Out Now: Daily Bread!
Preorder your copy of Volume 6
Cake Zine friends,
Perhaps no food is more vital than bread—a daily staple that has sustained communities across generations and borders. It is the scaffolding of sandwiches, the mortar of social order, a cornerstone of religious customs. It is the foundation by which entire nations have risen and fallen. Bread is a symbol of necessity and faith, of sustenance and tradition. Life creates bread, and bread creates life.
We’re so excited to share that our sixth issue, Daily Bread, is available for orders now. It’s currently en route from our printer to our distributor, and we expect copies to start shipping by early March. We’ll be celebrating with a reading in NYC on March 6 (more details to come!), plus a few other exciting new event formats. In the meantime, the best way to support our independent work is to order a copy and share it widely.
For many, the rhythms of the everyday are marked by bread. Somewhere, an office worker is grabbing a morning bagel before heading to work to “get this bread,” a nun is making eucharist for the masses on a convent production line, a father is cutting off the crusts for his daughter’s PB&J, and a mysterious internet artist is smashing her face into a ciabatta.
While Daily Bread takes its name from the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament, we approach the ritualization of bread from a non-denominational perspective. In compiling this issue, we returned to the words of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.”
Just as slicing a wedding cake consecrates a union or smashing a bottle of champagne against a boat’s hull christens the voyage, bread must be broken to fulfill its purpose. We hope you will tear into these pages in search of nutrition, tradition, and subversion. At the core of any loaf is faith—the faith to imagine that the bread will rise as it should, to return to the kitchen after a failure, or to continue on when bread itself is out of reach. For all the meaning we can project onto a simple mix of flour and water, to us, bread’s most fundamental role remains clear: There can be no nation or congregation if people are not fed.
Amen,
Aliza Abarbanel, Tanya Bush, and Noah Emrich
Attend:
’s online workshop “What Is Food Writing?” on 2/11.Bake: A cardamom-spiced blackout cake from
that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day.Read: Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover is a new essay collection from Humble Pie contributor Sarah Perry.
Eat: A new dark chocolate bar from Compartes raising money for LA wildfire relief.
Register: Making and Breaking the Zine, a six-week in-person course in NYC hosted by Index Space. Registrations are live now.