For Jews, it’s Passover and that means that bread is taboo and matzoh is in. It’s all about the leavening, and the story of the Exodus, when there was no time for bread to rise as the former enslaved Jews hurriedly fled from the Egyptian Pharaoh, the captor who released them.

Today,  for everyone, it’s also all about flatbread, an unleavened matzoh-like current fad food. Flatbread has followed panini, and foccacia, different  forms of bread that have recently captured culinary favor. It seems we’re all about bread, the staff of life but a staff that has bent with the times.

My friend Glenn, who was raised in South Dakota on a farm, really preferred Wonder Bread. His mother had always made her own bread, the kind that we all now look for in quality bakeries and restaurants, not airy, white slices in Wonder plastic, packaged sleeves with twist-tie closures. It had been  a real treat for Glenn when his mom bought a loaf of "store bread," just like it’s a treat for us now to enjoy a crusty, textured serving of good rye bread or crunchy Italian or French bread. A baguette is a treasure. A machine-sliced, mass-produced, spongy preservative-loaded loaf  easily crushed by supermarket baggers, is not.

We’ve always believed that you can judge a good restaurant by the quality of the bread it serves. Today’s finer restaurants often serve a basket filled with several choice delights, from seeded rolls to olive-infused breads. We’ve enjoyed breadsticks impaled by roasted garlic and  we've appreciated rosemary flecked whole wheat Italian bread. Those baskets often hold a  "flatbread," onion-flavored, sprinkled with poppy or  sesame seeds.         

Matzoh has followed bread in its various incarnations. There’s plain matzoh, whole wheat matzoh and egg matzoh - even "organic matzoh."  It’s all essentially flatbread.

Armenian bread, lavash,  Indian naan and Turkish yufka are three more age-old forms of flatbread. Christian liturgy celebrates the Eucharist with a flatbread wafer. Some flatbreads or wafers are made from spelt, a species of wheat dating back to the Bronze Age. Matzoh is only one of many  flatbreads with a long history.

Flatbread is a huge hit. Matzoh is just a minor player in this growing market. Fast-food vendors are advertising and serving flatbread sandwiches. Creators of diet and frozen meals are marketing flatbread sandwiches. Calorie-counters and carb-counters alike have embraced flatbread and collectively turned their backs on the Wonder world, only allowing an occasional loaf of multi-grain bread to enter their dietary regimen.

For Glenn, it was a Wonder-ful world. For us, it's now a bit flat, but it's certainly flavorful.

Ah, the wonder of it all..