Sundays Mom cooked feasts with plenty of leftovers. These she packed in styrofoam to-go boxes for my dad’s weekday lunches that he heated in his office microwave at the university where he taught. Usually we could find leftovers to munch in the hours after school before my parents got home from work. 

But bread. Sundays, Mom baked six loaves of French bread in between meetings of our three-hour church service. After meeting number one, zip home and mix the dough, leave it to rise during church meeting number two. After meeting number two, return to shape the dough into loaves, leave it to rise in the pans during church meeting number three. After church, bake. I loved being the first one to nip into a loaf, watching the crumbs firework all over the counter while sawing through the firm, crunchy crust, then slather butter on the soft, spongy inside and watch it melt in. 

Mom, an Austrian immigrant, is a butter-on-bread woman. Example: Mom and Dad like eating at Patsy’s pizzeria when visiting us in New York City—pepperoni pie and family-style siciliana salad, hold the anchovies. Patsy’s is also known for serving oversized crusty rolls to dip in olive oil sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. Mom does not want to dip her roll in olive oil. The lady wants butter. After our server said they didn’t have butter for rolls, I ran to the grocery next door and bought an entire box. 

Mom was born in northern Romania in 1945, just before the end of the war. Her Jewish parents fled Vienna around 1938 to hide in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine). After the war, they returned to their home in the Soviet sector of Vienna, but living conditions shadowed by a brewing Cold War pushed them to immigrate to the U.S. in 1950 and settle in East Hollywood.

There, she discovered Wonder Bread—cottony, fluffy, and sweet. When she went to a friend’s house, she snacked on Wonder Bread slick with margarine. At her house, her friends loved my grandmother’s heavy, seeded, dark German-style bread topped with butter. I’m sure part of the Wonder Bread appeal for my mom was its Americanness—important for fitting in, acclimating to her new country and language. But by the time she had us kids decades later, she was all in for whole wheat bread. As am I with my kids. Despite my childhood longing for Grandma Sycamore’s, I buy Dave’s Killer whole-wheat seeded bread. My boys, apparently, are overly desperate for white bread.

At the beginning of the pandemic during my long nights of doom scrolling, I saw an experiment designed to highlight the virtues of handwashing. A teacher instructed students to touch many surfaces, after which one group of the students wiped their hands on a piece of bread. The second group used hand sanitizer before wiping their hands on a different slice of bread, and the third group washed with soap and water before touching their slice. Each slice of bread was put in a labeled plastic bag (including one untouched piece as a control) and were left at room temperature for a week. When the students saw the mounds of mold growing on the unwashed-hands bread and very little on the washed-hands bread, they were immediately and forever converted to happy-birthday-twice handwashing.

So in my deep-anxiety phase of early Covid, I found the perfect way to teach my boys—then seven and four and congenitally compelled to touch every piece of litter, garbage can, handle, and public surface—why I insisted they wash their hands so often. Bonus: They love disgusting things and experiments so it was clearly the right activity for us.

They accompanied me to buy a loaf of white bread (better color contrast with mold) and we set off. Touch all the gumball machines on our way out of the grocery store? Yes! Let’s palpate the MTA fare machines, the door handles of the Catholic church up the hill, the door handles of our building, every railing and store handle we pass, the newspaper dispenser, and the ATM buttons. The boys squealed with delight with permission to lay hands on everything, the complete opposite of my instructions over the previous weeks.

At home, we repeated the steps I saw on Instagram and laid our labeled bread baggies on the counter next to the fridge, ready for science to do its thing. Though we waited for nearly two weeks, we didn’t see one spec of anything growing on the bread (should have spritzed them with water first). I went to bed thinking over our failed experiment. 

The next morning I emerged from my bedroom to prep the kids for turning off the TV. Since we stayed up late (see doom scrolling, above) and they woke up freakishly early, we set out bowls of cereal on a blanket in front of the TV, as if they were puppies who loved watching PBS Kids. I wandered over to the kitchen for a drink of water and noticed that each bag of Covid science bread was empty.

“Hey, guys,” I said casually, holding up a torn-open plastic baggy, “what happened to the experiment bread?”

“I ate it!” bubbled my seven-year-old.

I was not prepared for this radical twist in my brilliant plan. Was he so deprived of white bread that our weeks-old germ bread was too appetizing to resist? My boys were learning the exact wrong lesson—we touched everything and wiped our grimy hands on the bread and the bread is fine! Germs are fake! Our mom is a weirdo! Also, white bread, YUM!

I said nothing more. No point. The bread was already well into his digestive system. It would probably be just fine, I told myself, but I still crossed my fingers that the bread’s preservatives and my son’s gut bacteria would knock out any microscopic muck and I wouldn’t have to explain to the pediatrician why my asthmatic son was sick with Covid.

I’m not so rigid about bread these days. I regularly buy white bread to entice my children to eat PB&J because sometimes you just need them to eat the damn PB&J. Last time I visited my mom, she bought four loaves of Kneaders chunky cinnamon white bread to make French toast. And you know what kind of bread Christina buys now? Whole wheat.