BEEN THINKING ABOUT… OUR DAILY BREAD. “Give us this day our daily bread….” The rains were heavy that spring of my 16th year, and the gooseberry brambles plentiful with green fruit. Dark skies blocked out the May sun and I kept my worn-out green flannel shirt close by, wet-tinged breeze still biting as I threw hay to the goats. I was old for my years and far too young, unsure of myself, and staring down the barrel of a world that didn’t quite square with who I was.
“Honk, honk, honk!” Our neighbor Cindy was driving her green Tahoe up our long driveway, backseat crowded with her three boys who had rapidly become my three best friends, back of the Chevy also packed with leftover food pantry bread. After years of near-isolation doing homeschool with my parents, our farm neighbors next door had broken a long drought. Prior, my friends were elderly couples old enough to be my grandparents, and my goats and dogs. It was a peaceful life, but there was a certain liveliness that seemed missing. The Holloways filled that missing piece, and also filled the back of our pickup truck with bread every week. Cindy ran the local Assembly of God food pantry on Fridays and brought home all the leftovers, mostly more bread than any two families could eat in a week. They fed their critters lots of bread. And we also fed ours.
“The staff of life,” Cindy was yelling, “You’re disrespecting the staff of life!” The boys and I were having a bread fight in the yard as the goats and chickens trailed us around, eating scraps. The Holloways were true Ozarkers from Madison County, Arkansas. They said grace before each meal. Built a sod house in their garden. Kept a barnyard full of critters much like we always had (though I don’t think we ever misplaced a pet possum in our basement like they did). In many ways, my mom found a kindred spirit in Cindy, two mountain expatriate souls otherwise lost in a sea of generic white collar wives.
The boys and I were too busy to listen as we were sticking blueberry bagels onto my pygmy goat’s horns and letting the other goats chase her around. Real life came in sudden doses. Years of comparative isolation melted away. We built a stile over the five strands of barbed wire that had kept out the world prior and the boys were down nearly every afternoon, ostensibly to help with something barnyard-related or to learn Spanish, though we usually just devolved into a variety of games. It turned out to be the only summer I nearly found my abs as I was expending so much energy keeping up with them.
But I was also eating a lot of bread and getting an unexpected education in modern food in the process —
We had never had bagels before and we microwaved them instead of toasting, spreading on copious amounts of cheap margarine. We tried out fancy bread we would never have bought, things like Hawaiian rolls and Kaiser rolls with sesame seeds, and marbled caraway rye. Suddenly we were eating like the rich folks, so to speak, notwithstanding my dad had a good job and we could have afforded such things (we just didn’t because my mom was too frugal). Besides, the food pyramid in my textbook posited a diet rich in “grains,” and low in meat. What could go wrong? It was also an era in which we were told repeatedly that eggs were bad but vegetable oils were good.
Reality has a way of breaking through rhetoric, at least for the curious. By 20, I gave up margarine for butter in order to take care of what appeared to be Raynaud syndrome. I had not been officially diagnosed though the symptoms lined up. After six months of butter, the symptoms went away and never came back.
In real time, I had experienced the adage, “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food” (Hippocrates, 400 BC). I systematically removed anything with trans fat from my diet and began looking for ways to take care of my asthma. Needless to say, I was successful and gained additional distrust of a food-and-drug industrial complex that seemed content to make money with little real regard to our health. The very real overreach of that same complex compels me to remind readers that — “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration [and are not] intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”
Heaven forbid we take care of our bodies with God-given food and remain healthy — or even worse, no longer require medical treatment. The simple fact that, even now, I have to add a legal disclaimer about eating — and benefiting from — real food is more of a statement about a ridiculous system than anything I could addend.
Perhaps it was inevitable I would continue to study, would continue to grow food in our gardens, would continue to learn what actually worked for the human body. I realized wheat flour from Italy impacted the digestive system far less than American-grown wheat, which suggests that we aren’t gluten-intolerant but instead glyphosate-sensitive (the herbicide is heavily restricted in Europe). I learned real sourdough bread doesn’t have the same impact on blood sugar that regular white bread does. That vine-ripened fruits and vegetables contain many more antioxidants than the same products picked green. That Ayurvedic spices are sacred for a reason. That we should not “blame salt for what sugar did” (Dr. James Dinicolantonio). That soybean oil is weird and grass-fed beef is good. And that you should never use a metal spoon for your raw, local honey if you want the honey to retain its beneficial properties (thanks Mona)!
Listening to the experts is a strange drug in and of itself. I find it disconcerting when the experiment rats (that would be us) argue for what continues to make us sick. I am now a decade older than my college English professor was when he was diagnosed with diabetes and took to eating a homemade salad composed mostly of ramen noodles (it had been approved by his experts). He passed away three years ago, but not before losing a foot. About 10 years ago, I decided to spend more money than I was making at the time and hire a series of good personal trainers to revamp my trajectory. Still a work in progress but I eat better, run faster, lift heavier, and feel younger than I did 20 years ago. Our decisions matter, our sacrifices count. There is little virtue in compliance for compliance’ sake, and, yes, I inwardly cheered when the food pyramid was changed this year, separating nutrition advice — finally — from an unholy alliance of industrial powers dating back decades.
“Give us this day our daily bread….” Perhaps the real bread of life is transcending knowledge and heart guiding us beyond the primitive dogmas we were told to worship during the last century. And perhaps the future is brighter than our recent past. I believe there is a future in local foods and regenerative agriculture. I believe we can — through independent thought and discipline and study — take back the reins of our lives and gift that responsibility to the next generation. And I really can’t imagine a more Ozarkian legacy than that.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
