Toast

When I was in second grade, the Food Pyramid was still gospel. At one point, we had to draw and illustrate a menu for a day that had the proper number of all of the daily requirements.

Now, keep in mind that my ideal of a balanced meal at this point was probably alternating peanut butter and honey sandwiches with my peanut butter and jellies. Turns out that you actually needed to eat a lot of “bread group,” and I was running out of new starches to slip into my menu, so I figured that you could just eat two slices of toast with breakfast instead of one.

My teacher didn’t think so. No, she said, that had to be different things – a single tater tot on the side of your lunch would do the trick, but apparently not another slice of bread in the same sitting.

So, I went back my desk and did my best to draw “n” pieces of breakfast toast. I was only 7, so n=19, which is still a lot of toast to draw with a crayon.

Skip ahead 20+ years: Amelia and I had a dinner party last weekend, and one of the leftovers was a half a round of Roman bread a foot and a half wide. So, for breakfast the next morning, I had a single piece of toast eighteen inches long and an inch think. Only one serving of bread though -- take that Ms. Dalton.