Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday and I've been thinking a lot about bread,
specifically about what bread tasted like
right before the women's march
on Versailles in 1789 in which a group of
French women who were, depending on your perspective, either protesting
or rioting, besieged the King's palace in Versailles
and forced him and his family to return to Paris.
It was a big moment in French Revolution, and it was caused, in part,
by bread, mostly the price of bread, which had
risen dramatically due to failed harvests and bad monetary
policy, but also the quality of bread
which always declined in hard times. Like the
French peasant bread in 1789 often included lots of chaff
the indigestible husk surrounding the
edible kernel of grain and wheat. But it was also common to bulk up
wheat or rye or buckwheat dough with sawdust or hay
or even animal dung. And at that time bread wasn't just, like, a staple
of the French people, it was the diet.
Like, the average French adult ate two to three pounds of
bread per day, every day
And while they did sometimes have access to other foods,
many days, possibly most days, it was just bread.
Sawdusty, possibly animal-poopy
bread. I've been reading about these partly for the cooking history videos that
Sarah and I are gonna make later in the year and partly because I -
I don't know, I just fall down research rabbit holes, like I'm reading one book
book and then another, and pretty soon I'm looking up 5000 year old
recipes for grain paste and my kids are like "Dad! Can you make
breakfast?" and I'm like "Oh my God it's morning?!" Anyway the thing that
gets me about bread is not how shockingly horrible
it used to be, it's how recently
it was shockingly horrible. Like you know Hay-ley's comet
or possibly Halley's comet, or Haw-ley's comet, depending on
who's pronunciation you believe, it's this comet that is visible from
Earth every 75-ish years. So,
like a good human lifetime. The last time Halley was visible
from Earth in 1986, I was 8; the time before
that was 1910, and the time before that Louis
the XVI's cousin Philippe the first was king of
France having become king after the so-called second French Revolution
which was caused, in part, by
you guessed it, failed harvests and rising bread prices.
Put another way, we are two human lifetimes
removed from the US Civil War and only three
removed from the time when not just the poorest people but
most people were eating sawdust bread in France.
Of course this doesn't mean that we've achieved some
great victory that we ought to celebrate or anything, there are still
lots of people who don't get adequate nutrition and not only in
impoverished countries but also in wealthy ones. But it does mean that
we can make progress, and when you look at history through the lens of
lifetimes, both the pace of change and the nature
of change are to me really encouraging. And frankly I could
use some encouragement in these strange times because I find that despair
mostly just makes me complacent, like "Oh there's
nothing to be done about this horror or that
horror. It's just the nature of things." On
the other hand, feeling like progress is inevitable also makes me
complacent, like "Oh I can just sit back and watch rising
grain yields feed the world and Elon Musk fix
climate change and disease cure itself."
But reading history fills me with the uncomfortable but productive
feeling that better human lives are possible but
not guaranteed. Of course it's overly simplistic
to say that the women who led the march on Versailles brought about a
freer, more equitable, less hungry
France. The French Revolution, like so many revolutions,
failed to achieve many of its ambitions. In my experience
anyway the changes we seek in the world almost always
prove harder to make than we first think they'll be. But
looking at history in lifetimes shows that change
can, and does, happen anyway, something I'm reminded of
every time I bite into a nice, sawdust free slice of bread.
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.