Crumbs! A bakery sliced our bread lengthwise: do I bite back?

Q: My wife came back from the bakery with a loaf of fresh bread, only to discover it had been sliced lengthwise, not widthwise. Should I have complained or made very long sandwiches in the name of embracing diversity? B.S., Croydon, VIC

A: This question kept me up all night: how does anyone wind up with a length-sliced bread? Was the loaf placed incorrectly on the bread-slicing machine by a dopey-faced sales assistant with one or more missing fingers? Was the loaf shaped like a perfect geometric cube so that any horizontal or vertical slicing resulted in mathematically equivalent cross-sectional bread planes? Did your wife make a mistake when the sales assistant asked “Sliced for toast or sandwich?”, and she accidentally said, “Shelving”?

However you wound up with that length-sliced bread, complaining is going to be a lot of work. You have to go back to the bakery, present the loaf, explain the problem, endure the humiliating eye-rolls from dopey-faced sales assistants. And if you get a replacement loaf, you have to carefully check that it hasn’t also been sliced lengthwise, or diagonally, or in loop-the-loops.

So I’d only complain if the effort was justified: if the bread was one of those $450 artisan sourdoughs from an inner-city bakery that’s only open two hours a month and run by three women who dress like Rosie the Riveter.