My Bread & Butter

On the Complexity of Carbs

It must have been in the early 90s when I first became aware of The Atkins Diet. My sister, who’d been hospitalized for bulemia and depression in high school, was on it. There were three of us girls, all in college and living at home together that summer for the last time.

In the morning before heading out for her summer job, my sister would pack her lunch in Ziploc bags: Three hard-boiled eggs, several strips of thick-cut bacon, packets of string cheese. When she was home for dinner, she made herself a gigantic salad or pan-fried steak.

It should be said that around the time the eating disorder began, she’d put on some weight but was still petite. She was always on some diet or another and that summer probably under 100 lbs. She was also irritable and not very nice to live with; mostly we stayed clear of each other.

My mother clucked at her eating habits, and fretted about her in general, having been the one to check her in to a pediatric psych ward—at my sister’s own request, to be clear—five years before. But the thing about The Atkins Diet, now that I look back on that particular mother-daughter dynamic: for a Korean mother, watching your daughter eat large quantities of fatty meat, eggs (a luxury in South Korea during the war), and lots of vegetables while simultaneously slimming down—no matter her daughter’s state of mind—is a kind of twisted ideal situation. In my experience, Korean girls in the eyes of their mothers and aunties are always either too fat or too skinny, eating too much or not enough. If Atkins had only known, he might have made a killing with ethnic marketing.

As for me, I was a voracious omnivore. One of my cousins nicknamed me “Eating Girl.” At age 5, I ate my first of many Big Macs to come, every bite of it. We were suburban kids of the 80s: We ate Stouffer’s frozen pizzas, Kraft Mac & Cheese, instant ramen, Thomas’ English Muffins, Twinkies and Entenmann’s powdered donuts, McDonald’s at least once a week. We also ate Korean food regularly, at home and at church (rice rice rice). Of course we didn’t know what a carb was until Atkins came along.

I too put on a hunk of weight—a precocious “freshman fifteen”—in high school; but the idea of cutting bread out of my life or even caring about the shape of my body never occurred to me. I was “the brainy one” (my sister was the pretty one, our middle sister the funny one) and lived almost completely in my head, pathologically (in retrospect) disconnected from and unaware of my body. I have both family trauma (that’s for a future post) and a relatively high metabolism to credit for this and for the blissful ignorance of eating thoughtlessly for many years, until my 40s.

I discovered baking in my early teens—a Joy of Cooking pineapple upside down cake I managed to pull off is still legendary in the family lore—but didn’t take it up seriously until my late 30s. I’ve never had a sweet tooth and still squinch my nose at hard candy, cake frosting, syrupy pancakes or supersweet fruit (like pineapples). What I love—to bake and to eat, in countless variations and possibilities—are bread and butter.

In my mid 30s I started eating fancier things, like scones, and pies you didn’t buy in the frozen section of Safeway, and giant delectable cookies that were neither dry and crunchy (Oreos or Girl Scout cookies) nor grainy and cakey (Keebler Soft Batch). I was new enough to eating these kinds of artisanal goods; the idea that you could make them?

A friend of mine whose mother and grandmother were lifelong bakers showed me one day how to make pie crust. It involved cold cubed butter and plunging my hands into a bowl of flour (measured out the “spoon and level-off” way) to squeeze the cubes into the dough with my fingertips. Add ice-cold water and continue to gather and fold the dough—this miraculous process called kneading—until it just holds together… et voila!

The tactility was a revelation. Before I had only used spatulas and electric blenders. It was weird at first, like this messy inelegance couldn’t possibly be right; but then, that smell, of cinnamon and butter while the pie baked, and that first bite of warm flaky-layered perfection...

In fact they were far from perfect, my first pies, scones, and biscuits; but when you were going from old-school processed stuff to simple ingredients you’d shaped by hand, fresh-out-of-the-oven… all was forgiven. I didn’t even know that “flaky” was the verbiage for that holy grail of orgasmic deliciousness, the magic of flour and butter manipulated just so at the right temperature, then popped into 350-degree heat for 45 minutes.

It’s cliché, I know; but a warm, buttery, bready baked good is not “just food.” If your mother or partner or friend made it for you, it’s love. If you made it for yourself, it’s self-love.

But wait: which is “old school” — the ultra-processed stuff, or back-to-basics home baking?

Exactly.

Isn’t it fascinating—the sliding scale of what we mean by “old school”? There is always, continually, a “new old school.” My peers and I look at certain packaged foods and their branding—Hostess and Little Debbie’s, Count Chocula and Fruity Pebbles, Hamburger Helper and the Hamburgler—as old school. Iconic. With fondness, a measure of disbelief/disapproval, and whatever memories and deeper emotions they happen to conjure.

Home baking for my friend was old school—the way her mother and her mother’s mother before her produced treats and goodness for the family. For me it was revelatory and wondrous. Even in the same generation, one person’s old school can be another’s new old school. I just needed a bridge, an open door, to bring my own newness.

It can be a killer combo, the new-old alchemy. The process of discovery, together with a singular, soulful embrace of a recognized meaning and value, synthesizes in an exhilarating or provocative way. You could argue this as a definition of all sublime art. (Harken back to “The First Post” — in which we landed on just this note.)

It stands to reason that the new-old alchemy is not in itself a recipe for magic; that a soulless, low-value counterfeit of an artful new old school can be forged. There’s a lot of trendy “retro” happening in the marketplace that may or may not be worth anyone’s while. We will each, appropriately, have our own opinions about worth—the perennial “What is art?” question.

My own hunch is that the secret sauce is the self-love. Paradoxically, the beauty and value of your offering to the world may be most profoundly rooted in the way it nourishes your own soul. That first pineapple cake was a performance—of someone else’s traditional idea—more than an act of love. It was people-pleasing, sure; but it wasn’t something I wanted to eat, and I never made it again.

One’s primary livelihood is still sometimes referred to as their “bread and butter”—the staple they can rely on. It’s used more and more in the past tense, when that livelihood is under threat or obsolete, e.g. For decades, stay-at-home moms were the bread and butter for cookbook sales; now, they’re marketing their own recipes and creating their own brands online. In this case cultural evolution is progress; women who are primary caregivers in the home are becoming financially and creatively empowered.

Cookbooks have also evolved, and sales are up: The pandemic baking craze, social-media influencers, the rise of celebrity chefs (mostly male) and competition shows, and recipe books that incorporate storytelling, art photography, and specialty skills made accessible have all converged to create an “all ships rise” phenomenon in the home-cook industry. There’s a lot of new-old-school energy at its best in the baking world. You could say that bread and butter¹ are back, baby…

In my little corner of the world, however, not quite. Diabetes runs in my family; my closest friend eats gluten and dairy free to battle chronic auto-immune conditions; and my partner is both a science and fitness professional, wary of complex carbs. I have spent many hours on Sunday afternoons experimenting with butter substitutes and non-wheat non-flours, keeping company with the best of the GF/DF/Keto online bakers. I have done so with optimism and gusto.

Despite my own insistent proclamations of success—It’s pretty good! You can hardly tell!—I am in fact deflated by these efforts. What I love is what I love. The low-carb thing is perfectly fine qua its own thing, but it’s not what I love. When you try to substitute for your love, you wind up with pragma not philautia².

Elimination diets make me sad. Whether as a matter of life and death, or fad or moral stance or road to healing or addiction management or disease prevention; the sadness is there. I’m in my 50s now, and not anti-science, so I understand the very good and sometimes imperative reasons for ceasing to put certain things in one’s body. Knowledge empowers us to make healthful choices, and my rational brain supports that.

But I suppose the old-school temperament is a slightly melancholic one. Not nostalgia exactly, but a nagging suspicion that technology wielded without reflection—modern medicine included—is harshing our vibe. And I wonder if vibe isn’t these days undervalued as an (old school) health factor.

Cancel culture—another prevailing trend of modernity—also makes me sad. That’s a much bigger topic for another time, but my point is that eliminating and canceling can both be life-giving and self-expanding, or hyper-controlling and diminishing. At its best, modern technology expands our knowledge base and is additive to what we know experientially and intellectually, not a 1:1 replacement. Carbohydrates are not the only complex matter here.

Drink red wine, don’t drink red wine; coffee is good, coffee is bad; more mammograms, too many mammograms (same with protein). My doctor once told me to stop eating almonds and spinach—which were supposed to be superfoods for women my age (fiber, calcium, good fat)—because they increase the risk of kidney stones. Almonds and spinach? I thought I was going to lose my mind.

We are whole beings, corporeal and incorporeal, and we exist in dynamic physical and cultural circumstances. When health professionals parcel out the physical body into disassociated compartments and systems, then make recommendations in that same siloed way, we are subject to science at its worst. “Studies show” has to my mind become one of the most dangerous phrases in the Internet age; because a scientific study, by definition of a valid scientific process, isolates a single factor and “controls for variables.” We may not like to feel out of control, but we do better healthwise to accept that life is variables.

If it’s old school to mistrust “the experts,” the new old school has got to be about resisting the echo-chamber effect in an oversaturated information marketplace. You can always look for what you want to find—you will find it—and clutch it in your fist as the One Truth. I want to eat bread and butter in peace, so I found this and this (yes, there are data-supported arguments that bread and butter are good for you). My sister wanted a certain body type, so she found Atkins and later Keto. Now of course the jury is out on GLP-1s.

The new old school has got to be about discovery, integration, and individual choice— incorporating new data dynamically, engaged in our own wide-angle life journeys. The highest cause is to make conscious and creative pivots. It’s got to be a big tent, not a zero sum exclusive umbrella under which we all hover through the storm. It’s got to be about experience and process over finite measurements or marketable outcomes.

My partner and I play morbid “what if” games. What if you had to give up croissants in order to live past 60? What if you could only have either donuts OR coffee for the rest of your life? It’s a coping thing, as we manage aging and mortality. We are preparing for the imperfections, the compromises, the reality that something—many things—will have to give, and that longevity and pleasure may become increasingly incompatible.

Note that I say “longevity” and not “health.” Living long and living well may be correlated, but they are not equivalent.

There was little pleasure in our childhood. But we did have the privilege of choices when it came to food. My sadness about the choices my sister made has to do with her motivations being most likely trauma-based, not health-based. When I consider my present-day sadness about no-carb regimens, I have to ask myself what else is going on there for me.

I taught college students for many years, and at one point they began declaring they would not read Hemingway or Emerson³ or Annie Proulx (among others) because they were offended by their gender attitudes. The sadness I felt in the face of their elimination diets was, if I’m honest, a kind of loneliness. Those writers were my literary bread and butter. Their craft, their vision of human existence, their raw courage—all this gave me comfort, inspiration, and pleasure. It still does. I suppose my creative pivot is now to sit with, examine, and make meaningful work of that loneliness—slowly and attentively, in the new-old-school spirit.

Today, I’m doing this. It’s a long, slow rise.

Rye loaf, a little overproofed. 405g carbs per loaf or approx 40 carbs per slice.

1. Excited about Anna Stockwell’s new cookbook, The Butter Book, out March 2026.

2. Pragma: practical love, based on duty, obligation, or logic. Philautia: self-love, referring to how a person views themselves and how they feel about their own body and mind. Via Dictionary.com, “8 Greek words for love”

3. Warning: You will be hearing more about Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson here at TNOS.