"I had to learn the price of everything - because I could never afford it - when I came to the city on my own as a sixteen-year old apprentice: hunger taught me the prices, and the thought of freshly-baked bread rendered me weak in the head. In the evenings I would often wander through the city for hours on end, with only one thought in my head: bread. My eyes ached, my knees were weak, and I felt a wolf-like longing in me - bread. I was addicted to bread, just as you can be addicted to heroin. I frightened myself, and I kept thinking about a man who had once presented a slide-show at the apprentices' hostel about an expedition to the North Pole, and who had told us that they had torn apart freshly-caught fish and eaten them raw. Even now, when I have collected my pay and then walk around the city with my coins and notes, I am still often overcome with that wolf-like fear of those early days, an I buy which I see lying freshly baked in the bakers' shop window: I will buy two which look particularly good to me, then another one in the next shop, together with small crispy brown rolls, far too many of them, which later I will put in my landlady's kitchen because I cannot eat even a quarter of the bread I have bought and the thought of all that bread going mouldy fills me with horror."

Heinrich Böll, Das Brot der frühen Jahre (The Bread of Those Early Years) 1929