I’ve been thinking a lot about food choices lately. I’m not doing that in judgmental way. I’m interested in which foods resonate and why. What counts as comfort food? Me, I’ve got a soft spot for white bread. See In defense of (some) white foods (some of the time). My fave form is toast with jam. That’s definitely a childhood memory thing. Here’s my thoughts about bread with jam in the form of ‘hotel toast.’ This originally appeared in a zine (remember those?) called Philosophers on Holiday, edited by Peg O’Connor and Lisa Heldke. It’s from volume V, number 1-2, summer/fall, 2001.
Philosophers on Holiday is a quarterly ‘zine launched in the summer of 1997 as the “hippest, nowest, coolest thing in the philosophical travel-and-leisure genre.” After the free inaugural issue, people actually subscribed. This just encouraged us to do more, and so we offer selected articles from our print edition here in cyberspace, filling yet another void in the field of philosophical travel and leisure. We borrow our motto from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein suggests that philosophical problems emerge when we forget how words function in ordinary circumstances. When language “goes on holiday,” we create our own thorny, knotty problems–and then we proceed to chew on them for a thousand years or so. Our ‘zine was born out of our recognition that when philosophers go on holiday, we also tend to thrum up thorny little problems that keep us worrying all the way across Montana. Philosophers, unleashed in the ordinary world, are dangerous–or, at the very least, highly amusing. Of course on a good day, we can also be rather insightful. (Paying way too much attention to the ordinary can produce real wisdom every once in awhile.) Philosophers On Holiday attempts to bring all things philosophical and holiday-related together in one place; the danger, the amusement, the bumbling, and, yes, the occasional pearl of wisdom.
In Newfoundland, where I lived from the age of 4 to 11- having emigrated from England with my baker parents and baby sister- the locals called it “fog bread”. White, wispy, insubstantial. Mass-produced, eerily free of mould for weeks on end. The bread of choice for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as well as such more traditional favourites such as bologna and mayo or margarine and sugar.
