Miss Lettie’s Bread Manifesto

(as overheard outside Fran and Fanny Fern’s Florist)

Miss Lettie had her scooter parked crooked outside Fran and Fanny Fern’s Florist, right where it half-blocked the ramp like always. Thursday evening bourré was on break. The Fern sisters ran it tight in the back room. Lettie was busy digging through a small, brown paper bag that had been reused so many times it looked more like soft leather.

Zora walked up, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

“Hey Miss Lettie, you winning today?”

“Oh, not yet,” Lettie replied, squinting into her bag. “But I got a couple tricks left to play. You want a piece of bread? I brought a big one.”

Zora wrinkled her nose. “No thanks, Miss Lettie. I don’t eat bread.”

Lettie froze. “Whatcha mean, you don’t eat bread?”

“Don’t play dumb. You know carbs aren’t good for you. Besides, diabetes runs in my family, and I don’t wanna catch it.”

Lettie turned fully, one eyebrow lifted high enough to challenge gravity. “I know no such thing. People been eatin’ bread, or some form of cooked flour, for millennia. Nobody worried about numb toes back then. Next you’re gonna tell me my grapes are sugar.”

Zora smirked. “Grapes are sugar. Everybody knows sugar’s bad.”

“No honey,” Lettie said, pulling out a thick slice wrapped in cloth. “Earliest man lived on fruit they found and meat they hunted. Our DNA exists on it. Even before vegetables. Vegetables gotta be replanted every year unless you get lucky. Fruit just shows up. Nature gives it to you.”

Zora glanced at the bread. “I guess that makes sense. But why are people getting allergic to things we’ve always eaten?”

“They ain’t eating what we always ate,” Lettie said flatly. “They eatin’ bleach and caramel colorin’, not real bread. This bread here? It’s alive. Yeast that comes straight out the air, finds the flour and water, and starts gobblin’ it up. Gobbles the gluten too. This is what humans were made to eat.”

Zora tilted her head. “But white bread’s been around forever, right?”

“That nonsense started in the Victorian era. Hoity-toity folks thought their bread should be white as snow. So they got what they wanted, but it wasn’t flour. It was chalk.”

Zora stared. “Chalk? Come on.”

“I’m serious as a fox in a henhouse. People wound up with balls of plaster in their bellies. It’s a crime against humanity what they’ve done to bread, a basic human right. Oh sure, man doesn’t live by bread alone... you need beer too. Or wine. Or just clean water, if you can find any.”

Broom the dog wandered by just then, sniffed Zora’s shoes, and flopped onto the florist’s porch. Lettie didn’t miss a beat.

“You ever seen them old Roman mosaics? Folks sittin’ around eatin’ grapes, olives, cheese, maybe a bit of fish, and a hunk of bread to sop it all up. If we ate like that, we wouldn’t be cryin’ about blood sugar.”

Zora took a breath, hesitated.

“Maybe they didn’t live long enough to get diabetes back then… ‘cause they didn’t have antibiotics.”

Miss Lettie gave her a long look, folded the bread back into its napkin, and rolled her bag up.

“Antibiotics didn’t fix nothin’. They just bought us time. And the bill’s comin’ due.”

She started her scooter, turned toward the florist’s door, and added, “I’ll be inside whoopin’ Fran and Fanny. If you change your mind, this bread’s got your name on it.”

Zora watched her go, lips pressed tight. She still wasn’t touching the bread, but she wasn’t laughing it off, either.

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