Heels And (Open) Faces

There are some pretty widely-held opinions that I just don't share. I don't mean to say universally so, but that is sometimes the case. I never have been a really big fan of 'The Godfather Part Two', but did really like 'Superman 4'. Those are not popular opinions, and I have more where they come from. Some are in the category of food, and one of those inspired me to write today. It does not quite go as far as catharsis (as my attack on the term 'from downtown' in basketball did), but I do want to express my opinion.

It's about sliced bread. I love bread, and that variety is no exception. It's one of the few things in life where no matter how much you spend, no matter how high-end what you buy is, there's always that unpleasant part. I'm talking about the end pieces of the loaf, and for me they're not unpleasant at all. It does amuse me that there's no getting around the existence of what some call the 'heel'. They can leave those pieces out of the bag, but then you're just going from having two lesser pieces of bread to having two fewer pieces of bread.

I like them. I like crust, and they've got considerably more than the other slices. This is really nice when it's high quality bread heavily laden with things like seeds. I never have understood being against crust, and am always surprised to look in a pizza box and see piles of unwanted crusts. I'm sympathetic to pizza chains and their efforts to make the crust desirable by filling it with cheese or converting it to crazy bread. Crust is definitely a plus. Those end pieces are very useful apart from being tasty. When making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I consider the end pieces the best, so well suited are they to containing the mess within their confines.

Is that not reason enough to love the end piece? Our society has been on a trend of lionizing the marginalized and outcast for quite some time, and in spite of being in that number I don't know how I feel about that, but if that's what we're doing then the end piece should be the marshal of the parade. It perfectly encapsulates what it is to be discarded for being different or difficult and not for being bad. I love the end piece, and will always bang my drum in support of it.