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The Symbolism of Bread

Paul van Reyk

As part of my study for the Masters in Gastronomy, I wrote about the symbolism of bread and asked whether its symbolism was unique to it or a Western expression of more pervasive symbols. My interest focused particularly on bread as symbolic of physical and spiritual nourishment and enrichment and more potently what I called life givingness, through the deployment of the transformative processes of baking and ingestion.

Australian poet Dorothy Hewitt's songWeevils in the Flour is a good place to begin. "For dole bread is bitter bread, bitter bread and sour; there's grief in the taste of it, there's weevils in the flour." Here, the grief of the unemployed during the Depression is kneaded by them into the loaf that they bake, and the bread itself becomes bitter and sour. Then the grief is eaten again by them in a vicious circle. At first this looks like a striking inversion of the association of bread with nourishment, physical and spiritual. Then Hewitt states something marvellous as the song continues, "But men grew hard as iron upon that bread so black and sour." It's an inversion of an inversion where from grief and oppression comes strength and from contamination comes nourishment.

A more potent example of the symbolism of bread is in the Catholic mass. In the act of transubstantiation the host, the wafer of bread that is taken during communion, becomes the body of Christ. Bread becomes not just physically life giving but spiritually life giving. This is a strong example of what James George Frazer in The Golden Bough termed contagious magic, where some aspect of one object is transferred into another through the two things being brought into contact in some way. Here, like in Dionysian rites, the worshipper is ingesting god and so is taking on some of the nature of god. In an article that appeared in Slow Magazine Dominique Prédali suggests that, to some extent, monastic prescriptions against waste carry this weight of meaning. She describes particularly the monastic practice of collecting crumbs of bread at the end of a meal and recycling them as soups, pancakes and pudding, a Spanish version of the latter being made at Christmas for the poor and called las migas del niño or the crumbs of baby Jesus.

Piero Camporesi among others has pointed to the sexual symbolism of bread. In his book The Magic Harvest Camporesi claims that, "Bread serves as an emblem of both male and female reproductive organs, and edible metaphor of the phallus and the vulva, both in the (feminine) ellipsoid loaves and in the numerous loaves of phallic form". Is this an extension of bread as life-giving symbol? The phrase "She's got a bun in the oven" is still used of a pregnant woman. Taking a loaf with Camporesi, semen could be wheat seed that has been transformed after much grinding of millstones/ thighs, mixing with various fluids, baking in the oven/womb into the foetus/loaf.

But what is it about bread that allows it to be symbolically life giving? After all, we don't need bread to live. Camporesi talks of bread as a symbol of "life in perpetual regeneration . . . of the continuity of existence". But I think he is missing something. Focusing only on baking and ingestion throws too narrow a light. I believe it is not bread per se that is carrying the meanings, but the whole cycle from planting to eating. In fact, not until the bread is eaten can the cycle be complete.

Let me draw a parallel. A traditional English folk song tells the tale of John Barleycorn. John is the barley plant, more particularly the barley seed. In the song men come into the field and cut down John Barleycorn, then beat him (threshing), grind him between two stones and bung him in a vat, effectively killing him. The punch line, though, is that John Barleycorn "lives to tell tale, for they pour him out of oaken vat and they call him nut brown ale". This is a story of resurrection, as of course are the stories of Christ and of Persephone.

The common thread in all of this is the cycle from seed to plant to product, through which the properties of this whole cycle are incorporated into the human consumer through contagious magic. To the pre-scientific mind the transformation of seed under the earth into grass, of flower into seed again, of powdered seed and water into a pulpy lump must have seemed miraculous. Why wouldn't anyone want to take in that magical power by eating the product?

If my view is correct, then one might expect to find that where bread is not the staple something else has taken its symbolic place. In The Rice Book Sri Owen looks at the culture and myths of rice and finds parallels to the bread stories. The Bagobo of Mindanao have a story about Mebuyan, who, refusing to follow her brother to explore the sky, sank instead into the earth, scattering rice as she went, and still remains under the earth. This is similar to the story of Persephone. In a Javan myth about the origin of rice a young goddess, Dewi Sri, was saved from rape at the hands of one god by being killed by other gods. They buried her body, and from it grew rice. Owen notes that Dewi Sri is now the spirit of fertility and increase, protectress of rice fields. The Lamet people of Laos believe that rice alone among all plants has a soul, and they line the roads to their fields with altars and flowers so the soul can find its way there in time for the harvest.

Margaret Visser also draws attention to the soul within rice. She recounts a Thai custom where the purchaser of rice gives back a handful of grain to the farmer, the grain being the soul of the rice that must "impregnate" next year's crop. According to Visser, for the Thai rice is "like mother's milk, white and pure nourishment from maternal womanhood". The soul in rice--the khwan--has this nourishing property. "The khwan in a person is nourished by his or her mother before birth, by her milk after birth, and by rice thereafter."

Equally, I believe, the soul in the wheat seed is eternally nourishing when we eat bread.