MFA in Artisanal Toast
Conferred by The Brooklyn Culinary Arts Atelier
Terminal degree program exploring sourdough as canvas, avocado as medium, and the existential weight of charging $18 for breakfast. Studio critique sessions held in reclaimed wood venues only.
"Panis Et Avocado Sine Fine"
Program Overview
The Master of Fine Arts in Artisanal Toast at the Brooklyn Culinary Arts Atelier is a two-year terminal credential for the mid-career cook who has begun to treat the breakfast service as a creative practice and would like to have that practice taken seriously by other people who treat the breakfast service as a creative practice. The program is intentionally small, admitting eight to twelve candidates per cohort, all of whom are selected on the basis of a portfolio of photographed toast and a single in-person studio session in which the candidate plates a slice of bread in front of a panel without speaking.
First-year coursework covers the foundation of the medium. Students complete a foundation sequence in Bread Theory, an extended study of the sourdough loaf as a structural and chemical object, with particular attention to the difference between an open crumb that supports the architecture of a sliced topping and an open crumb that allows the topping to fall through. A parallel sequence in Surface Studies covers the treatment of avocado, the rebellion against avocado, the strategic reintroduction of avocado, and the long-running debate over whether the lemon-juice treatment of an avocado constitutes a discovery or a betrayal.
Second-year coursework introduces concentration tracks. Candidates may concentrate in Plating, Pricing, or Photography. The Plating concentration treats the slate board, the unevenly hand-thrown ceramic, and the wax-paper-on-wood arrangement as serious questions of composition. The Pricing concentration explores the philosophical justification for charging eighteen dollars for two slices of bread with a vegetable on top, with a special focus on the small printed card describing the farm where the wheat came from. The Photography concentration covers the lighting requirements for what social media has come to call the breakfast flat-lay, including the increasingly important question of where in the frame the small ramekin of flaky salt belongs.
All candidates are required to maintain a daily studio practice in which they produce and consume one piece of toast and write a brief reflective note. By the end of the program, each candidate has accumulated more than five hundred toast journal entries. The committee uses these journals during the dissertation review to verify that the candidate has, in fact, been thinking about toast for two consecutive years.
The terminal capstone is the open studio. Each candidate produces a single piece of toast, plated and lit to the candidate's specification, in front of a small audience of faculty and visiting critics. The candidate then describes the toast for no fewer than twelve minutes and answers questions about it for another twenty. Graduates open menus, consult on breakfast programs, develop signature loaves for boutique bakeries, and, in growing numbers, write essays for publications you have never heard of about a meal you have probably eaten.
A Note From the Dean
Artisanal toast became, sometime in the last fifteen years, the shorthand for everything about urban food culture that the rest of the country wanted to laugh at. It is worth asking why the laughter was so loud and so specific. There are many small, expensive foods. None of them attracted the cultural derision that landed on toast. We suspect the answer is partly that toast is, in its base form, the cheapest possible breakfast, and a fundamental social anxiety attaches to anyone willing to charge fifteen dollars for it.
Our program does not apologize. The graduate of the MFA in Artisanal Toast leaves with the understanding that the food was never the point. The point was the transformation of an ordinary act of eating into a small theatre of attention. The bread, the spread, the plate, the lighting, the photograph, the comment section. All of it adds up to a moment in which a person who lives a fairly disposable life can feel that they have, for ten minutes, been present at something.
Whether this is worth fifteen dollars is a separate question. Our program does not answer it. We do, however, charge tuition at a rate that suggests we have our own answer.
Common Questions About This Program
Is the MFA in Artisanal Toast an accredited credential?
No. The MFA in Artisanal Toast conferred by The Brooklyn Culinary Arts Atelier is a novelty parody. It is not recognized by any actual accrediting body, it does not satisfy any real academic or professional requirement, and it may not be used as evidence of qualification in any setting where a genuine credential is required. Every diploma printed by this site carries a permanent watermark identifying it as a novelty.
Who is this program intended for?
The MFA in Artisanal Toast is intended for adults who enjoy a particular kind of deadpan satirical premise and would like a printable artifact that extends the joke. Common uses include framed gag gifts, office desk decoration, social media screenshots in private group chats, and the occasional small ceremonial moment when a friend has done something the world refuses to recognize as worth a credential.
How does The Brooklyn Culinary Arts Atelier relate to the rest of the catalog?
The Brooklyn Culinary Arts Atelier is a fictional institution whose only public output is the MFA in Artisanal Toast. It joins a roster of similarly fictional institutions across the catalog. Each institution exists as a small piece of the larger gag, and the names are chosen to evoke a generic flavor of real-world institution that the program is gently teasing. No institution mentioned anywhere on this site refers to a real organization, current or former. Any resemblance to a real school, agency, or business name is unintentional and will be corrected on request.
What does the printed diploma actually look like?
After typing your name and submitting the form below, the site renders a single-page diploma image that includes the program title, your name styled in a traditional diploma script, the fictional institution name, the Latin-style motto, and a small notice identifying the document as a novelty. The artwork is sized to print cleanly at standard letter size on cardstock. There is no digital signature, no embossed seal, and no real watermark beyond the one printed visibly on the artwork itself.
About the Catalog
Every program in the fake.degree catalog is an original satirical creation. The writing team studies an area of contemporary life that has become, in some quiet way, deserving of a degree, and then writes the kind of program bulletin a real university might publish if it were willing to recognize the area honestly. The bulletin you have just read is one of sixteen such programs. New programs are added only when an honest case can be made that the field exists.
If this page made you laugh, the editorial team will consider its work successful. If it made you slightly more skeptical of the next real credential you see described in serious tones, the team will consider its work doubly successful. The diploma is a small piece of printed paper. The work it claims to certify is, in every real case, the work itself. We try, in our small satirical way, never to confuse the two.
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