The bread fetish

Over the last ten years or so the lifestyle media has turned breadmaking – at least, a certain approach to and enthusiasm for breadmaking – into a fashionable pose. It isn’t the first time this has happened – as part of the wholefood revolution it became quite vogueish in the 1970s as a complement to bohemian chic, only to be ousted by the hard-edged modernity of the following decade.

What I hadn’t really appreciated was just how far into popular culture the lifestyle status of breadmaking had penetrated. The other night I was watching the film The 40 Year Old Virgin. No, I know it’s not auteur cinema, but it was a Saturday night and I was at a lose end. At one point there is a dialogue between two of the male characters who are accusing each other, in the manner of oversexed teenagers, of being gay. “You know how I know you’re gay?” asks Seth Rogen of fellow star David Rudd. “I saw you make a spinach dip and a loaf of sourdough bread once.”

Only the following night Ben Stiller’s Zoolander was on. In a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it moment that reminded me of the Airplane! films, faddish supermodel Hansel (Owen Wilson) is seen unloading a rustic loaf from a wood-fired oven on a wooden peel. Although innocent enough in its own right, this scene is part of an unfolding sequence of visual gags taking aim at signifiers of the hipster lifestyle. The writers had clearly been reading their Roland Barthes. You can kind of see their point when you look at a book like Tartine Bread – a fine work, but with panoramic shots of surf-dude bakers taking time out from the kitchen, maybe a little too self-consciously cool.

But maybe I’m just jealous because I can’t grow a beard like those guys…