Henry Miller wrote a lot of very good books, and then he died in 1980.  This article about bread was written shortly after World War II.

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 twenty­four hours old which is good for nothing except perhaps to fill up a hole.  Good for target practice, maybe.  Or shuttlecock and shuffle board.  Even soaked in urine it is unpalatable; even perverts shun it.  Yet millions are wasted advertising it.   Who are the men engaged in this wasteful pursuit?   Drunkards and failures for the most part.  Men who have prostituted their talents in order to help further the decay and dissolution of our once glorious Republic.

Here is one of the latest widely advertised products: Hollywood Bread.  On the red, white and blue cellophane jacket in which it is wrapped, this last word in bread from the American bakeries, it reads as follows:

BAKED WITH whole wheat flour, clear wheat flour, water, non­diastatic malt, yeast, salt, honey, caramel, whole rye flour, yeast food, stone ground oatmeal, soya flour, barley flour, sesame seed, and a small quantity of dehydrated (water free) vegetables including celery, lettuce, pumpkin, cabbage, carrots, spinach, parsley, sea kelp, added for flavor only.

The only thing missing from this concoction is powdered diamonds.  How does it taste?  Much like any other American product.  Of course, this is a reducing bread of which one should eat two slices a day three times a day and not ask how it tastes.  Grow thin, as in Hollywood, and be thankful it doesn't taste worse.  That's the idea.  For several days now I have been trying to get a whiff of some of those ingredients?sea kelp especially?which were included "for flavor only."  Why they were not added for health too I don't know.  Naturally all these delicious­sounding items amount to about one ten­thousandth part of the loaf.  And on the second day, stale, flat and unprofitable, this marvelous new bread is not more attractive to the palate or the stomach than any other loaf of American bread.  On the second day it is good for replacing a missing tile on the roof.  Or to make a scratchboard for the cat.

The second day! If the first is given to creation, to light, let us say, the second (in America) is given up to garbage.  Every second day is garbage day in America.  I know because I have had lots to do with garbage.  I've hauled it, for pay, and I've eaten it upon necessity.  I learned to distinguish between one kind of bread and another by salvaging dry crusts from the garbage can.  I don't know which is worse?the day of creation, when everything turns to gas and bilge, with its concomitants dandruff, constipation, halitosis, false teeth, artificial limbs, psychic impotency, and so on, or the second day, given up to garbage, when all creation turns out to be nothing but a mirage and a disillusionment.  It has been said, and I have no doubt it is true, that the garbage accumulated by one big American city would feed certain of the little countries of Europe handsomely.  I know no quicker way to kill off the warring nations of Europe than to feed them our garbage.  The pygmies might thrive on it, possibly even the Chinese coolie, who is supposed to thrive on anything, but I cannot see the Danes, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Greeks, the Albanians, or the Austrians thriving on it.  No Sir.  I would sooner feed them buzzards than the left­overs from the American table.  Already, with our canned food products, our cold storage meat, our dehydrated vegetables, we have brought a tremendous deterioration in these sturdy people of Europe.  From these to the machine and thence to war is but a step.  Then, famine, plague, pestilence, dung heaps.  And monuments, of course.  All sorts of monuments.  Done by send or third rate artists.

The care and affection which once was bestowed on the human body now goes to the machines.  The machines get the best food, the best attention.  Machines are expensive; human lives are cheap.
Never in the history of the world was life cheaper than it is today.  (And no pyramids to show for it either.) How natural, then, that the staff of life should be utterly without value.  I begin with bread and I shall end with bread.  I say we make the foulest bread in all the world.  We pass it off like fake diamonds.  We advertise it and sterilize it and protect it from all the germs of life.  We make a manure which we eat before we have had time to eliminate it.  We not only have failed God, tricked Nature, debased Man, but we have cheated the birds of the air with our corrupt staff of life.  Everytime I fling the stale bread over the cliff I beg forgiveness of the birds for offering them our American bread.  Perhaps that is why they are not singing any more as they used to when I was a child.  The birds are pining and drooping.  It's not the war, for they have never participated in our carnages.  It's the bread.  The stale, flat, unprofitable bread of the second day.  It shortens their wing­span, weakens their umbrella­ribs, reduces the scope of their swoop, blunts their beaks, deteriorates their vision, and finally­it kills their song!  If you don't believe me, ask any ornithologist.  It's a known fact.  And how Americans love facts!

Another fact.  .  .  food, when it is not enjoyed, kills.  The best diet in the world is useless if the patient has no appetite, no gusto, no sensuality.  On the whole, Americans eat without pleasure.  They
eat because the bell rings three times a day.  (I omit mention of the clay eaters of the South and other poor whites who live on rats, snakes, and cow­dung.) They don't eat because they love food.  To prove it you have only to shove a glass of whiskey before them.  See which they reach for first! And now, with vitamins and all the other life­savers, food has become even less important.  Why bother trying to squeeze a bit of life out of our worn­out products of the soil?   Why pretend?   Throw anything down the hatch to stop the gnawing and swallow a dozen vitamins.  That way you'll make sure you've have your proper dose of the vital essentials.  Should the vitamins fail, see a surgeon.  From there to the sanitarium.  And from there to the nut­house?or the dung heap.  Be sure to get a Hollywood funeral.  They're the loveliest, the duckiest, the most sanitary, the most inspiring.  And no more expensive than ordinary ground burial.  You can, if you like, have your dear lost one propped up in a natural reclining position, her cheeks rouged, a cigarette to her lips, and a phonograph record talking to you just as she once talked to you in life.  The most wonderful fake imaginable.  Jolly, what?  O death, where is thy sting?  What's more, she can be kept that way for an unspeakably long period; the cigarette is guaranteed not to rot away before the lips or the buttocks.  You can come back and have a second, a third, a twenty­fifth look at the beloved.  Still smoking a cigarette.  Or you can have her reading a book, the Iliad, say, or the Bhagavad Gita?something uplifting like that.

I remember when I used to be served a slice of homemade bread with butter and sugar smeared over it.  Glorious days!  That bread really had a taste.  Schmect gut, nichtwahr?   Yah!  Sehr gut.  Wunderbar.  Ausgezeichnet.  With a piece of bread like that I used to sit and read Pinocchio or Alice Through the Looking Glass or Hans Christian Andersen or The Heart of a Boy.  Mothers had time in those days to make good bread with their own hands, and still do the thousand and one things which motherhood demands of a woman.  Today, they haven't time to do anything, and hardly a bloody mother in the bloody land knows how to bake a loaf of bread.  Mother gets up early now to work in an office or a factory.  She's 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 one­way passage via the frying pan and the cookerless cooker.  A child is an accident?bad rubber goods or else too much to drink and recklessness.  Any way, it's there and it has to be fed.  You don't bake bread for accidents, do you?   And why bother to produce milk from the breast when the cows are working over­time for the dairy companies of America?

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 super­fortresses.  Civilians never advance.  Civilians always rot and help make insurance companies richer.

But bread.  .  .  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 coal stove.  Not a gas range.  Not an electric 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.  Life begins with bread.  And a prayer.  Not a begging prayer, but a prayer of thanks.  Don't bless the block­busters.  Bless God for his favors?air, water, sun, moon.  God wants you to enjoy the bread of life.  He never meant you to go out all day working at a job you loathe so that you can buy a loaf of store bread wrapped in cellophane.  God gave us germs as well as air and water and sun.  Germs attack only 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.

Before Communism there was Communion and before that there was God and God said let there be light and there was light.  And what a glorious light it was.  It lasted for aeons, and then came the scientific age and darkness fell upon the land everywhere.  Now everything can be proved backwards and out of existence and instead of soaring with our own wings or on the backs of our giant birds we make things of metal and plastics which spread havoc and destruction in their wake.  We throw bones to the dogs and eat the dogs instead of the bones.  Not one step has been taken towards improving the flow of milk from the mammary glands.  Only mothers and wet nurses give milk, whereas with time and experimentation every one could give milk and the food problem would be solved for eternity.  We wouldn't even need to sit down to eat: now and then a step­ladder might be necessary, but nothing more.  Why hasn't any one thought of that?   It is so improbable?   Ants have their own milk cows?how did that happen?   Anyway, with human milk the universal food, with manna falling from heaven, and nectar and ambrosia for dessert, think what a lot of work would be eliminated.  Think too of the gratitude the animals would show, once they go on to the new scheme of things.  All we would need, men and animals, would be one huge grass plot.  No more dairy companies, no more containers, no more bottles, plates, knives and forks, spoons, pots, pans, stoves.  The solution of the food problem would throw a monkey wrench into the entire economic and social system; our mores would change, our religions would disappear, our money become valueless.  One can hardly imagine what the cause for war would then be; though doubtless a good excuse will always be found.

Outside of the foreign quarters, then, take it for granted that there is no good bread to be had.  Every foreign group has introduced into our life some good substantial bread, even the Scandinavians.  (Excepting the English, I should add, but then we hardly think of them as foreign, though why we shouldn't I don't know, for when you think of it the English are even less like us than the Poles or Latvians.) In a  Jewish restaurant you usually have a basket filled with all kinds of bread from which to choose.  In a typical American restaurant, should you ask for rye, whole wheat or any other kind of bread but the insidious unwholesome, and unpalatable white, you get white bread.  If you insist on rye bread you get whole wheat.  If you insist on whole wheat you get graham bread.  Once in a great while you come upon nut bread; this is always a sheer accident.  Raisin bread is a sort of decoy to lure you into eating unpalatable, perfidious and debilitating white bread.  When in doubt go to a Jewish restaurant or delicatessen; if necessary, stand up and eat a sandwich made of sour rye, sweet butter, pastrami and pickle.  A Jewish sandwich contains more food value than an eighty­five cent meal in the ordinary American restaurant.  With a glass of water to wash it down you can walk away feeling fit.  Don't sit down and eat a Jewish meal, because the Jews are bad cooks despite their great concern about food, which amounts to a neurosis.  It is curious, though, how the desire to survive has made the Jews keen about preserving the staff of life.  It is even more curious that they are just as riddled with disease as the other members of the community?more so, in fact, judging purely from personal observation.  They not only have all the physical ailments which other white peoples are heir to but they have all the mental and nervous ailments.  Often they have everything at once, and then they concentrate upon food with even greater acuity and despair.  It is only when they become revolutionary that they begin to lose their interest in food. 

The real American, on the other hand, though totally unrevolutionary at heart, seems born with an indifference to food.  One can serve a white American food which would make an Igorote 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.  On the other hand, olive oil which the French eschew when preparing salads because it has too strong a flavor, Americans hardly ever use in their salads.  Nothing on God's earth is more uninviting, more anemic, than the American salad.  At its best it is like refined puke.  The lettuce is a joke: even a canary would refuse to touch it.  This concoction, mind you, is usually served before the meal, together with the coffee which is cold by the time you are ready to drink it.  The moment you sit down at a table in the ordinary American restaurant, the moment you begin scanning the menu, the waitress asks you what you wish to drink.  (If by chance you should say "cocoa" the whole kitchen would be thrown out of gear.) To this question I usually counter with another: "Do you have anything but white bread?" If the answer is not a flat No, it is: "We have whole wheat," or "We have graham bread." Whereupon I usually mumble under my breath: "You can stick that up your ass!" When she says: "What did you say?" I reply, "Do you have rye bread by any chance?" Then, before she can say no, I launch into an elaborate explanation of the fact that I don't mean by rye bread the ordinary rye bread, which is no better than white, graham, or whole wheat, but a succulent, tasty, dark, sour rye such as the Russians and the Jews serve.  At the mention of these two suspect nationalities a scowl spreads over her face.  While she is saying in her most sarcastic voice that she is sorry but they do not have that kind of rye bread or any rye bread, for that matter, I begin asking about the fruit, what kinds of fruit, fresh fruit, they have on hand, knowing damned well that they haven't any.  Nine times out of ten her answer will be: "We have apple pie, and peach pie." ("Stick it up your ass!") "I beg your pardon?" She says.  "Yes, fruit...You know, the kind that grows on trees...apples, pears, bananas, plums, oranges. . . something with skin on it that you peel." Whereupon a light dawns and she hastens to interpolate: "Oh, but we have apple sauce!" ("Fuck your apple sauce!") "I beg pardon?" Here I look leisurely round the room, surveying the shelves, the counter, the pie plates.  Finally, resting my gaze upon a bowl of artificial fruit, I exclaim with glee: "Like that over there, only real!"
 
 
 

Henry Miller is currently looking down at you and smiling wide.