The tussle between the ingredients of a loaf of bread and its wrapping is naked to the eye. Advertisers clearly display their seductive acumen all over the bag's skin. It is fair game to print sheaves of nineteenth-century wheat on its surface for it is reassuring to see through the caper for we are all familiar with its true pedigree. The eater must be reassured that the $.04 worth of powdered grain is worth the $1.69 we pay, despite the fact that there is a frightful discrepancy between the grain's worth and its cost. Bread is forgiving and the interlopers know it. They place strategies of marketing between wheat and the eater on the understanding that the word "bread" will seal the possible rift that they may induce.
 

Established bread rules exist which take a lifetime to learn and are invisible to those not conversant with American bread lineage. Apart from the names and sizes of loves there are minute indicators that are Braille-ridden in breads. When choosing a loaf, the hand clutches and the side fingers automatically grip the loaf's back. Bread is apparently squeezed as if it were a ripe fruit, but actually it is a test to verify the existence of the imaginary exoskeleton. Modern bread is always neutered and deboned before it is eaten. We know from bread history that bread bones did exist, making us now hesitate before swallowing.
 

Bread and its package are a sham. The marginally acceptable eating of it and the sometimes reusable plastic sock-bag barely make up for the half-truths that surround the entire pantheon of bread manufacture. Is there any part of the stuff that can tell a straight tale without forfeiting the dignity of its past? Bread buyers have always had a distrust of the miller and his cohorts. The miller was forever putting things into flour, perhaps a little chalk, to stretch the profits. Today, bags of vitamins are exchanged for chalk and bran dumping is practiced. The wheat-for-bread barter seems to be as distant as it ever was.
 

However, beyond the act of eating there now exists a new grain of redemption. Pinched around the throat of each bag is the bread tag. Like all tags or ties it is perceived to have a measure of respectability. The modern bread tag acts as a sentinel surveying the absurdities of current salesmanship. Gone from the shelves is the wire twist tie, whose paper shell - after too much fingering, twisting and retwisting - was reduced to a matted paper ball hindered by dampness and the hunger of buttered fingers.
 

The tag, a flat plastic section the size of a quarter, press-fits into the untidy folds of the neck of the bag and grips onto it for dear life. The plastic closure tag sets itself apart from the nonsense of bread selling. Its flatness, indelibility and practical honesty is antithetical to the charade of salesmanship and confusion of eating. If it were to get stuck in the throat, its plastic fangs might turn outwards and latch onto the epiglottis. By all reason, the tag should not be anywhere near a loaf of bread. It is dangerous and unwanted.
 

Russians watching the film Dirty Harry probably think the shoot-out in the supermarket is not as interesting as the thirty types of bread on the shelf. They might prefer to observe the events which occur at the edge of the screen. The bread tag thus assumes the role of voyeur.
 

The manufacture of objects has fairly uneasy history. In a general attack against mechanical manufacture Ruskin blasted the possibility for any sort of artful expressiveness in the mechanical process. In his view an object was viable only if the entire weight of the maker could be counted through the thousands of blows wrought on a piece of iron. A wrought iron leaf speaks of the life within only when it has within it the multitude of hurts and caresses. A melt-metal cast-iron leaf has, by comparison, a manufactured nothingness. It's gone, dead before working, and is discounted as the disease and decay of the love of objects.
 

Within the past one hundred years attitudes toward manufacturing have changed radically. The honesty of metal beating has been relegated to cuteness. That venue for creative expression has evaporated, its linneage patented by dogmatic rural expressionists who craft things for the sake of materials alone. The manufactured object, such as the aeroplane, was deified in the 1930's for the vitality of its design and the process of mass production in the factory. Since then the glory of manufacture has been usurped by machines that design machines that make machines for us to use. In this divorced state, the maker has become usurped and his works trivialized. He has been pushed towards an indefinite state of unmotivated redundancy.
 

Boredom is the final pass in every process. When everything is worked out and the activity is no longer a struggle, the maker's frame slumps forward. Boredom is vital to making. However, boredom itself can not improve the product, it can only lay waste its previous vitality and fortitude. In the insistent repetitiveness of mass production, the skill required to stamp out a metal sheet is very quickly forgotten. Whilst the sheets of metal fly past the operator, he is lulled into a daydream and through projective imagination he becomes his own master again. As long as there are moments of reverted tabula rasa, there is hope that the maker can empty his soul once more into the object.
 

A bread package maker, for example, works out and over-choreographs the sheaves of wheat on the loaf package. It is a job which is riddled with justifications: "This is why it looks like that and that is why it looks like this!" But this is constipated death to intelligence for it is too reasonable. Every variable is considered by the clever designer and, accordingly, the recipient of the object is put in a perpetual straight jacket where every move has been masticated and there is nothing left to invent. In this instance the overly conscious designer prefigures every move and leaves one smothered in pregurgitated excellence. There is another sort of designer whose marginal task it is to figure out the bread tag.
 

At first glance bread tags appear perfectly sensible. The plastic has printed upon it the curriculum vitae of the bread within: how much it costs, when it is going to be stale, who made it, and where. The tag also doubles as something to hold when the bread bag is pressed between the fangs of the snap, making them open askance and letting the folds of the bag crowd into the hole provided. The hole may have teeth set into the sides to prevent the oily bag of bread from slipping through. Each tag design has marginally different quirks. In some there are no teeth, in others there might be a pronounced entry slot. Each design is slightly dissimilar.
 

If a row of bread tags are balanced on their entry holes they become figurative. A city comes into existence and it is populated by blocks of white glassine masonry accessed through a lower passage. Sometimes a room is smooth and rounded. At other times it is complex, full of recurves and indentations, and a string of anthropomorphic associations is recalled. In this context a bread tag becomes a talisman, a little map which can be kept in the pocket to savor the very moment of life itself.
 

Bread tags can be categorized into various types. Like all collections of things that outwardly appear to be similar to the uninitiated, such as Greek vases or baseball cards, each has its own characteristics, common or rare. A bread tag can be evaluated according to following criteria: the overall deportment of the tag, the proportion of the aperture system in relation to its shape, and the organization of the aperture system.
 

Bread tags can be categorized by the shape of the aperture: undentured,
mono-dentured or tri-dentured. Within each of these three types they can be either single-height, double-height, or colossal. 

Bread tags have other variables, such as the flare of the triangle at the base or the size of the corner truncations of the tab and spore legs, should they exist.
 

The un-dentured tag appears best when it sits in a rectangular truncated frame and has a generous flare to the entry triangle to prevent it from seeming pinched.

has an overly generous hole with straight sides at mid-section which tend to make it appear stretched.
While the hole of this pair look identical, the curve of the latter is continuous 
while the former has at its midsection a straight line that interrupts the clarity of the curve.

has an heart-shaped hole which is too pictorial and obvious. It has become self-conscious and therefore loses the subconscious daring that a successful bread tag requires.
 

The mono-dentured tag can be spoken of in much the same light as the in-dentured tag. 
One difference is that the small aperture is surrounded by a wide or narrow tab. The latter suffers from being too narrow, and this makes the hole ungainly, whereas the side walls of the former are too wide and the tag is heavy.
 

is proportioned pleasingly.
 

Instead, this tag suffers from being heart-shaped. The hole is placed so far at the bottom of its double square tag that it appears to be pushed out of the tag entirely.
 

This recent design has lost the elegance of the early tag. It appears simplistic, crude, and devoid of purpose. It is a copy of a tag, not a tag driven with inner substance.
 

The tri-dentured tag is the most handsome and purposeful for its projections are set so as to hold onto the plastic bag which will be pressed into it.
 

It is interesting to note that the identical hole is harmonious with either the single height or double-height shapes alike.
 

The giant order of 
has a spectacular silhouette for it nearly suggests a house with short walls, a sloping roof and maybe a front garden set in perspective. The pictorial heart-shaped hole is secondary to its provocative Rorschach-like form which permits the mind to wander.
 

Ruskin could not have seen this dimension of the mechanically manufactured world, nor would he have believed in the explosive proliferation of objects whose implications threaten the descriptive quality of mother nature. Now a whole generation of objects has come into being which perform mundane tasks but which are imbued with a life that has drained the extremities of the maker. The maker seems to have performed an act of self-hypnosis, brought about by boredom, the results of which have produced objects of penetrating brilliance. The mundane, profuse world has become, once more, impregnated with thought. Objects are designed in a trance state. Banal specifications written for objects are imbued with the life experience of the maker. This experience enters the task unannounced. It is objects such as these, produced in the millions and discarded in exactly the same number, that will be kept safe in the Kleptoman Cell of the Appliance House.