Our
Daily Bread charmingly weaves together the customs, rituals, anecdotes, legends
and sayings that tell the story of bread, from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, to
the Far East, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the New World.
Matvejević
shows how bread is depicted in literature and art (with beautiful
illustrations) and examines especially closely the role of bread in the major
world religions, drawing from the Bible, Talmud and Quran, but also at various
apocryphal texts.
In
his seventh and last chapter, his narrative moves to the personal, explaining
what motivated him to write this book; the lean years of his childhood during
World War II and his father’s detention in a German concentration camp. Warning
about the pending threat of hunger in the “developed world,” the book fittingly
ends with a quote from the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin: “The question of
bread must take precedence over all other questions.”