Any and everyone who has ever eaten bread in a configuration from buttered to PBJ has at one time or another dropped their intended meal onto the floor.
This has led to many a philosophical discussion on whether the bread tends to fall with the slathered side up or down. It’s long been the contention that most bread will land butter down but this is a typical pessimistic view that supports how life treats us sometimes.
Of course Ol’ Dutch had to find out just exactly what the truth of the matter was on this phenomena and in doing so found out about inertia, angular momentum and period of rotation.
This strange phenomena was also parodied in a “Critical Review” of the movie “The Devil.” A priest proves his point by tossing a jellied slice of bread into the air which lands face down demonstrating, of course, that “the Devil is near.”
Mostly Ol’ Dutch has found old Lucifer to be near most of the time and not too dependent on a Smuckers smeared slice of bread. But maybe that’s just more proof that “the Devil made me do it” as an excuse for bad behavior too.
I was drawn into this research not by dropping my bread --- which, by the way lands face up more times than not when Ol’ Dutch becomes fumble fingers -- but by Miss Trixie’s insistent use of real butter instead of the smooth spread.
During my short duration as a happy and confirmed bachelor, Ol’ Dutch got the spreadable butter tasting concoction and it would easily coat my morning toast with a golden sheen.
Last week I decided to have a slice of toast and only having the hard block of dairy purity, ended up with torn bread and slabs of unmelted butter resembling yellow lego pieces.
It then dawned on me and was also proven by scientist studying such important things that if the butter was melted into the toast it was more likely to end face up and hence my good luck in life so far.
Not wanting to incur Miss Trixie’s wrath for insisting that her precious churned real butter is inferior, I carefully carried said slice away from the toaster and ate it one greasy block of cold butter at a time.
My grandmother was famous for making breakfast for us when we would visit and she would have the toast all made up ahead of time. Here we were these poor little children forced to eat burned and scraped toast long cold-to-the-world since it had been made an hour before we got out of bed. And the butter was the same hard block of creamy goodness that would not spread to save your life.
Now Ol’ Dutch has been around the block enough to know that real butter is supposed to be better for you than margarine but I think it’s like the wine industry telling us that liquid sour grape juice is good for us. They have a vested interest in the results of the same studies.
What savings we might get from less cholesterol is eaten up quickly in the stress on our hearts from trying to spread ice cold chunks of butter on torn bread slices then being forced to eat it slimily oozing down our throats.
For some reason there has been a lot written about bread and how that relates to life such as asking “which side is your bread buttered on.” This supposedly is about one side of the slice being bigger and if you buttered that side you had more butter and hence were rich. Poor people had to butter the smaller side. Good grief.
As usual, this column has provided you with information to which you have always wondered about the answers to and now you can truly go through life much happier than before.
Just know this, however, if you drop your bread from table height it’s gonna land face down and you are going to get “the look” from the significant other.

Kevin Kirkpatrick and his Yorkie, Cooper, fish, hunt, ATV or hike daily. His email is [email protected]. Additional news can be found at www.troutrepublic.com or on Twitter at TroutRepublic.