The Moldy Bread Analogy
A way of thinking about American anti-urbanism
I realize that a lot of the pieces I publish here are fairly long, and I like to mix in shorter pieces with more singular points in between the essay/magazine-style pieces. I like these “analogy” pieces where I try to look at familiar issues differently, and hope other people do to.
One such analogy, for example is bookcases with density. As I put it on social media:
A bookcase is density. More books in a fixed room means more, and taller, bookcases.
At its most basic, that is precisely what a city is.
Obviously this is very simplified, but the point is that urban density is a specific instance of a general thing, which in other instances can be observed, and unfolds, with absolutely no political valence at all. Obviously how you organize your house is different from how we organize our communities (I said it’s simplified, after all). But I think, for me anyway, this analogy kind of demystifies the idea of cities/crowding/etc.
But today’s piece is a different analogy, what I call the moldy bread analogy.
Let’s say you grew up in a home where the bread was always stale or moldy. For whatever reason your family bought a lot of it, maybe always from the discount rack, maybe bought more than you were likely to eat, whatever. When you went to eat bread in your home, it was never good. This is also obviously simplified, but imagine that was your total experience of bread. You would—logically—conclude that that’s what bread is. When you grew up and heard people talk about how delicious a nice fresh loaf of bread is, you would think—again, reasonably—why do they love this stale moldy garbage? What’s wrong with them?
I’m curious whether you get what analogy I’m making, but it’s that this is how a great deal of American suburbanites grow up viewing, and learn to view, cities. They learn to see the problems with American cities—sometimes exaggerated, but definitely real—not as problems which afflict American cities but as inherent attributes of cities in general. They’re the poor moldy bread kid having no conception that there is such a thing as bread, apart from the substandard bread they grew up eating (or not eating).
I want to stress that this is not claiming people who disagree with me on liking cities and urbanism are in thrall to “false consciousness.” Nor do I mean it to imply that everyone who really understands cities will necessarily like them. (Not everyone likes good bread, after all!)
My point is about recognizing and avoiding the fallacy of mistaking an attribute of a specific instance of a thing for an attribute inherent to the thing itself.
Related Reading:
Planet Fitness Is Entry-Level Housing
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,200 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!
I like this analogy. First, because it acknowledges the possibility that some people will prefer rice or noodles even after they've had a chance to experience good bread. And second, because that is exactly how some anti-city people seem to me - they sound like they have never experienced any of the good things about living in a city. And hey, fine if you don't want to try it - I'm not going to make you try tasting the bread if you don't want to - but then don't think you are qualified to have an opinion about it.
This is just as much a way of thinking about the anti-suburbanism that seems to prevail here on Substack, a fully reversible analogy.
The other evening Gwen and I were watching the little kids on the ice in the town park, hearing the hockey sticks clatter and the laughter. Our backs were turned to the north wind and the playing field on which, if it were April. there might have been 300-400 people playing ultimate or soccer, while there was a pick-up game of hoops on the court that is now flooded for skating. Beyond the fields is the brook, with its active beaver colony and trail winding through to the dozens of homes from which people can walk to the park or on through it to the school, library, and town offices. There's even a band shell for summer evening concerts.
So I ask, why is it that city people who've seen a couple of stereotypical suburbs (ticky tacky, as per the old Pete Seeger song, and they certainly do exist, just as do severely dysfunctional cities) think they're all the same? Isn't that just as fair a use of your analogy?
What your analogy doesn't capture, I think, is evolution. Moldy bread just continues to deteriorate. Cities and suburbs are able change in positive ways. Our town was much closer to being the stereotypical suburb 20 years ago than it is now. Wise investments in open space acquisition and thoughtful zoning have conributed to a continuing transfomation.