I stared at the loaves in disbelief. They were fine, perfect really, except for the burned areas. Did [Peeta] mean for me to have them? He must have. Because there they were at my feet. Before anyone could witness what had happened, I shoved the loaves up under my shirt, wrapped the hunting jacket tightly about me, and walked swiftly away. The heat of the bread burned into my skin, but I clutched it tighter, clinging to life.
— Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games
As one of the oldest staple foods in the world, bread has a great deal of cultural significance attached to it. It has entered the modern lexicon as a symbol of basic necessities and living — someone who supports a household is a "breadwinner," and making a living can be referred to as "bringing home the bread" or "putting bread on the table." Giving someone bread and salt is a traditional sign of Sacred Hospitality in many cultures.
As a storytelling device, miraculously finding bread, sharing bread with someone, or being given bread as a gift can symbolize hope, life, and survival, especially through the eyes of someone who is starving. Experiencing the joy of biting into a loaf of warm, freshly baked bread can give them the strength to continue to the next day. Beware, though — someone offering warm bread when you're starving could just as easily be trying to lure you into a trap.
For a situation to qualify as this trope, it can't just be a hungry person eating bread. (After all, bread is a staple food in most regions of the world, so hungry people eat it all the time.) The act of finding or receiving the bread has to change the tone of the scene from grim to uplifting at least slightly.
Related tropes:
- Bread and Circuses: An oppressive government keeps people happy with food and entertainment.
- Jail Bake: Hiding something to help a prisoner escape inside baked goods.
- Sacred Hospitality: As noted above, bread and salt is a traditional welcoming gift in some cultures.
- Tastes Like Friendship: A character becomes another's friend after being given food.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Attack on Titan: In "A Dim Light Amid Despair: Humanity's Comeback, Part 1", Sasha eats a stolen potato in front of her commander and is punished by being made to go without dinner. Krista saves some bread for her, and Sasha asks in awe and reverence, "Are you God?"
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Golden Wind: In Narancia's backstory, after being discarded by his former crew, he rummages through a trashcan to pick up a bread before Fugo finds him and instead takes him to a restaurant.
- Stone Ocean: After being tossed into maximum security, Jolyne looks around her surroundings before finding some bread on the ground already covered with insects, but decides to eat it to gather strength for her mission to retrieve DIO's bone.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team: In episode 4, Michel and Eledore are captured by Zeon forces and locked up inside the village Inn's cellar. The innkeeper comes by and gives them loaves of bread while telling them not to lose hope.
- One Piece:
- Chopper's very first positive interaction with any human (hell, possibly any living being) came from Dr. Hiriluk taking him into a warm bed with a loaf of bread after finding him critically injured.
- Inverted(?) in Sanji's backstory, where after a month of being stranded he's whittled all his provisions down to a single moldy chunk of bread. Which he accidentally drops into the ocean, hammering in just how much utter starvation he's in for.
Comic Books
- Batman: In Batman Annual #25 (pre-Flashpoint), it is shown that Jason Todd, after being resurrected, wakes up from a coma, escapes the hospital and breaks the glass of a bakery to steal some bread to eat. This moment is what originates the "Jason Todd loves bread" meme.
- Laika: While slogging through the snow in a heavy winter and trying to find shelter and food, Korolev hears the barking of a dog, which leads him to a loaf of warm bread sitting in the snow. He's so astonished that he wonders if it's a joke, but just beyond it is a warm shelter.
Films — Animated
- In Aladdin, the titular street rat and his pet monkey Abu are able to steal a loaf of bread and evade the Sultan's guards. However, right after Aladdin breaks it in half to share it with Abu but before they can savor it, they see two orphans even hungrier than they are. This leads to Aladdin and Abu (the latter very reluctantly) giving their respective halves of the loaf to the children.
Films — Live-Action
- It's a Wonderful Life: Bread is one of the items the Baileys use symbolically whenever a new family moves into a home in their development. Mary recites a blessing as she hands the new owner each item in turn, beginning with, "Bread... that this house may never know hunger."
- The Menu: During the bread course of the dinner, Chef Slowik speaks of the culture history and religious significance of bread… before telling his diners they won't get any before presenting them with only the traditional accompaniments. This is both an insult to them and foreshadowing that he plans to kill them all. Notably, only protagonist Margot gets any bread near the end of the film in the form of the bun on a cheeseburger — she is the film's only survivor.
Literature
- Gate: When the refugees of the dragon attack are brought to Alnus Hill, they are given provision, including bread, which Master Wizard Cato goes into a very Large Ham praise of for being so fluffy and warm and soft.
- The Hunger Games: Bread is a recurring Arc Symbol that represents survival and life.
- When Katniss, her mother, and her sister ran out of money and were starving to death, she dug through the Mellarks' trash bin as a last resort. Mrs. Mellark shouted at her to go away, but Peeta "accidentally" burned two loaves of raisin-and-nut bread and then threw them to Katniss when his mother wasn't looking, which saved the lives of her and her family.
- Catching Fire:
- Katniss encounters two escapees from District 8, Twill and Bonnie, who are trying to make it to District 13 and are in rough shape, not knowing much about wilderness survival. She gives them two cheese buns she has in her bag, along with some grain and dried beans.
Bonnie holds the bun as if she can't quite believe it's real and then sinks her teeth into it again and again, unable to stop. "It's better if you chew it." She nods, trying to slow down, but I know how hard it is when you're that hollow.
- During the 75th Hunger Games, Katniss and her allies receive twenty-four District 3-style bite-size rolls as sponsor gifts. She only learns later that the bread was a coded message indicating the time of their rescue from the arena: the District 3 bread meant the rescue would be on the third day, while the number of rolls meant it would be by the 24th hour.
- Katniss encounters two escapees from District 8, Twill and Bonnie, who are trying to make it to District 13 and are in rough shape, not knowing much about wilderness survival. She gives them two cheese buns she has in her bag, along with some grain and dried beans.
- Les Misérables's entire story is kicked off by this trope. Jean Valjean is arrested and sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister and her children.
- In variants of The Love of Three Oranges, the hero fetches three fruits with maidens inside and cuts open each one, releasing a maiden. In some tales, each of the maidens asks for bread, but, since he cannot provide them with some, they disappear or die soon after. The only exception is the third maiden, to whom he gives the bread she requested, thus allowing her to live.
- Runaway: While homeless and on the run, Holly encounters a small group of homeless Spanish people who share their corn tortillas with her, despite not having much themselves.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Inverted in A Storm of Swords. Craster lets the Night's Watchmen stay at his keep after the fight at the Fist, but the terrible freezing conditions, meager provisions, and lack of help for their wounded and dying make them resentful, and rumors start to spread that Craster has a secret larder of food he's not sharing. At the farewell "feast" he holds for them, receiving only two loaves of bread pisses them off so much that they mutiny, killing Craster and Lord Commander Jeor Mormont.
- Wintergirls: At the end of the book, when Lia is recovering from anorexia and has decided that she wants to get better, one of the things she does is eat a waffle with syrup and ask for more. It is implied that she may have chosen to try a waffle in memory of her deceased best friend Cassie, who loved them.
Mythology and Religion
- The Bible contains one of the oldest examples, if not the oldest. Jesus performs a miracle by using five loaves of bread and two fish to feed 5,000 hungry people and even has twelve baskets full of food left over after everyone has eaten their fill.
- As far back as the Torah/Old Testament, the breaking of bread (which was harder during these days than modern bread) is seen as a ritual to represent blessing a meal and was done at the beginning of the meal by the blesser/host. To this day, breaking bread is still an important ritual in Jewish and Christian religious events (mainly communion for the latter).
- Used as a rule of symbolism. Jesus' breaking of bread (along with wine) during the Last Supper is used to represent his body soon being used as a sacrifice (compared to the lambs slain to protect the Hebrews from the Angel of Death). After the resurrection, Jesus is invited into two people's house where he gives passages of scripture and breaks bread in THEIR house, simultaneously showing he is bringing new hope and helping the residents realize the man they were speaking to was Jesus.
Video Games
- Invoked in Final Fantasy XIV. Sharlayan's greatest food scientists have spent decades trying to develop the perfect emergency ration for use in the event of a food crisis. The scientists decided to focus their efforts on making bread due to it being relatively easy to prepare and stuff full of nutrients. The problem is that each iteration of this bread is increasingly nasty, culminating in panaloaf, which induces nausea and retching upon consumption despite being incredibly nutritious to eat. The Faculty of Medicine quests involve Debroye's quest to make the bread palatable because Living Is More than Surviving. Later on, Flagustert argues in favor of Debroye's bread because focusing solely on nutrition would inspire nothing but misery, whereas delicious food inspires hope during the worst ordeals.
Web Animation
- Team Fortress 2: Inverted in the animated short "Expiration Date" in which Engineer and Medic use bread to perform experiments on the teleporter, finding what appears to be tumors inside them, which gets them to believe the entire team will die in 3 days. Further experiments though, and they conclude that it only happens to bread and that it isn't tumors but some self-aware beauty mark that makes the bread hostile. When they inform the team that they will be fine as long as bread isn't put through the teleporter anymore, Soldier reveals he did nothing but teleport bread for three days, resulting in a giant bread monster that the team has to fight.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: SCP-3764, A Gift from a Friend, is a burlap sack that produces warm, fresh loaves of wheat bread along with kindly notes signed "-a friend". Several D-class who ate the loaves had chronic ailments cured, including night terrors, sleep paralysis, clinical depression, and thoughts of suicide.
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