When Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar started charging $3 for its breadbaskets in late 2005, diners were incensed. “Has Kennedy started to believe in his own bullshit?” asked one disgruntled patron on Chowhound. Sure, the bread was homemade and organic, but it was the principle of the thing. Free bread is the standard in Toronto restaurants, and as a cornerstone of the Western meal, it’s the symbol of hospitality. Asking us to pay for our crusts was like pulling the welcome mat out from under our feet. What was next—charging for tap water?

Nowadays, Kennedy is looking like a visionary. Artisanal bread is taking over the city. This spring alone, an outpost of Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian chain of café-bakeries, opened in Forest Hill. Mont­real’s Première Moisson is selling bread at Toronto supermarkets like A&P and Dominion. And Kennedy recently expanded his line of breads for retail at Gilead, his new café-bakery in Corktown. Even neighbourhood restaurants are making an effort to bring in decent bread (Ace, Fred’s) if they aren’t baking their own. But the good stuff doesn’t come cheap. Anthony Walsh, execu­tive chef at Canoe, regularly grumbles that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year buying loaves from Marc Thuet to stock the Oliver Bonacini restaurant empire. Not surprisingly, Walsh is looking into opening his own commissary. The model is already there: Thuet, hands down the city’s best baker, opened a second location to start selling his bread. The days of free baskets may be numbered.

Our new-found obsession with big-ticket bread is coinciding with the world’s highest wheat prices in decades: in February, they peaked at $813 a tonne, almost four times the average of the past two crop years. There are several reasons, but the most salient one—and the one least likely to be mentioned by fear-mongering news­paper head­lines—is that until recently, grain was ridiculously cheap. Adjusting for inflation, wheat prices had actually dropped 69 per cent since 1974 due to higher-yield seeds, better fertilizers and better equipment. But rising energy costs (those fertilizers and equipment are fuelled directly or indirectly by oil) are driving up production prices. Compounding the problem is the fact that world grain reserves are alarmingly low, in part because of an extended drought in Australia, a major wheat exporter. Consumption of grain-fed meat is at an all-time high, thanks to the rise of the middle class in China and India. And bio­fuels are adding further pres­sure as farmers replace wheat crops with corn—not only are we com­peting with the meat on our plates for grain, we are now competing with our cars.

In the States, bakers have marched on Washington to protest prices. The Pakistan government has banned wheat exports. And after riots broke out in Egypt over the long queues for subsidized bread, President Hosni Mubarak ordered the army to start baking for the civilian market. Here at home, the strong loonie has insulated us somewhat, but supermarket stickers have been inching up over the past year—often not fast enough for bakers to recoup losses. Première Moisson has jacked up its prices twice since last fall, each time by 10 or 20 per cent. So far, it hasn’t hurt sales. “But we always worry it could put the brakes on consumption,” says Jacques Pascal, a sales executive at Première Moisson. Thuet, who used to give away his chewy nine-grain, now sells it for $5.95. Even at a chain like Le Pain Quotidien, a boule (albeit a two-kilogram one) fetches $12. And that’s without much of a profit.

Higher prices raise our expectations: we want to get more for our money—if not quantity, then quality. And for most Canadians, artisanal bread is still an affordable luxury. “It’s not like comparing a BMW and a Pontiac,” says Pascal. “The price differential between artisanal and mass-produced bread isn’t that dramatic.” Philip Shaw, the CEO of Ace Bakery, points out that when people feel pinched—say, during a recession—they typically curb their spending at restaurants but splurge for better items at home. “Retail sales can even go up.”