Thank You,

G. Blandston (_____@butter.net)
Chairman,
Bureau for Ultimate Tasting Toast Experimentation and Research

A: Dear Chairman Blandston,

And thank you for your kind and encouraging words. It’s important and challenging work that we do here at the University of Toast, and even with my lofty and intimidating title of Doctor of Toastronomical Sciences, there is still so much left for me to learn about toast, and indeed about myself, before my work is complete. I am honored, and only a little bit creeped out, to know that you will continue to monitor my work in the future, and I look forward to the possibility of collaborating with your Bureau in its own endeavors, without any of those pesky restraining orders.

Warmest Regards,

Dr. Toast

We accidentally found your website during our search for some information about the toast’s history and its consumer habits. We are 10 students from Germany who are participating at a famous marketing/design competition and our task is to create a complete new strategy/commercials for a very famous Toast Brand. To win this competition you could help us, as you are a famous toast doctor. We are sure you can help us to answer our questions [below]. It would be sooo helpful to get some answers. We will name your help in our presentation.

Thank you so much,

– Angela from Germany (angeladies@xxxxx.com)

Q: Why did you decide to open a Dr. Toast site?

A: Dr. Biscuit, Dr. Pancake, and Dr. Huevos Rancheros were already taken.

Q: Why do you think people are so interested in toast and how many visitors do you have monthly?

People are interested in toast because it’s a great way to meet new people and improve hand-eye coordination.

I receive approximately one hundred billion trillion monthly visitors to my site. To try to visualize this number, if you were to stack all of the monthly visitors on top of each other, they would reach all the way to the moon.

Q: What does toast mean for you and why toast and not bread?

A: To quote Alan Burdick: “To toast, then, is to ritually re-enact, daily and in miniature, the American dream itself. Each morning, in a small corner of the kitchen, the transformation of bread into cake prefigures (we hope) our own successful assault upon the social ladder. It is as if, by toasting, we ourselves might be toasted.”

And toast, not bread, because Sara Lee holds the trademark on the term “Bread®” and my counsel advises against it.

Q: Which person could stand for toast?

A: I believe that a great American hero could stand for toast. Benjamin Franklin, Mark Wahlberg, and Maya Angelou come to mind.

Q: And last but not least – how can toast be a medium to bring people together?

A: I would like to see the world’s pop superstars come together to sing an anthem of toast, a la “We Are The World”, in order to send a message of love, tolerance, and understanding to all mankind. Here is a sample verse, with the names of the stars who will sing each line:

Make toast, not war, let the children know (Avril Lavigne)
Spread peace like butter, watch it start to grow (Jay Z)
Add the marmalade, that your karma made (Madonna)
Crust is justice, just trust this toasted flow (50 Cent)

You have an incredible site. I am completing a cookbook dedicated to my wife, who is now on her fourth occurrence of ovarian cancer and five of chemo.

One section of this book is dedicated to yourself and asking people to send you more recipes and visit your website often. There are maybe 15 entries with full credit to you and the author. I do not like to infringe and rather ask you.

I would be very happy to send you the final draft copy of this book. Perhaps you could give some thoughts to me.

Who knows, perhaps my works would inspire you to go publish your vast wealth of information. I would even offer to help you out with you project should you go foward.

Your loyal follower,

John (jmullet@xxxxx.com)

Winter Park, Florida

A: Dear John,

Thank you for your touching letter. I do feel honored to be included in your project, and you have full permission to include any recipes found on my site in your book (although the credit is really due to their original authors).

And please know that the thoughts of my readers and myself are with you and your wife during this difficult time.

Yours in Toast,

Dr. Toast

you are quite the site for about 100 4th and 5th graders now.

i’ve bookmarked it, because i might not like the stuff, but i love information. it’s a great site!

– kt (ihatetoast@xxxxx.com)

A: Dear Katy, thanks for your note. I am sorry to hear we have such differing opinions on the subject of toast. However, if you’ll just hear me out for a moment:

Perhaps you hate toast simply because you’ve never had really GOOD toast. For example, if you have toast made with dense and dry bread, lacking fresh, properly proportioned toppings, the experience will no doubt be less than satisfying, and could in fact be psychologically damaging.

However, toast doesn’t have to be dry and boring. There are a large number of recipes on my site showing what you can do with a slice of toast, a creative mind, and way too much time on your hands. Yet it doesn’t even need to be that creative: one of my favorites is a single slice of lightly toasted oat bread, topped with a little butter and drizzled with fresh honey. A delicious snack that’s lower in calories than many other treats, such as TWO pieces of toast topped with a little butter and drizzled with fresh honey.

Of course, you don’t have to even eat toast to realize its glory. For example, many people find toast to be an inspiring metaphor for the American Dream, or discover that it is a reliable friend and confidant, or even just a sort of muse for general creative inspiration.

Or maybe you just don’t like toast because it doesn’t like you. But no need to take it personally – I once got into quite a fight with a bowl of stir fried bok choy that started saying unspeakable things about my mother. These things happen.

Nevertheless, even though you do not like toast, I don’t hold it against you. We are all entitled to our own opinions, no matter how wrong they may be.

Best Regards,

– Dr. Toast

Thank you very much.

– Pam (UpstatePam@xxxxx.com)

A: Pam, contrary to popular belief, raisins do not “fall” into the bottom of the toaster. The unpleasant truth of the matter is that they jump.

With crazed resolve, they willfully meet their fiery demise to dramatically demonstrate their outrage at the social injustices that take place on a daily basis within a slice of toast. You see, a slice of toast is actually an extremely complex socio-economic environment, complete with a hierarchical social system, political corruption, private monopolies, budget deficits, inflation, and unemployment. Bread has many diverse ingredients working with each other and against each other, forming coalitions and rivalries – a chaotic system that inevitably swings periodically to either end of the political spectrum. Indeed, a slice of toast is not unlike modern American society.

A number of recent events are responsible for particularly heating up (no pun intended) the current social climate of toast. In one well-publicized incident that was captured on videotape, an innocent raisin was driving through a mostly wheat neighborhood, when police stopped him and beat him senseless. (Granted, he was already a raisin so he didn’t look too different afterwards.) Outraged raisins throughout the entire slice rioted, leaving a charred hulk of a once-proud slice.

In an unrelated incident, violence broke out in a slice of Oat Nut bread. Some Quakers were minding their own business when the local skinhead Almonds began taunting them. The Quakers were steamed, and the Almonds eventually went nuts, beating the Quakers to a pulp. When the dust settled, all that remained was a rather tasty porridge.

So to make a long story short, raisins have always been the most politically active of the ingredients in a slice of toast. They feel they have exhausted all other options for bringing about social change in their particular slice of the world, so they illustrate their passion by throwing themselves to the fate that awaits them in the dark and crumby recesses at the bottom of the toaster.

Hmmm, on a second reading it looks like your question is actually why do they catch fire, not why do they fall. Well, I would guess that’s because toasters are very, very hot.

– Dr. Toast

– wanting to know why (jastef@xxxxx.net)

A: Now I want you to remain very calm and listen carefully to what I am about to say. The reason that your toast is not getting toasted is quite simply that it’s not really a slice of toast! It’s an impenetrable vessel harboring tiny alien life forms, a breakfast trojan horse engineered by a mind-boggling extraterrestrial intelligence, designed to smuggle them into your kitchen so that they may take control of your mind!

Hopefully you’ve remained calm and are ready to pay very close attention to my explanation of what to do. Act normal, don’t look at the toaster! Just keep reading this page and eating your Cheez-Its.

That buzzing noise your toaster makes when you hold the lever down is the amplified sound of the communications uplink that the aliens have established through your electrical wiring to the rest of your appliances, so that they may be programmed to participate in a vast household conspiracy to drive you insane. Does any of the following sound familiar? Your VCR flashes 12:00 constantly. Your toilet makes a subtle “shhhhh” noise until you jiggle the handle. You receive mysterious unsolicited telephone calls where a recorded voice tells you to wait for the “next available operator,” who subsequently tries to sell you bulk meat products and an industrial-sized freezer to hold them.

Yes, the aliens are subtle and insidious with their scheming ways. But there is hope for you, if you follow my instructions exactly. You must kill your toaster! When I give the signal, you must lunge at your toaster, remove the communications uplink (power cord) from the wall, throw it on the floor, and then topple your refrigerator onto it, thereby smashing your toaster and its wretched alien inhabitants into a thousand pulverized bits. Now, GO!!!

If you’re reading this paragraph, I guess you survived without being atomized by tiny alien death-o-rays. Either that, or your toaster was just broken and there were no aliens. Either way, have fun cleaning up the mess!

– Dr. Toast

Look forward to your reply,

– Broken toasted hearted (spycc@xxxxx.au)

A: There is a common misconception about the processes that cause the ejection of toast from the toaster. Most believe this morning miracle is due to the sudden conversion of static potential energy (stored in coiled springs within the device), to dynamic kinetic energy, which manifests itself with the pleasant “sproing” of a successfully completed toasting cycle.

This explanation, of course, is completely ridiculous.

The truth is that each morning, your toast is abducted by aliens. Just as your toast is nearing crispy perfection on your countertop, alien spacecraft hovering high in the stratosphere send a powerful tractor beam into your kitchen that lifts the toast from the appliance. Then why, you ask, does the toast not float out the kitchen window, but rather appears to pause with about an inch of its tantalizing crust protruding from the toaster? That’s the precise moment at which the aliens cause a temporal disruption, a rift in the time-space-toast continuum. Time itself is halted in your kitchen, and the aliens are free to transport your breakfast into their secret laboratories without your knowledge. After the experiments are over, the toast is returned to your toaster at precisely the same moment it had disappeared. This creates the illusion that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, when in reality, your breakfast has suffered a severe temporal discontinuity!

So why exactly is your toast not ejecting from your toaster? I dunno, maybe it’s stuck or something.

– Dr. Toast

– Toasted in New Haven (ophir.klein@xxxxx.edu)

A: Firstly, let me say that you are on the right track in your quest for perfection of toasting technique. For those readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of gourmet toasting:

Plug orientation is critical. If the plug is inserted into the outlet upside down, the incoming electrons will notice this immediately. As we know from our previous discussion of the “Electron Anxiety Effect”, they are extremely nervous and fickle little creatures, and such a drastic upheaval of their familiar “conduit to toast” may ultimately result in their refusal to enter the appliance at all.

Room temperature is of utmost imporance. If all other conditions are satisfactory, the average adult electron will willingly enter a toaster at just about any physical room temperature. However, for optimum toast, our goal should be to bring the room temperature exactly to the point at which the electron will say to himself, “Hmm, it’s such a nice day, I think I’ll bring the wife and kids with me today.”

Obviously, more electrons mean toastier toast! Experiment to find the temperature at which your electrons are most comfortable.

Synchronization with lunar cycles will have a profound effect on the quality of your toast, with a full moon being the optimum time for toasting. When the moon is full, the earth is positioned between the moon and sun. When a toaster, with its unique geometric and electromechanical properties, is subjected to the directly opposing gravitational fields of these celestial objects, a resonant microgravitational field results. The electrons in the toaster are temporarily caught up in the swirling gravitational vortex, lingering in the appliance longer than they had originally intended. While this technique often results in electrons being late for appointments later in the day, the end result is toast of a uniform texture and consistency.

But for truly sublime toast, one must also master insertion technique. Because bread slices are inserted before power is applied to the appliance, we need not worry about the idiosyncracies of electrons, as far as our insertion technique is concerned. However, we do need to be concerned with the electromagnetic synchronization that occurs between adjacent slices of bread in a loaf.

Electromagnetic synchronization in sliced bread, also known as carbohydrate polarization, is a process that takes place gradually in the hours between the slicing of the bread at the bakery and its eventual insertion into your toaster. Each slice has an adjacent “counterpart” with whom it gradually achieves an electromagnetic equilibrium over its entire surface. Due to their immediate proximity, and a certain amount of inevitable emotional attachment, the two slices eventually grow to share an electromagnetic charge.

(The heels of the bread, due to their low social status and general unpleasantness, have a neutral charge. Thus the electromagnetic pairing of slices begins at the first non-heel slice.)

So how does all of this relate to toast insertion technique? Well, if the electromagnetic synchronization of two slices of bread is broken before toasting occurs, the culinary repercussions are severe. The taste, texture, and spiritual value of the affected slices will all diminish by an average of 62%. Indeed, non-simultaneous insertion of electromagnetically paired bread slices can result in an asynchronous breakfast.

So the goal, evidently, is to insert the two slices at precisely the same moment.

– Dr. Toast

– Joslin (rjoslin@xxxxx.com)

A: The process of toasting bread does not physically reduce calories or carbohydrates. However, eating toast will make you more popular and attractive.

You see, Joslin, toasting bread fundamentally changes its molecular structure. The high temperature convection currents within the toaster transform the complex carbohydrates, through a process known as “Toaster Induced Molecular Transfiguration”, or TIMT, into new molecules that are actually capable of altering the structure of your DNA. These new molecules are called “Molecular Toast Genetic Transmogrificators”, or MTGTs. When the MTGTs enter your bloodstream, they seek out the nuclei of your cells and, through the process of “Active Molecular Toast Genetic Transmogrification”, or AMTGT, modify the very sequence of your genetic code. The resulting enhanced genetic material is appropriately called “Toast Initiated Genetic Transmogrificant”, or TIGT, which over time will result in “Toast Accellerated Human Evolution”, or TAHE. So you see, TIMT-induced MTGTs result in AMTGT on your DNA, giving you TIGT leading to TAHE which, FYI, is A-OK.

Sound a little scary? Well, never fear. Because they are a miracle born of toast, the MTGTs only replace segments of your DNA which are directly detrimental to your looks and popularity. For example, if through some unfortunate twist of fate the encoding of your DNA has left you with the irresistable urge to dance the Macarena whenever you hear that ridiculous song, the MTGTs will overwrite that flawed section. The perverted impulse will be replaced with the overwhelming need to put on a classic Miles Davis record instead.

The principle is also true of physical flaws. No more bad hair days. No more stinky feet. And you know that little flap of skin you get when you burn the roof of your mouth with a really hot slice of pizza? If you eat enough toast, your repaired genes will give you a more heat-resistant, pizza-tolerant mouth.

So eat your toast, Joslin. For yourself, and for your posterity.

– Dr. Toast

– Mikey (Mikey6585@xxxxx.com)

A: Mikey, do not be alarmed at your toaster’s unprovoked aggression. This is completely normal. You see, a toaster that has been unexpectedly brought to life simply needs time to adjust to its new environment. Take it by its cord and gently lead it on a leisurely tour around your home. Let it explore one room at a time, at its own pace. Show it where its food and water are kept, and talk to it in calm, reassuring tones.

If you give your toaster the love and attention it needs, keep it fed and groomed, and bring it in for regular visits at a factory authorized service center, you will be rewarded with many years of loyal companionship, unconditional love, and fresh, crispy toast.

– Dr. Toast