Pacific Standard: The Science of Society<\/a> How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? Ask a trivial question, get a profound, heartbreaking answer. The coffee shop, called the \u00a0Red Door<\/a>, was a spare little operation tucked into the corner of a chic industrial-style art gallery and event space (clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Evernote, Google) in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves\u2013the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a standalone item\u2013at $3 per slice.<\/p>\n It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better.<\/p>\n A couple of weeks later I was at a place called \u00a0Acre Coffee<\/a> \u00a0in Petaluma, a smallish town about an hour north of San Francisco on Highway 101. Half of the shop\u2019s food menu fell under the heading \u201cToast Bar.\u201d Not long after that I was with my wife and daughter on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, and we went to \u00a0The Mill<\/a>, a big light-filled cafe and bakery with exposed rafters and polished concrete floors, like a rustic Apple Store. There, between the two iPads that served as cash registers, was a small chalkboard that listed the day\u2019s toast menu. Everywhere the offerings were more or less the same: thick slices of good bread, square-shaped, topped with things like small-batch almond butter or apricot marmalade or sea salt.<\/p>\n Back at the Red Door one day, I asked the manager what was going on. Why all the toast? \u201cTip of the hipster spear,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I had two reactions to this: First, of course, I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly \u00a0San Francisco<\/em>, this toast. And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. How many weeks would it be, I wondered, before artisanal toast made it to Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? How long before an article appears in Slate telling people all across America that they\u2019re making toast all wrong? How long before the backlash sets in?<\/p>\n For whatever reason, I felt compelled to go looking for the origins of the fancy toast trend. How does such a thing get started? What determines how far it goes? I wanted to know. Maybe I thought it would help me understand the rise of all the seemingly trivial, evanescent things that start in San Francisco and then go supernova across the country\u2013the kinds of products I am usually late to discover and slow to figure out. I\u2019m not sure what kind of answer I expected to turn up. Certainly nothing too impressive or emotionally affecting. But what I found was more surprising and sublime than I could have possibly imagined.<\/p>\n \u201cFlaunting your wealth has been elevated to new lows,\u201d wrote the author, Jolie O\u2019Dell. \u201cWe don\u2019t go to the opera; we overspend on the simplest facets of life.\u201d For a few weeks $4 toast became a rallying cry in the city\u2019s media\u2013an instant parable and parody of the shallow, expensive new San Francisco\u2013inspiring thousands of shares on Facebook, several follow-up articles, and a petition to the mayor\u2019s office demanding relief from the city\u2019s high costs of living.<\/p>\n The butt of all this criticism appeared to be The Mill, the rustic-modern place on Divisadero Street. The Mill was also, I learned, the bakery that supplies the Red Door with its bread. So I assumed I had found the cradle of the toast phenomenon.<\/p>\n I was wrong. When I called Josey Baker, the\u2013yes\u2013baker behind The Mill\u2019s toast, he was a little mystified by the dustup over his product while also a bit taken aback at how popular it had become. \u201cOn a busy Saturday or Sunday we\u2019ll make 350 to 400 pieces of toast,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n But Baker assured me that he was not the Chuck Berry of fancy toast. He was its Elvis: he had merely caught the trend on its upswing. The place I was looking for, he and others told me, was a coffee shop in the city\u2019s Outer Sunset neighborhood\u2013a little spot called \u00a0Trouble<\/a>.<\/p>\n THE TROUBLE COFFEE &<\/strong> \u00a0Coconut Club (its full name) is a tiny storefront next door to a Spanish-immersion preschool, about three blocks from the Pacific Ocean in one of the city\u2019s windiest, foggiest, farthest-flung areas. As places of business go, I would call Trouble impressively odd.<\/p>\n Instead of a standard cafe\u00cc\u0081 patio, Trouble\u2019s outdoor seating area is dominated by a substantial section of a tree trunk, stripped of its bark, lying on its side. Around the perimeter are benches and steps and railings made of salvaged wood, but no tables and chairs. On my first visit on a chilly September afternoon, people were lounging on the trunk drinking their coffee and eating slices of toast, looking like lions draped over tree limbs in the Serengeti.<\/p>\n The shop itself is about the size of a single-car garage, with an L-shaped bar made of heavily varnished driftwood. One wall is decorated with a mishmash of artifacts\u2013a walkie-talkie collection, a mannequin torso, some hand tools. A set of old speakers in the back blares a steady stream of punk and noise rock. And a glass refrigerator case beneath the cash register prominently displays a bunch of coconuts and grapefruit. Next to the cash register is a single steel toaster. Trouble\u2019s specialty is a thick slice of locally made white toast, generously covered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar: a variation on the cinnamon toast that everyone\u2019s mom, including mine, seemed to make when I was a kid in the 1980s. It is, for that nostalgic association, the first toast in San Francisco that really made sense to me.<\/p>\n Trouble\u2019s owner, and the apparent originator of San Francisco\u2019s toast craze, is a slight, blue-eyed, 34-year-old woman with freckles tattooed on her cheeks named Giulietta Carrelli. She has a good toast story: She grew up in a rough neighborhood of Cleveland in the \u201980s and \u201990s in a big immigrant family, her father a tailor from Italy, her mother an ex-nun. The family didn\u2019t eat much standard American food. But cinnamon toast, made in a pinch, was the exception. \u201cWe never had pie,\u201d Carrelli says. \u201cOur American comfort food was cinnamon toast.\u201d<\/p>\n The other main players on Trouble\u2019s menu are coffee, young Thai coconuts served with a straw and a spoon for digging out the meat, and shots of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice called \u201cYoko.\u201d It\u2019s a strange lineup, but each item has specific meaning to Carrelli. Toast, she says, represents comfort. Coffee represents speed and communication. And coconuts represent survival\u2013because it\u2019s possible, Carrelli says, to survive on coconuts provided you also have a source of vitamin C. Hence the Yoko. (Carrelli tested this theory by living mainly on coconuts and grapefruit juice for three years, \u201cunless someone took me out to dinner.\u201d)<\/p>\n The menu also features a go-for-broke option called \u201cBuild Your Own Damn House,\u201d which consists of a coffee, a coconut, and a piece of cinnamon toast. Hanging in the door is a manifesto that covers a green chalkboard. \u201cWe are local people with useful skills in tangible situations,\u201d it says, among other things. \u201cDrink a cup of Trouble. Eat a coconut. And learn to build your own damn house. We will help. We are building a network.\u201d<\/p>\n If Trouble\u2019s toast itself made instant sense to me, it was less clear how a willfully obscure coffee shop with barely any indoor seating in a cold, inconvenient neighborhood could have been such a successful launch pad for a food trend. In some ways, the shop seemed to make itself downright difficult to like: It serves no decaf, no non-fat milk, no large drinks, and no espressos to go. On Yelp, several reviewers report having been scolded by baristas for trying to take pictures inside the shop with their phones. (\u201cI better not see that up on Instagram!\u201d one reportedly shouted.)<\/p>\n Nevertheless, most people really seem to love Trouble. On my second visit to the shop, there was a steady line of customers out the door. After receiving their orders, they clustered outside to drink their coffees and eat their toast. With no tables and chairs to allow them to pair off, they looked more like neighbors at a block party than customers at a cafe\u00cc\u0081. And perhaps most remarkably for San Francisco, none of them had their phones out.<\/p>\n Trouble has been so successful, in fact, that Carrelli recently opened a second, even tinier location in the city\u2019s Bayview neighborhood. I met her there one sunny afternoon. She warned me that she probably wouldn\u2019t have much time to talk. But we chatted for nearly three hours.<\/p>\n In public, Carrelli wears a remarkably consistent uniform: a crop top with ripped black jeans and brown leather lace-up boots, with her blond hair wrapped in Jack Sparrowish scarves and headbands. At her waist is a huge silver screaming-eagle belt buckle, and her torso is covered with tattoos of hand tools and designs taken from 18th-century wallpaper patterns. Animated and lucid\u2013her blue eyes bright above a pair of strikingly ruddy cheeks\u2013Carrelli interrupted our long conversation periodically to banter with pretty much every person who visited the shop.<\/p>\n At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. \u201cI did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,\u201d she said. \u201cI wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.\u201d<\/p>\n The smallness of her cafe\u00cc\u0081s is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it\u2019s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. \u201cNo one can be mad at toast,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Carrelli\u2019s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a cafe\u00cc\u0081, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism\u2013a specialized tool\u2013designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.<\/p>\n EVER SINCE SHE WAS<\/strong> \u00a0in high school, Carrelli says, she has had something called schizoaffective disorder, a condition that combines symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolarity. People who have it are susceptible to both psychotic episodes and bouts of either mania or depression.<\/p>\n Carrelli tends toward the vivid, manic end of the mood spectrum, she says, but the onset of a psychotic episode can shut her down with little warning for hours, days, or, in the worst instances, months. Even on good days, she struggles to maintain a sense of self; for years her main means of achieving this was to write furiously in notebooks, trying to get the essentials down on paper. When an episode comes on, she describes the experience as a kind of death: Sometimes she gets stuck hallucinating, hearing voices, unable to move or see clearly; other times she has wandered the city aimlessly. \u201cSometimes I don\u2019t recognize myself,\u201d she says. \u201cI get so much disorganized brain activity, I would get lost for 12 hours.\u201d<\/p>\n Carrelli\u2019s early years with her illness were, she says, a blind struggle. Undiagnosed, she worked her way through college\u2013three different colleges, in different corners of the country\u2013by booking shows for underground bands and doing stints at record stores and coffee shops. But her episodes were a kind of time bomb that occasionally leveled any structure in her life. Roommates always ended up kicking her out. Landlords evicted her. Relationships fell apart. Employers either fired her or quietly stopped scheduling her for shifts. After a while, she began anticipating the pattern and taking steps to pre-empt the inevitable. \u201cI moved when people started catching on,\u201d she says. By the time she hit 30, she had lived in nine different cities.<\/p>\n Like a lot of people with mental illness, Carrelli self-medicated with drugs, in her case opiates, and alcohol. And sometimes things got very bad indeed. Throughout her 20s, she was in and out of hospitals and periods of homelessness.<\/p>\n One day in 1999, when Carrelli was living in San Francisco and going to school at the University of California-Berkeley, she took a long walk through the city and ended up on China Beach, a small cove west of the Golden Gate. She describes the scene to me in stark detail: The sun was flickering in and out of intermittent fog. A group of Russian men in Speedos were stepping out of the frigid ocean. And an elderly man was sitting in a deck chair, sunbathing in weather that suggested anything but. Carrelli struck up a conversation with the man, whose name was Glen. In a German accent, he told her that people congregated regularly at China Beach to swim in the ocean. He had done so himself when he was younger, he said, but now he just came to the beach to sunbathe every day.<\/p>\n Carrelli left San Francisco shortly thereafter. (\u201cEverything fell apart,\u201d she says.) But her encounter with the old man made such a profound impression that five years later, in 2004\u2013after burning through stints in South Carolina, Georgia, and New York\u2013she drove back across the country and headed for China Beach. When she arrived, she found Glen sitting in the same spot where she had left him in 1999. That day, as they parted ways, he said, \u201cSee you tomorrow.\u201d For the next three years, he said the same words to her pretty much every day. \u201cHe became this structure,\u201d Carrelli says, \u201ca constant.\u201d<\/p>\n It was perhaps the safe distance between them\u2013an elderly man and a young woman sitting on a public beach\u2013that made Glen relatively impervious to the detonations that had wiped out every other home she\u2019d ever had. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t kick me out,\u201d Carrelli says. She sat with her notebooks, and Glen asked her questions about her experiments with strangers and coconuts. Gradually, she began to find other constants. She started joining the swimmers every day, plunging into the Pacific with no wetsuit, even in winter. Her drinking began to taper off. She landed a job at a coffee shop called Farley\u2019s that she managed to keep for three years. And she began assiduously cultivating a network of friends she could count on for help when she was in trouble\u2013a word she uses frequently to refer to her psychotic episodes\u2013while being careful not to overtax any individual\u2019s generosity.<\/p>\n Carrelli also found safety in simply being well-known\u2013in attracting as many acquaintances as possible. That\u2019s why, she tells me, she had always worked in coffee shops. When she is feeling well, Carrelli is a swashbuckling presence, charismatic and disarmingly curious about people. \u201cShe will always make a friend wherever she is,\u201d says Noelle Olivo, a San Francisco escrow and title agent who was a regular customer at Farley\u2019s and later gave Carrelli a place to stay for a couple of months. \u201cPeople are taken aback by her, but she reaches out.\u201d<\/p>\n This gregariousness was in part a survival mechanism, as were her tattoos and her daily uniform of headscarves, torn jeans, and crop tops. The trick was to be identifiable: The more people who recognized her, the more she stood a chance of being able to recognize herself.<\/p>\n But Carrelli\u2019s grip on stability was still fragile. Between apartments and evictions, she slept in her truck, in parks, at China Beach, on friends\u2019 couches. Then one day in 2006, Carrelli\u2019s boss at Farley\u2019s Coffee discovered her sleeping in the shop, and he told her it was probably time she opened up her own space. \u201cHe almost gave me permission to do something I knew I should do,\u201d she recalls. It was clear by then that Carrelli couldn\u2019t really work for anyone else\u2013Farley\u2019s had been unusually forgiving. But she didn\u2019t know how to chart a course forward. At China Beach, she took to her notebooks, filling them with grandiose manifestoes about living with guts and honor and commitment\u2013about, she wrote, building her own damn house.<\/p>\n \u201cGiulietta, you don\u2019t have enough money to eat tonight,\u201d Glen said, bringing her down to Earth. Then he asked her a question that has since appeared in her writing again and again: \u201cWhat is your useful skill in a tangible situation?\u201d<\/p>\n The answer was easy: she was good at making coffee and good with people. So Glen told her it was time she opened a checking account. He told her to go to city hall and ask if they had information on starting a small business. And she followed his instructions.<\/p>\n With $1,000 borrowed from friends, Carrelli opened Trouble in 2007 in a smelly, cramped, former dog grooming business, on a bleak commercial stretch. She renovated the space pretty much entirely with found materials, and with labor and advice that was bartered for, cajoled, and requested from her community of acquaintances.<\/p>\n She called the shop Trouble, she says, in honor of all the people who helped her when she was in trouble. She called her drip coffee \u201cguts\u201d and her espresso \u201chonor.\u201d She put coconuts on the menu because of the years she had spent relying on them for easy sustenance, and because they truly did help her strike up conversations with strangers. She put toast on the menu because it reminded her of home: \u201cI had lived so long with no comfort,\u201d she says. And she put \u201cBuild Your Own Damn House\u201d on the menu because she felt, with Trouble, that she had finally done so.<\/p>\n GLEN\u2013WHOSE FULL NAME<\/strong>was Gunther Neustadt, and who had escaped Germany as a young Jewish boy with his twin sister during World War II\u2013lived to see Trouble open. But he died later that year. In 2008, Carrelli became pregnant and had twins, and she named one of them after her friend from China Beach.<\/p>\n That same year, after having lived in her shop for months, Carrelli got a real apartment. She went completely clean and sober, and has stayed that way. She started to hire staff she could rely on; she worked out a sustainable custody arrangement with her children\u2019s father. And Trouble started to get written up in the press. Customers began to flock there from all over town for toast and coffee and coconuts.<\/p>\n The demands of running the shop, caring for two children, and swimming every day allowed Carrelli to feel increasingly grounded, but her psychotic episodes hardly went away; when they came on, she just kept working somehow. \u201cI have no idea how I ran Trouble,\u201d she says. \u201cI kept piling through.\u201d In 2012, after a five-month episode, Carrelli was hospitalized and, for the first time, given the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. Under her current treatment regimen, episodes come far less frequently. But still they come.<\/p>\n At bottom, Carrelli says, Trouble is a tool for keeping her alive. \u201cI\u2019m trying to stay connected to the self,\u201d she says. Like one of her old notebooks, the shop has become an externalized set of reference points, an index of Carrelli\u2019s identity. It is her greatest source of dependable routine and her most powerful means of expanding her network of friends and acquaintances, which extends now to the shop\u2019s entire clientele. These days, during a walking episode, Carrelli says, a hello from a casual acquaintance in some unfamiliar part of the city might make the difference between whether she makes it home that night or not. \u201cI\u2019m wearing the same outfit every day,\u201d she says. \u201cI take the same routes every day. I own Trouble Coffee so that people recognize my face\u2013so they can help me.\u201d<\/p>\n After having struggled as an employee in so many coffee shops, she now employs 14 people. In an almost unheard of practice for the cafe\u00cc\u0081 business, she offers them profit-sharing and dental coverage. And she plans on expanding the business even further, maybe opening up to four or five locations. With the proceeds, she hopes to one day open a halfway house for people who have psychotic episodes\u2013a safe place where they can go when they are in trouble.<\/p>\n WHEN I TOLD FRIENDS<\/strong> \u00a0back East about the craze for fancy toast that was sweeping across the Bay Area, they laughed and laughed. (How silly; how twee; how \u00a0San Francisco<\/em>.) But my bet is that artisanal toast is going national. I\u2019ve already heard reports of sightings in the West Village.<\/p>\n If the spread of toast is a social contagion, then Carrelli was its perfect vector. Most of us dedicate the bulk our attention to a handful of relationships: with a significant other, children, parents, a few close friends. Social scientists call these \u201cstrong ties.\u201d But Carrelli can\u2019t rely on such a small set of intimates. Strong ties have a history of failing her, of buckling under the weight of her illness. So she has adapted by forming as many relationships\u2013as many weak ties\u2013as she possibly can. And webs of weak ties are what allow ideas to spread.<\/p>\n In a city whose economy is increasingly built on digital social networks\u2013but where simple eye contact is at a premium\u2013Giulietta Carrelli\u2019s latticework of small connections is old-fashioned and analog. It is built not for self-presentation, but for self-preservation. And the spread of toast is only one of the things that has arisen from it.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, I went back to Trouble because I hadn\u2019t yet built my own damn house. When my coconut came, the next guy at the bar shot me a sideways glance. Sitting there with a slice of toast and a large tropical fruit, I felt momentarily self-conscious. Then the guy said to the barista, \u201cHey, can I get a coconut too?\u201d and the two of us struck up a conversation.<\/p>\n This post originally appeared in the \u00a0January\/February 2014<\/a> \u00a0issue<\/em> \u00a0of<\/em>Pacific Standard<\/a> \u00a0as<\/em> \u00a0\u201cA Toast Story.\u201d For more, consider \u00a0subscribing<\/a> \u00a0to our bimonthly print magazine.<\/em>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You might think the following article is about the psychology behind wacky food crazes, and it is. But it isn’t. But it is, at a much deeper level than you think. It is very worthwhile to read and contemplate. Don’t read this article here. Read it on the Pacific Standard website instead. \u00a0There you will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n A Toast Story
\nBY JOHN GRAVOIS – January 13, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/toast-1-300x192.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nAll the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare\u2013blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line at an unfamiliar cafe\u00cc\u0081\u2013was the way he did it. He had the solemn intensity of a Ping-Pong player who keeps his game very close to the table: knees slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, eyes suggesting a kind of flow state.<\/p>\n![\"toast-3\"](\"http:\/\/d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/toast-3.jpg\")
<\/a>IF THE DISCOVERY OF<\/strong>artisanal toast had made me roll my eyes, it soon made other people in San Francisco downright indignant. I spent the early part of my search following the footsteps of a very low-stakes mob. \u201c$4 Toast: Why the Tech Industry Is Ruining San Francisco<\/a>\u201d ran the headline of an August article on a local technology news site called VentureBeat.<\/p>\nIt was perhaps the safe distance between them\u2013an elderly man and a young woman sitting on a public beach\u2013that made Glen relatively impervious to the detonations that had wiped out every other home Giulietta had ever had. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t kick me out,\u201d she says.<\/h3>\n
![\"toast-2\"](\"http:\/\/d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/toast-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m wearing the same outfit every day,\u201d Carrelli says. \u201cI take the same routes. I own Trouble Coffee so that people recognize my face\u2013so they can help me.\u201d<\/h3>\n
The trick was to be identifiable: the more people who recognized her, the more she stood a chance of being able to recognize herself.<\/h3>\n
\n