The Loaf That Launched a Thousand Takes

A £45 loaf has given the internet something to chew on. What happens when the price of food becomes its most shareable ingredient?

Nobody needs to taste a £45 loaf of bread to have an opinion about it. That is its genius, and possibly the whole problem. Before anyone has described the crust or the sourness of the rye, the price has done the travelling. You can resent it, defend it or send it to a friend with a row of crying-laughing faces. Every one of those responses gives the loaf another audience, including, I am aware, the one reading this.

The loaf lives at Rye by Martin Auer in New York’s SoHo, where a whole rye sourdough costs $60, roughly £45. In fairness to the bread, which has barely been allowed a word in, it is a substantial thing, weighing around 1.5kg, with halves and quarters available. Those details matter, even if they travel rather less efficiently than the headline. Nobody has ever gone viral for mentioning the portion size.

The Washington Post’s reviewer admired the bread. Around it sits the theatre: a boutique-like interior, carefully displayed loaves and an $80 cap bearing the word “RYE”. You can eat the bread and wear the affiliation, which is more than any sourdough has previously asked of me.

Bread has entered the same territory as a pair of Gucci loafers. There is the quality of the thing itself, and then there is the badge: what owning it tells other people about your taste. You can see it in the loaf on the dinner table, the bakery bag on the kitchen counter and the photograph in the feed. A $60 loaf is not really a purchase; it is a status update with a crust. Even something we tear apart and eat can do the social work of a label.

I meant the loafers as a metaphor. Rye’s online shop has taken them literally. Alongside the bread and that cap are $230 knives, $290 toasters and $160 leather loafers. Bread, homeware and clothing are brought together under a baker’s name, in a miniature department store with a loaf as its anchor product. The bakery used to sell bread. Now the bread sells the bakery.

That is the shift that interests me most. The product attracts attention; the person behind it becomes someone whose taste we might follow. If you trust the baker to make your bread, perhaps you will trust the world built around him to furnish your kitchen or dress you for breakfast. Expertise becomes influence, with something tangible at its centre. The baker’s name can carry a recommendation across several departments, and I suspect plenty of influencers will try the same trick with far less craft behind them.

Meanwhile, the baker becomes a master tailor, working with flour and a mother culture instead of cloth. A craft we were used to calling humble gets the lighting, language and reverence of luxury. I have no quarrel with the skill, which was always there. What has changed is how it is displayed, priced and circulated.

This is where I part company with the sneering. There is a real appetite underneath all this. For those of us brought up on soft, standardised supermarket bread, a dark crust and a deep, nutty flavour can feel like a rediscovery. The convenience of the sliced loaf helped distance many of us from bread with character: the chew, the fermentation, the way its flavour changes when toasted. Perhaps some of the yearning is for that missing pleasure, however extravagantly it is now packaged. The sliced loaf made bread easy to forget; the $60 loaf has made it impossible to ignore.

The feed adds another layer. You cannot taste rye through a phone, but you can understand £45 immediately. The price becomes a reason to stop, comment or film a verdict. Whether or not anyone planned the controversy, the argument becomes part of the product’s public life. Even people who would never buy it help introduce it to someone who might. The feed cannot tell us what anything tastes like, so it tells us what it costs, and we have learnt to crave accordingly.

The book I’m writing in public starts from one idea. We used to eat from the earth. Now we eat from the feed. So I can’t look at a viral loaf without asking whether all that attention could lead us back to the field.

Andy Cato, the musician and Wildfarmed co-founder, is someone I intend to explore this with as part of Eat Your Screen. Wildfarmed has built a recognisable brand around regenerative farming and taken its bread into supermarkets. That complicates the story nicely: the supermarket, so often cast as the villain of this particular tale, can also be a route back to bread we care about.

A £45 loaf gets our attention. The question is not really whether it is worth the money. It is where that attention goes next, whether to the label, the baker or the soil, and that is the bigger story.

Will London get its own version? I’d bet on it.

The first purchase might be for the story. The second has to earn its place at breakfast.

Read next: Wendell Berry Saw the Screen Coming

Eat Your Screen is a book being written in public about food, the feed and what’s still worth eating. Subscribe for the free Dispatch, every other Tuesday, and you’ll be told the moment each new chapter lands.