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Toast, Trouble, and the Hidden Strength of Weak Bonds

What localists can learn from a schizoaffective coffee shop owner
toast

In the latest issue of Pacific Standard, John Gravois tells a remarkable story about the origins of artisanal toast in San Francisco. Yes, artisanal toast. At four bucks a slice. Yet far from being one more jeremiad filled with lamenting about Silicon Valley casual wastefulness upcharging the most mundane of foods, Gravois traces the toast craze back to its very humble beginnings in a place called Trouble.

Giulietta Carrelli, the 34-year-old proprietor of Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club, had a hard life on her way from the Cleveland of her childhood to settling down in San Francisco. Plagued by schizoaffective disorder, she bounced around the country, burning her way through friendships and periods of stability at roughly equal rates until she ultimately found a coffee shop in the Bay Area whose owner had a higher tolerance than most.

Eventually encouraged to start her own shop, Carrelli carved out a tiny lot in an obscure neighborhood near the water, and began building a community that could ground her. Her toast, cinnamon sugar, was a source of comfort from a childhood that couldn’t afford any fancier dessert. Her shop was founded, in the most simple sense, to make friends. Even after years of running Trouble, she still struggles with her own troubles, and can have lapses of hours, days, or longer. As she told Gravois, “I’m wearing the same outfit every day. I take the same routes. I own Trouble Coffee so that people recognize my face—so they can help me.”

Gregarious, tattooed, and certainly memorable, Carrelli runs a coffee shop, with a single toaster on the counter, to continually build her network of support, to catch her and remind her of who she is and where she wants to be. The most moving and remarkable about Carrelli’s network of friendships, though, is this feature Gravois describes:

Most of us dedicate the bulk of our attention to a handful of relationships: with a significant other, children, parents, a few close friends. Social scientists call these “strong ties.” But Carrelli can’t rely on such a small set of intimates. Strong ties have a history of failing her, of buckling under the weight of her illness. So she has adapted by forming as many relationships—as many weak ties—as she possibly can. And webs of weak ties are what allow ideas to spread.

Carrelli’s coffee shop exists to make friends, but by partaking of a different sort of friendship than Aristotle or Nisbet would commend to us. Carrelli is the most vivid and compelling example I’ve seen of the essential power of weak bonds.

For all the value we usually place on strong bonds, a superfluity of weak bonds can show much the same strength, and perhaps be more valuable, more resilient in coping with powerful impacts. Moreover, strong bonds can come at a cost, brittleness, as civil engineers are taught. Often tremendous strength is maintained by immobility, a fragility that any wise engineer accounts for by building flexibility into a material, allowing it to bend within its environment and not shatter the moment it is pushed past its tolerance

A useful parallel in the physical world may be another basic staple of everyday consumption: water, formed by predominantly weak hydrogen bonds between each of the individual molecules of H2O. In our everyday encounters, water is permeable, loose, breaking to flow at any disturbance. But that collection of weak hydrogen bonds can make for a powerful static surface tension between whichever molecules happen to be on top at any given moment. It can resist the force of a sudden, powerful impact with the strength of concrete.

Those of us who put a premium on having an attachment to place, to locality, can often talk as if the only thing that mattered were strengthening the few strong bonds that tie us to those around us, especially in the face of modernity’s anonymizing assault on those strong bonds. And it is right that we should make such an emphasis.

But we shouldn’t lose sight of what Carrelli discovered in her journey to starting Trouble. That the multiplication of weak bonds are also essential to tying a people together, and can be especially vital in reaction to such overwhelming shocks that could shatter a few vulnerable but erstwhile strong connections. It is the many weak bonds that tie localities together, and afford them collective strength when faced with dangers that could wipe each out.


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