Bread Overhead

What happens when a corporation's quest for the perfect "light" bread goes too far? In Leiber's gleeful satire, the answer is catastrophe: loaves of bread, pumped full of hydrogen to skirt a government ban, escape into the atmosphere and drift across a near-future America. When engineer Roger Snedden makes his fateful substitution at Puffy Products, the sky suddenly rains bread. The result is a perfectly executed comedy of errors: loaves block out the sun over Chicago, trigger military responses, send markets tumbling, and turn citizens into a mix of panic-stricken and gleeful witnesses to the great Loaf Recession. Leiber plays it absolutely straight, which is what makes it so funny. The bureaucratic responses, the corporate spin, the media frenzy, all treated with the same deadly seriousness as the bread itself. It's a perfect little machine of a story: smart, tight, and merciless in its skewering of the systems we build to feed ourselves.