"Bread for the Road": Intersections of Food and Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador‪.‬

BREAD IS A STAPLE worldwide, (1) but in Newfoundland and Labrador (2) it has special significance. In this article I argue that by the twentieth century bread pervaded Newfoundland culture more thoroughly than any other food. Although cod was once the backbone of the economy and remains the province's most iconic food, bread touched all aspects of life. As anthropologist Carole Counihan discovered in Sardinia, bread is "the nexus of economic, political, aesthetic, social, symbolic, and health concerns" and "a particularly sensitive indicator of change" (Counihan 1999: 29). In the following pages I explore how bread in all its forms (homemade bread, hardtack, fried bread, bread pudding, etc.) was integral to Newfoundland food systems, sustained and shaped men's and women's labour, helped define gender, contributed to physical and psychological well-being, and now represents a marker of cultural loss. Support for my assertion of bread's primacy comes from a range of published and unpublished sources, but in particular from the collections of Memorial University's Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). (3) Established in 1968, MUNFLA is Canada's foremost repository for recorded and collected items of Newfoundland and Labrador folklore, folklife, language, oral history, and popular culture. The majority of the more than 11,000 contributors who have donated materials to MUNFLA did so as students enrolled in undergraduate folklore courses. The present research draws heavily on one aspect of the archive's collection: folklore survey cards that students completed as part of folklore courses from the mid-1960s to the present day. These brief bits of folklore that students collected from family and friends, or remembered from their own past, now represent a wealth of information on everything from turns of phrase and remedies to children's games and supernatural beliefs. Although survey cards are valuable in determining the presence, and often pervasiveness, of certain beliefs and practices, they frequently provide only minimal contextual information so that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine the exact time period of a collected item. Most of the survey cards that inform this article date from a 10-year period, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and report on material remembered from the first half of the twentieth century.