We are playing a giant game of telephone

So on a connected, but sort of unrelated topic.

I'm currently taking a 10-week bread baking and pastry class and our focus this past Saturday was bread. Slotted for baking that day were baguettes, ciabatta (which means slipper in Italian if any of you were wondering), foccacia, and butter bread (a.k.a. challah). We completed much of our baking early, so the Chef was showing us some fancy-pants braids that could be done with the butter bread dough. While he was rolling out the pieces, he started talking about how/why braided bread came to be.

Chef Parks claimed that the whole braided bread escapade started in India.

Then came my middle name:

A little background thanks to kamat.com:

"Sati (Su-thi, a.k.a. suttee) is the traditional Hindu practice of a widow immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre." (Thanks, Dad..)

Sati means a virtuous woman. A woman who dies burning herself on her husbands funeral fire was considered most virtuous, and was believed to directly go to heaven, redeeming all the forefathers rotting in hell, by this "meritorious" act. The woman who committed Sati was worshipped as a Goddess, and temples were built in her memory."

(okay, maybe my Dad was just trying to be sweet in sort of an awkward way... Just like when he named my old dog Nanuck, but called him Nookie for short).

Anyway, as Chef Parks kneaded his butter bread, he continued to explain how the act of sati was replaced by the widow braiding her hair after the death of husband, chopping it off, and throwing it on to the burning funeral pyre. The women was recognized as a widow by her short hair and was able to honor/mourn the death of her husband sufficiently. And more practically, I think, than throwing herself on to a funeral pyre. I'm sure I was distracted at some point during the Chef's explanation (I'm not always great at following long stories), but eventually folks decided to bake bread, braid it, and then burn that when some dude died. And then they figured out that was just silly and decided to eat the braided bread at funerals.

So I came home and attempted to do a little fact checking (this and to find the answer to his second challenge, which is the history of the bagel.. can you say stirrup?)

But this is what I found (challah and braided bread were the most easily connected, yet culturally problematic in terms of verifying Chef Parks' story).

"With that in mind, the Midrash relates that the braiding of the bread alludes to the way God adorned the hair of the first woman, Eve, before her wedding to Adam in the Garden of Eden."

So I guess this is like playing cross cultural telephone (one explanation may have come before the other, but they probably started out with the same basic idea, and ended up with an entirely different result).

Alright. To get to the (longwinded) point, it seems that humans (across cultures, across geography, across knowledge and wealth and technology) have continued to translate the meaning of acts and words (anything from highschool gossip to bread braiding to acts of war) to fit their specific frame of reference. Not news to any of you, I'm sure.

So, if it isn't a person specific problem, but instead a human specific problem, we are going to headed for waterballons or missles or whatever else, over and over again.

If someone figures out what to do, let me know.