"Bread for the Road": Intersections of Food and Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BREAD IS A STAPLE worldwide, but in Newfoundland and Labrador it has special significance. In this article I argue that by the twentieth century bread pervaded Newfoundland culture more thoroughly than any other food. Although cod was once the backbone of the economy and remains the province’s most iconic food, bread touched all aspects of life. As anthropologist Carole Counihan discovered in Sardinia, bread is “the nexus of economic, political, aesthetic, social, symbolic, and health concerns” and “a particularly sensitive indicator of change” (Counihan 1999: 29). In the following pages I explore how bread in all its forms (homemade bread, hardtack, fried bread, bread pudding, etc.) was integral to Newfoundland food systems, sustained and shaped men’s and women’s labour, helped define gender, contributed to physical and psychological well-being, and now represents a marker of cultural loss. Support for my assertion of bread’s primacy comes from a range of published and unpublished sources, but in particular from the collections of Memorial University’s Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). Established in 1968, MUNFLA is Canada’s foremost repository for recorded and collected items of Newfoundland and Labrador folklore, folklife, language, oral history, and popular culture. The majority of the more than 11,000 contributors who have donated materials to MUNFLA did so as students enrolled in undergraduate folklore courses. The present research draws heavily on one aspect of the archive’s collection: folklore survey cards that students completed as part of folklore courses from the mid-1960s to the present day. These brief bits of folklore that students collected from family and friends, or remembered from their own past, now represent a wealth of information on everything from turns of phrase and remedies to children’s games and supernatural beliefs. Although survey cards are valuable in determining the pres-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".