In late 20th-century America, especially in California's 'tech' culture, meals are organized not by successive courses but by moments in the workday: breakfast on the go, the brown bag lunch (a meal brought from home in a paper bag), the afternoon snack eaten in front of the terminal, and the convivial potluck—a shared buffet where everyone brings a dish—that marks major collective events like conferences.

The sourdough bread of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its characteristic tangy crumb, is the edible emblem of this region where Anita Borg built her career. It appears sliced at breakfast, as a sandwich in the brown bag, or hollowed into a bowl for soup.