Let’s talk about the most widely consumed food in the world.
The food we turn to in our darkest of hours, that basically defines what it means to be
human itself.
The history of bread starts before recorded
time.
Up to 30,000 years ago humans were collecting grain and mixing it with water to a create
porridge or Gruel.
Sometimes they would heat it, making a flat thing that you could call bread, but we have
no idea what language was like that far back, so who knows what they called it.
But although they looked like us, these people
were nomadic – moving with the migrations of the animals they ate.
The men were the hunters responsible for the meat, and the women were the gatherers responsible
for the plants, so we have an extremely smart lady to thank for what happened next…
After the last ice age, approximately 10,000
years ago, temperatures rose, and grasses became a lot easier to find.
Now, right around this time in the Fertile Crescent, somewhere around modern Iraq, someone
noticed that if you left your Gruel out, for some reason it started to bubble.
Now, you could do two things with this soured-dough.
You could cook it and create a wonderful portable, fluffy food, that can last for days on end
and provide boundless energy – OR you could let your cold Gruel sit for longer, fermenting
to create a drink that was safer than water and made you feel pretty great.
Bread and Beer were born.
Forget that nomadic lifestyle, now we had
a reason to stick around one area for awhile, creating towns and cities.
And with all the beer and bread we wanted, we needed to grow a lot of grain, which created
agriculture.
And wait, to plough all those fields, wouldn’t we need some help?
Which created the domestication of animals and slavery.
Around 5,000 BC, even though they had no idea
of the why of it besides some kind of magic, the Egyptians learned that you could easily
make Bread in two ways, either skim off a bit of beer and add it to your flour - or
save a little bit of the dough each time you make bread and add it next time – what we
now call a Sourdough starter.
At this very time, cultures all over the world
were figuring out agriculture and bread – just using whatever grain they had the most of.
In Asia that was rice and in the Americas, that was corn.
Egypt discovered you could take grass, which
is easy to grow and convert it into energy that could power a massive workforce of slaves,
which was convenient considering all the gigantic structures they wanted to build.
In fact, the most common item found in excavations
of Egyptian slave quarters are bread baking bowls.
And When the Hebrew people fled in the book of Exodus, they brought their bread bowls,
but as we all know couldn’t wait for their bread to leaven, so basically abandoned their
sourdough starters, leading to…
The Egyptians taught bread making to the Ancient
Greeks who passed it on to the Romans, who were REALLY into bread.
So much so that every household received 75 pounds of wheat a month.
Why?
Because the Romans found that as poet Juvenal observed: “Give them bread and circuses
and they will never revolt”
The fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity leads to the Medieval Ages in Europe, where
most people were dirt poor serfs, who farmed grain, but forced to give most of it to the
lords as taxation.
Now you got to keep a tiny share, but because you didn’t have the money to build a bread
stove, you took it to the Lord’s baker to bake into bread, who also took a cut.
As the Romans could have warned them, this
system that made bread so difficult for the people to get couldn’t last forever.
By the late 1700s in France for instance, buying bread used half of a person’s income.
A bread shortage is what caused 7,000 women to storm Versailles at the kick off of the
French Revolution.
By the way, you may think at this point I should mention Marie Antoinette saying “If
the people have no bread, let them eat cake”
But in original phrasing in French, it would have actually translated to “let them eat
brioche” which is even dumber, but also all of this is dumb because she never even
said that, it was made up about 50 years later.
But up to this point, all of this was over
a food that no one knew for sure HOW was made.
Everything that happened inside bread when it rose and baked was a total mystery scientifically.
But in bread loving France in 1840, Louis
Pasteur discovered that all the little things that scientists had observed for centuries
under rudimentary Microscopes were alive, and all of these germs were bacteria and yeast.
For more on Louis, see our video on Pasteurization, but thanks to him, everyone now knew the reason
why flour and water left out starts to bubble.
Simply, Yeast is a fungus that is everywhere – in the air, on surfaces (like the skin
of fruits), on your pets, on you… and the yeast gets into the flour and water and starts
eating the sugars and farting, giving your dough lift when you bake it.
All those starters people were saving, they
were keeping the fungus they had originally captured multiplying each time they baked.
The timing of this discovery was perfect,
because the mid 1800s would also see the industrial revolution and the population explosion that
came along with it.
All these workers would need a lot more bread and faster than the old days long sourdough
process took, so baker’s yeast was invented.
And with every population boom, came more
bread innovations.
Post World War One saw the rise of mechanized sliced bread.
Post World War II, with the baby boom, came
the great wonder-bread white bread nightmare, where in order to further speed along bread
production, they took a food with 3-4 major ingredients and created a chemistry experiment
in a bag made to mimic bread, but not exactly be bread?
But boy oh boy, did it pack well in a howdy doody lunch box.
Yes, I know this is not white bread.
White bread is not allowed in this household.
Now as I record this, we are all inside in
isolation and flour and yeast are hot commodities as humanity relearns the value of baking their
own bread – literally half my Instagram feed is people baking.
Seemingly even as we are at our most disconnected in history, we are reconnecting with the thing
that pulled us together into civilization in the first place… beer.
I mean bread.