I always knew it was spring when my mother finally took out the toaster. Growing up, the images I associated with toasters were largely shaped by 80’s kids movies, rented by my parents from Blockbuster to entertain my siblings and me on a Friday night. The toaster was a mainstay of every film, the glue that bound each nuclear family unit—or showed its absence, like Doc’s in Back to the Future. The toaster always seemed to exist in the domain of the father, who worked an ambiguous corporate job and wore large glasses, a wide tie, and would sit in his big chairs with his big family with his big cup of joe. Everyone had a big slice of toast. Or burnt toast, depending on the story. Either way, toast was a necessitated ritual of the morning routine.
Despite the resonance of this imagery within my mind, and corresponding association with the toaster as a symbol of labor, unity, family, and togetherness around a morning meal—if you had asked me how to toast a piece of bread at that age I would have pointed you to our oven. My mother claimed the oven gave the bread a more thorough, even toast. That is, again, unless it was spring.
In spring, the pungent smell of gas from the stove top would prick at my nostrils. Our oven, and ancient metal clunker with missing temperature knobs, was prone to give out as temperatures rose. Additionally, it tended to heat up the entire house, imposing its fiery presence in both smell and feel. So by early May, the oven went on sabbatical and the toaster resumed its station on our countertop.
The toaster retained a mystical, elusive aura to me. Its sleek design, its silver sheen, its satisfying “pop” as bread reemerged, toasted. And so for those brief hot months, I would relish in partaking in what felt like a great cultural ritual, of man and job, of American purpose and identity—of bread turning to toast.
Today, I’m curious—despite having no family members with a corporate job and no regular use of a toaster—as to how this image of toasting nuclear America became so prominent in my mind. How, even as a child, I understood the toaster and its role in a distinctly American morning routine before having used it myself.
The Smithsonian National Museum of American history lists the toaster in a larger “object project,” including it as a part of a larger list of household appliances distinct to American culture. 1926 is marked as a pivotal turning point in the toaster’s career, in which manual toasters—requiring users to sit, watch, and flip their bread—were replaced by automatic toasters: self-timed and self-flipping. What I find distinctly poignant about this cultural shift is the underlying theme of optimization, a theme present throughout most of much of modernist history in the United States. Everything can always be done quicker and better, including your morning routine, your toast.
—
Art by Lara Schaberg.
