the-mango-vol-1-issue-6

Bread has been referred to as the staff of life for being a very fundamental food that sustains life. It’s also a casual synonym for money. According to Dick Clark: “Music is the soundtrack of your life.” The American 19th century poet Sidney Lanier said: “Music is love in search of a word.” More recently Bono observed: “Music can change the world because it can change people.” Bob Marley expressed this: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” Likely lots of the trop rockers, including Jerry Diaz, embrace what Ray Charles said: “I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me - like food or water.” Diaz knew from a young age that he would be involved seriously with music. He also knew he needed

to earn the family bread, and he does that in his day job as a Pepperidge Farm distributor for the last 20 years. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and during theGreat Depression – think 1929-30 – times were hard. Margaret Rudkin’s youngest son suffered from severe allergies and asthma and was unable to eat many processed foods. She experimented with all-natural, stoneground, homemade, whole wheat bread for him. “My first loaf should have been sent to the Smithsonian Institution as a sample of Stone Age bread, for it was hard as a rock and about one- inch-high,” Margaret quipped. Long story, short. She advanced her baking skills; her son’s health improved; and she approached a grocer to sell her loaves for more than two times the going cost. By 1939, her Pepperidge Farm sold its 500,000th loaf of bread and in less than a year, production grew to a million loaves. Her business

5 1

m a n g o - m a g . c o m

N o v / D e c 2 0 2 1