The National Bakery Standards Board concluded its seven-year review of crumb classification on Friday, publishing a definition that runs to four hundred pages and resolves, in its final paragraph, that a crumb is any object the board has determined to be a crumb.

Board chair Hesper Loam defended the wording as "unambiguous."

The long road to nothing

The review began after a dispute between two suppliers over whether a fragment weighing slightly under the old threshold could be sold as a crumb or only as crumb-adjacent material. Rather than settle the case, the board suspended the threshold entirely and convened a panel.

The panel met one hundred and forty times.

We considered mass. We considered volume. We considered the question of whether a crumb ceases to be a crumb when nobody is looking at it. In the end we returned to first principles, and the first principle is that we decide.

Suppliers have welcomed the clarity. Consumers have noted that the price of a crumb has risen twice during the review and once since it ended.