Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Bread

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Bread is one of the most important, most commonly consumed, and oldest food products in the world. It’s been called the Staff of Life. It even gets a prominent mention in the Lord’s Prayer. But how did this fundamental food, which ultimately comes from wild grass, get developed? And perhaps more importantly, why did this grass-based food become so important? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bread is one of the most important, most commonly consumed, and oldest food products in the world. It's been called the Staff of Life. It even gets a big shout-out in the Lord's Prayer. But how did this fundamental food, which ultimately comes from wild grass, get developed? And perhaps more importantly, why did this grass-based food become so important? Learn more about the history of bread and how it became the staple food for so much of the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals,

but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. My guess is that there's some. something you would like to do, but you don't know how to do it. Maybe it's start a podcast or a

YouTube channel. Perhaps you want to learn more about music or graphic design. Skillshare has thousands of video-based courses to teach you the skills you want. With Skillshare Premium, you can get unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare Premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes. When trying to decipher the human use of bread, we have to try to infer things from the objects we find. Written evidence only goes back so far, and in the big scheme of things, it's relatively recent. Organic objects like bread don't really fossilize, so it's hard to find direct evidence through really old preserved bread. The story of bread starts out with grass, or to be more

specific, cereal grains. There isn't much we know about when humans figured out they could eat seeds from certain grasses. But the current belief amongst anthropologists is that it was a relatively new addition to the human diet. Nuts, fruits, and tubers, all probably came first and well before the adoption of grains, with meat being the primary staple in the human diet. The earliest evidence that's been found dates back about 105,000 years. Stone tools found in Africa had microscopic bits of grass seed in them. They found over 2,000 particles of plant starch on one of the tools which indicates that humans were probably processing the seeds for consumption at that point. The way humans first consumed grain was probably direct.

Some hunters probably rolled the seeds from a grass plant in their hands to remove the husks and found that the seeds could provide them with some energy, even if it wasn't the best meal they could have. A type of gruel was probably developed before bread. This would have been some sort of minimally processed seeds to make a type of soup or paste which could be consumed directly. The next real evidence we have of grain adoption comes from a gruel. group of humans called the Natufians, whose remains were found in caves in Israel. Here they found grains of barley embedded in stone tools in a way that clearly showed that the tools were used for grain processing. In 2018, a discovery was made at a Natufian site in Jordan, which totally

changed the timeline for when we think humans began making bread. There they found some black specks around a fire pit. The black specks turned out to be the ancient equivalent of burnt toast crumbs you might find at the bottom of your toaster. It was bread. It was dated 14,000 years ago, a full 4,000 years earlier than bread was previously believed to have been made. This bread was almost certainly a type of non-leavened flatbread. It would have been lightly cooked on a stone and not in an oven, and it probably would have been somewhat similar to Indian non-bread. Also found in Israel were early stone sickles, which show that they were creating tools with the sole purpose of harvesting wild grains. About 10,000 years ago, one of the biggest changes to humanity took place, and one which had an obvious impact on the story of bread, the rise of agriculture.

The hows and whys of the rise of agriculture is a pretty involved story. There are lots of theories, and it's certainly well beyond the scope of a daily podcast. I'm sure I'll be dealing with the subject more in future episodes. For now, I'll just wave my arms around in the air and say, agriculture happened. For the purposes of this episode, the important thing to know is that the rise of agriculture, at least in the fertile crescent in the Middle East, was heavily reliant on grain. Why grain, and why in particular wheat and barley? Humans have been eating tubers for a much longer period of time, yet when humanity fully

committed to agriculture, it was with cereals, not roots. While there are several reasons. First, grain stores really well. You can store grain for years, and it'll still be edible. fruit and meat have very short shelf lives in a world without refrigeration. With grain, you could even out the good and bad years, which would regularly produce the biggest problem nomadic people had, which was getting enough food. Second, one person could produce a lot. Anthropologists have done tests and have found that a single person could harvest enough wild grain, not even cultivated grain, in a three-week period, to feed four people for a full year.

This allowed people to spend time on other pursuits for much of the year, which eventually gave rise to civilization. But that too is another episode. Third, the byproduct had other uses. While humans only ate the seeds, the rest of the plant, primarily the stock, could be used for animal feed, for thatching on a hut, as bedding, or as fuel to be burned. It was after and during this period of the rise of agriculture, and again, I'm waving my hands fiercely here, where modern bread that we might recognize today developed. The first advancement was leavening bread. If you look at any modern bread recipe today, we'll probably have yeast as an ingredient. Again, as with most things about bread, we really don't know who first developed leavened bread,

but it was the Egyptians who really embraced it. They developed the technique of keeping dough used the previous day as a starter for the next day's bread. This sourdough technique is still practiced today. The Boudin Street Bakery in San Francisco has a sourdough starter dating back from 1849, and many bakeries around the world have yeast cultures that date back for decades. One of the creators of the Xbox, Seamus Blakely, collected a 4,500-year-old dormant yeast from Egyptian pottery and managed to get a yeast culture to grow from it.

He claimed, quote, The aroma of this yeast is unlike anything I've ever experienced, unquote. Doesn't however indicate whether it was good or bad. And yes, he actually did manage to make bread from it. Later on, yeast sources came. came from different places in different cultures. Beer-producing regions like Gaul and Iberia use the foam from beer as a yeast starter.

In wine-producing regions, grape must would often be used as a yeast starter. The histories of wine and beer are, yet again, subjects for other episodes. The other big innovation was the oven. If you've ever prepared bread while camping on a flat rock or a stick, it certainly can work and get the job done, but it isn't quite the same as a freshly baked loaf of bread. In fact, for thousands of years, bread really wasn't baked at all. That took the development of the oven. The earliest evidence of ovens came from ancient

Greece. They developed the closed-door oven which allowed a wider variety of bread to be created. It's hard to pin down many of the first when it comes to bread because so many cultures around the Mediterranean made bread, and there was so much contact between them in terms of trade and exchange of ideas. I mentioned earlier that bread doesn't fossilize, and that's true. However, it can carbonize when it's buried in volcanic ash, and that's exactly what happened when Vesuvius erupted. A carbonized loaf of Roman bread called the Herculaneum loaf was discovered in 1930 in the villa of one Quintus Granius Veris.

We know his name because the bread was stamped with a baker's stamp from the villa, which was used for branding. It's a round sourdough loaf with a radial cut with marks on the top. People have actually since replicated this bread. Bread in the ancient world was a really big deal. Rome had a baker's guild, and a representative from the guild would always have a seat in the Senate. In Greece, cities would compete with each other on the quality of their bread and their bakers.

Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, and other towns would all brag about their bread. Almost everywhere in the ancient world, you could find many dozens of types of bread, which differed in the type of grain they were made out of, how they were cooked, and what products were added. Bread with egg, butter, or milk were more expensive and usually only eaten by the rich. In Rome, bread became a public good. There were subsidies for bread, and it was given out by rich Romans who sponsored games, hence the term bread and circuses. In the Middle Ages, bread didn't lose its importance as a food.

However, how it was used did change slightly. A larger stale piece of bread called a trencher was often used as a plate during meals. Food was placed on the bread which would then absorb any juices which came from the meat, and the bread could then be eaten as part of the meal. This practice was eventually replaced with the use of bowls and dishes. There was little change to bread for centuries, From ancient times to about the 19th century, we could probably have easily recognized by sight and taste ancient bread. The Industrial Revolution saw the industrialization of breadmaking.

In 1786, the Albion flour mill became the first flour mill to use a steam engine instead of a wind or water mill. It was said that it could output more flour than every other flour mill in London until it mysteriously burned down in a fire five years after it opened. sliced bread was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I did an entire episode on how sliced bread came to be, so I'll ask you to just listen to that to get the full story. In the 20th century techniques such as the clorley wood bread process, which allows for faster production with lower protein wheat was developed. Bread also became the vehicle for many additives,

which changed the color, texture, as well as nutritional additives such as calcium. One big change to bread is that traditionally darker whole wheat bread was formerly considered the bread for poor people. while white bread from refined flour was the bread of the rich. In the late 20th century, those trends reversed with whole grain bread now being more expensive and refined industrial white bread being cheaper. In the 21st century, bread consumption, for the first significant time in centuries, had gone down. With increasing diagnoses of celiacs disease and gluten intolerance,

as well as more people trying to cut down in carbohydrates, bread consumption per capita might have reached its peak. Over 56% of consumers have indicated that they're buying less bread than before, even though it's still estimated that 60% of the people in the world still eat some form of bread every day. Regardless of what might happen in the future with diet trends, given its history and cultural significance, I don't think that bread will be off the menu anytime soon. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Today's user review comes from Mitch Duneau in Canada. He writes, brief fun and informative. This podcast by well-known travel blogger Gary Arndt is the perfect pandemic pivot podcast.

Gary himself pulls off such a literative elocution in the podcast. Nearly every episode is under 10 minutes and filled with interesting factoids about various moments in history. Not to be missed. Well, thank you very much, Rich, and thanks to all of you who've left reviews over on Apple Podcast and over on places such as Stitcher. Remember, if you leave a five-star review, I will read your review on the show.