Ready-Sliced Bread

BEFORE the comfortable relaxation of middle age came to ease the tension of the moral armor I used to keep tightly buckled on, it always produced in me a sense of guilt to hear virtuous housewives say that their work was finished by ten in the morning.

Too well I knew that bits of my own straggled on and, with luck, were done by 10 P. M. Each new day found me all set miraculously to turn into one of those orderly women who waste no precious moments over the breakfast table, but earn a later leisure by marvels of well-planned work. Now I know — and the acknowledgment is the most infallible sign of the passing of youth — that I shall never be that kind of woman.

More reprehensible still, I know that I do not want to be. Midday leisure, won by a frantic exit from the breakfast table, would not compensate me for the nefarious loafing over a second cup of coffee and the newspaper. Nor for that glorious ‘alone at last’ feeling that can be had at no other time of day. Even after the paper has been exhausted I sit shamelessly on, enjoying my inconsequential, but uninterrupted, thoughts.

These idle musings seldom result in anything concrete, but this morning I was enchanted to find that one of my daily grouches had its roots in something deeper than a personal and material irritation. The general implication of the matter stood out for the first time. For an endless series of mornings I had been excavating the bread that ‘human hands had never touched’ from its adhesive and sanitary wrappings to find huge, ready-cut wedges in place of the uncut loaf I had expressly ordered. The doors of my electric toaster fell open over the massive slices; the faces of my family fell when they saw them. When I bit into my soggy piece I tried hard not to think of the cosy references in some of my favorite novels to crisp, wafer-thin buttered toast. It was no use — the grocer was incorrigible. Of course he had to unload on me, who did not want it, because of the large stock he carried for the ninety and nine others who did.

After the breadwinners — unsliced is what they’re after — had left, I sat on trying to argue myself out of my annoyance by thinking that, no matter how thick they slice it, it is still bread, and I don’t yet have to stand in line to get it. Then suddenly I realized that it was not just an unpalatable hunk of toast that was weighing on my spirit — and stomach. It was the tendency that lay behind this laborsaving mania and the depths to which it might ultimately take us. The dietetic dilemma alone is appalling. The old ‘groaning board’ has been abandoned. It was too well named. But won’t there be groaning spirits and an utter lack of festivity at the meal resulting from the marketing of a woman who stood beside me in a chain store yesterday? She bought her meat in a can and her soup, biscuits, cereals, and dessert all prepared, except for turning on the faucet and lighting the gas oven. A feeling of nausea seized me. Calories there might be, but certainly no charm.

I have no quarrel with the woman who must buy everything ready prepared because her job of providing it leaves her no margin of time or strength. But so many of the buyers of ready-to-eat foods have no valid reason. It all boils down to a dislike of effort, and the energy they save goes into exactly nothing at all. More time to play bad contract and see worse movies. The very thing that makes them evade a reasonable amount of work and thought is what makes them satisfied to play a mediocre game and choose the poorer movies. When we get flabby from letting someone else do everything for us our mental muscles will be involved too.

Someone will rise to defend the prepared foods as an economy. They can’t be. Work is always paid for. In order to finish Lamb in His Bosom I stole all of one blissful day, in which everything went straight from the package to the table. It was worth it, — for one day and such a book, — but the results to the housekeeping budget were unfortunate and the patient tolerance of the family could not be faced every day. Also my New England ancestors exacted their usual toll in a feeling of wickedness that I had expended no effort on my bounden duties. I have put those ancestors far enough in the background of my mind so that I do not feel more virtuous for having engaged in unnecessary toil. I shall not spend hours in concocting the tricky foods the women’s magazines and the radio domestic experts suggest, but I know that living out of cans and packages will undo something in me and in my home.

Food is only one of a thousand things handed to us in a shape that precludes the need of thought, work, or ingenuity. We get our opinions ready-made, our music, our amusements. We are even saved the trouble of reading. Does not the Reverend Mr. So-and-So review books for us every week over the radio, and is n’t it just as easy to discuss the book after hearing his condensed version of it? As for comparing the editorials of different papers or articles in various magazines and forming one’s own conclusions on public questions, is n’t it much better to get the whole mass digested for us in that weekly lecture at the club? Why bother to keep up one’s scales when some of the best concert pianists may be heard on the air so often? The whole thing is trying to obviate the necessity for that slow process of education which should, and occasionally does, result in learning to think.

I am coming to fear this modern trend that is bringing us gifts of predigested food and thought, and to find the persons who follow it exceptionally dull. There is an objectionable goose-step in their mental gaits. We try to pep up life with this and that artificial stimulant, but I strongly suspect that the flavor would still be there if we put more of ourselves into it — worked out our own philosophy of both labor and pleasure and were not forever in the attitude of dropping a penny into the slot.