This post is based on a true story from my wife’s family. She is from southern France, and several of her family members, including a great aunt and uncle, were refugees from Spain in the broad context of the Spanish Civil War and early Francoist regime. Because of this background, they carried with them certain habits and values shaped by hardship, what can only be described as a “culture of poverty.” One of the most poignant and interesting of these legacies was that at one point my wife’s great aunt and uncle voluntarily ate stale, hard bread for most of their lives, even when they had fresh bread in the house.
To understand this, it helps to know something about Southern European bread culture. In France, Spain, and Italy, bread doesn’t typically mean the pre-sliced, plastic-wrapped loaves common in the U.S. and Northern Europe. Bread in Southern Europe generally means a preservative-free loaf, baked every day at the local bakery (the exact composition for typical loaves is even codified in French law). In these cultures, the texture of the bread is everything: a good loaf is hard and crackly on the outside but soft on the inside. If these loaves are sealed in plastic bags like American sandwich bread, the moisture equalizes between the interior and crust, and the entire thing becomes unappetizingly spongy. So this bread is always sold in paper, which keeps the crust crunchy, with the downside that within a day or so the bread will get dry and hard.
Some days my wife’s great aunt and uncle would do their shopping and pick up their usual loaf of bread, only to find upon returning home that for whatever reason they hadn’t finished their loaf from the previous day. And like many who live through poverty and hunger, they obeyed one cardinal commandment above all others: thou shalt not waste food. So they would eat the previous day’s loaf, lest it go to waste, before beginning the next one. There would inevitably be some of the new loaf left over, and the cycle would repeat the following day. As a result, most of the bread they ate in their lives was stale, hard, day-old bread. It is easy to imagine that through a slight tweaking of their preferences and choices, they could have foregone eating the old bread and found another use for it, and eaten the fresher, better bread every day. But their preferences were deeply ingrained, hard-coded by their early lives and lived experiences, as unchangeable as the color of their eyes.
There is perhaps a lesson in this for all of us. We may not eat old, hard bread, but most of us are probably doing irrational things that result from cultures and habits that we have unthinkingly inherited. Many of them are rational, logical choices given certain initial conditions, but these may be material conditions that no longer exist. This is true not just of individual behaviors, but entire cultures and ways of being. Some, like those of my wife’s family, are hard-coded, and we will never be able to change them or even think about changing them, for example Sam Harris once very insightfully pointed out that by all rational analysis, no one with alternative heating systems should be lighting a fire in their fireplace, and used this to explain to rationalist-atheists why some people still believed in God. Others may be preferences, heuristics, or automatic choices that with rational reflection we may realize are inefficient or wrong for the modern world, for example daylight savings time, office work, or the 40-hour workweek. As we go about our days, let us be critical in asking ourselves: what aspects of our cultures, what habits in our lives, are merely stale bread?
Whither the West? 