What is bread? Something to eat, something to bake, something to break. In this book, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a philosophical inquiry and an accessible survey of the many manifestations of bread, in our daily lives and beyond. This book offers a unique approach, integrating the lived experience of bread, incorporating musings and reflections on bread by the author as he kneads and bakes his way through various loaves. Carving paths between food studies, critical inquiry, and cultural history, Shershow examines bread as an object that, throughout the myriad details of its manufacture and social existence, is always in process of becoming something else—flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to crumb, and so forth.