The Bread Cult

I'm not sure how it got started -- I s'pect it just grow'd -- but sometime in my early teens, the idea of a Bread Cult became current in my circle of friends. This was a fictional organization -- there was never any attempt to found it or to pretend that it actually existed -- and yet there was never any fiction written about it, either. Bread Cultists did put in a few appearances as antagonists in our D&D games, but the Cult was already an established idea by then. Everyone knew what the Bread Cult was, just as everyone knew what orcs were. It was just a free-floating shared idea.

The Bread Cult worshiped bread, and their slogan was, appropriately enough, "Bread: Worship It." Their symbol was originally a rising sun over a loaf of bread, but later the sun was replaced with a skull as the Cult's image took a darker turn. This slogan and iconography were popular subjects for doodling.

The darker turn I mentioned was partly my mother's fault. She once saw or overheard something about people "worshiping bread" and thought it was about the soft rock band from the seventies, fronted by David Gates, which none of us kids had ever heard of. She apparently found Bread intolerably sentimental and gooey and summarized their music as "I found the diary underneath the tree and threw up."

That line quickly became incorporated into the legend of the Bread Cult: The Cult had been a secret society whose very existence was unsuspected for centuries until someone happened to find Minutes of the Bread Cult under a tree, read a few pages, and promptly threw up all over it. No one knew how these very secret Minutes came to be under a tree in the first place -- there were various theories -- and about the content of the Minutes no one dared even speculate. The vomit-soaked book had become illegible and could not be salvaged, and the vomiter took his secret to the grave. Anyway, whatever it was, it was obviously something unspeakably foul.

The only publicly known ceremony of the Bread Cult was innocuous enough, though: the Bread Exchange. The Cult maintained a detailed list of exchange rates for various types of bread -- telling you how many slices of whole-wheat toast could be exchanged for how many buttermilk biscuits and so on -- and once a year all the Cultists would convene, exchange bread with one another, and go home.

One of the stranger rumors surrounding the Cult was that they were secretly behind a Sesame Street-themed toy from Playskool called Busy Poppin' Pals, and that every detail of its design held esoteric significance for initiates.

My best friend's little brother happened to own this very toy, but not being initiates ourselves, we were never able to decode its secret meaning.