Bread: Friend or Foe?

It’s a decent question: most of us eat it every day. A lot of it. Toast, sandwiches, hamburgers. But why? It’s scarcely the easiest thing to make – well, not from scratch: you’ve got to grow corn, wheat or a similar cereal, then you’ve got to mill it, sift it, and that’s before even thinking about starting to bake it with other things. Then you’ve got to get yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae to be precise, which means either leaving your dough in a warm place for a period of time, or adding a preharvested yeast to it. It then has to be baked at fairly high temperatures for a relatively long period of time, before finally being anywhere near an edible state.
Alright, so perhaps that’s not so bad, especially in the modern world, where it’s easy to walk in Tesco and choose out a presliced loaf of bread, or, for the more adventurous, to buy a bread-oven, and mix the ingredients together and then come back a few hours later to find your loaf ready to eat (but unsliced).  Yet it’s easy to forget, or just to ignore the amount of work involved in your loaf.

Bread: The Backbone of Technology?

To make bread you need flour. Unfortunately, Tesco didn’t exist when bread was invented, so they had to find it from somewhere else… That was of course, by milling grain. There is evidence to suggest that humans from across the world have used flour: it was used by the Mesoamericans (the Aztecs, the Mayans, and others), and it was used by the Egyptians. The earliest means of producing flour was simple: two large flat stones, which you rubbed together: the top one had a hole in the middle, which you dropped the grain into, and it got ground out into flour. It sounds simple, it is simple, but there are a few problems.

1. The grain builds up between the two stones, forcing them apart, and eventually stopping the grinding.
2. To get the grain out you have to stop milling, lift the top stone up, and clear the grain out.

Some clever individual, however, spotted a way to fix this: why not cut deep channels into your top stone: this provides a sharp edge to grind the grain, and channels to carry it out from the inside of the stone to the outside. It’s a pretty simple way to solve two problems: bread’s first technological advance.

That’s only the start though, because soon our ancient baker discovers that he’s getting more orders than he can easily fulfil by milling all of his flour by hand. It’s pretty hard work too, because the stones are heavy, and he has to move them quite fast to get a nice even grain texture. He’s got to get more energy, and it’s going to take more than just manpower.

The rise of energy production

Our baker now lives in a big society: a civilization. He runs a successful business, selling bread to hungry bypassers and residents. He’s too popular, and he can’t produce enough bread.

One day, as he’s walking along the Tigris, he has an idea. The water is moving: he needs his stones to move. The water’s moving quite fast, he needs his stones to move quite fast. There’s a problem though: he needs his stones to move around, and water moves along. He also doesn’t want the water moving over the stones, because then it would mix with the flour, and make sticky dough. Mr. Baker invents the waterwheel. Now he can make as much flour as he wants, as long as he builds a big enough mill, and has enough millstones. Great: now he has a way of making all the bread he can out of the grain he receives. His new problem comes in storing the grain, but, living in a hot country he has no problem just putting it into a building and leaving it for the winter, or years when he can’t get any fresh grain. Now, not only has he solved the problem of market demand, but he’s also eliminated the problems of starvation. It’s a big step in technology too, because now he can generate energy – this won’t be utilised for very much else until the 19th century. Today the same mechanisms are used in cars, power stations, and most other mechanical devices. The same concept is used in hydroelectric power production.

Perhaps it is this property of the materials in bread which make it so important to humanity: it is preservable – a fall back.

Of course, when Mr. Baker expands his business empire away from the river he has a problem: does he transport flour from his big watermill by the river out to his new bakeries, effectively limiting the distance which his business can travel; does he only build bakeries by the river; or does he find a new way to make flour. It’s a difficult decision, so he goes out on a walk in the hills. He soon gets cold, because in the hills its windy. Wind moves, his mill stones move… well, you get the picture: he invents the windmill, expands his business, and provides the means for Holland to stay dry a couple of millennia later.

Now, Mr. Baker’s son has taken up his father’s line of business, but he’s sick of living in the same place, commuting between the river and the hills. He wants to move to a new coastal resort. This is where one of my two inspirations for this blog article come in: he invents the tidal mill.

I’ve never heard of a tidal mill I hear you say… Well, I’ll show you the remains of one.

Down the right-hand side is Nendrum’s tidal mill, and it’s about a mile away from where I live. Discovered in 1999 it is the oldest tidal mill to have been excavated anywhere in the world. It’s ajoined to a monastery on an island in Strangford Lough. Unfortunately this technology hasn’t really been capitalized, with only a few modern tidal power plants in the world.

Let’s look back at what Mr. Baker has done for us: he’s invented the windmill, the waterwheel, and even the tidal mill. He’s invented most of the parts of a car and power station in the same process, and he’s started one of the first industrial processes. Pretty clever, only I’m sure that there was no Mr. Baker, at least, not one who invented all of those things.

Economic Bread

Our aforementioned baker built a business empire out of bread: for all we know he was the Alan Sugar (or, more likely, Alan Bread) of his day, and it’s not for me to speculate on, but he probably sent budding business hopefuls out on missions to market pyramid schemes, whilst followed by a few thousand theatre goers looking for some entertainment after a hard day’s mill building, yet, by the Mediaeval period bread had crossed the world, and was being used as tableware by the subjects of the kings and queens of massive castles: it had become a staple food.

The farmers of Great Britain relied so heavily on grain production by the 19th century that the government of the time introduced import laws on corn from outside the island, which became known as the Corn Laws their repeal was perhaps the first step towards free trade, and the common market, which the English government had taken. Under the laws the price of corn rose to levels which the poorest could not afford. Today we see this issue of rising bread prices again, as developing markets import more grain than ever before, reducing world stock-piles, increasing prices, and we all know what happened next…

The Credit Crunch: Is bread to blame?

To grow corn or wheat you have to start with seed, and you’ll have to buy that off somebody. The growth of the American Grain Belt required a lot of seed, which farmers couldn’t afford without first selling a crop. With no means to get an ordinary loan they looked to a system developed by an ancient Greek, by the name of Thales. He had forecast the success of an olive harvest in a year, so he negotiated the use of olive presses in exchange for money in advance. Glad of the guaranteed income the olive press accepted, got their money upfront, whilst Thales waited, running the risk of a poor olive harvest and a loss. His powers of forecasting, however, are said to have served him well, as when the large harvest came, and many presses were needed he let them back out at much higher rates than he had paid the previous spring. From this idea the modern futures market was born, hedges invented, and nobody really understood what they would do. Now, however, we do.

Don’t cry over broken bread

I’ve followed a very circuitous route to get here, and thought of some things I never thought to think of, but finally, I will return to my original idea.

Today is Palm Sunday – the day when Christ entered Jerusalem on a colt. It’s also the day when my church holds a service at the ruins of the aforementioned monastery at Nendrum. That service is a Eucharist service, which involves, yes, bread. It’s also the only service in the year when dogs attend: more precisely Ajax, our Jack Russell attends it.

Our dogs like to eat toast. They were given toast by their breeder when they were tiny little puppies, and they’ve never grown out of it. At breakfast they crowd around the table, or, more frequently me and my father, in order to receive their daily toast. It’s an interesting ritual, but even when we’re eating breakfast at seven in the morning, and they are still asleep, the sound of the toaster springing up will instantly rouse them. They see it as an important occasion in their daily schedule of sleep-eat-sleep-walk-lick-sleep-bark: their masters giving them small fragments of crust. It is somehow reminiscent of a couple of lines from the book of common prayer:

“We are not worthy so much as to eat the crumbs under your table, O merciful Lord…”

“Give us this day our daily bread”

The second quotation is interesting, as the word we translate as daily, in Greek – ἐπιούσιος – only occurs in Luke and Matthew’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in Greek. It almost certainly refers to manna from heaven. The first, and more cynical (ie. canine) is a slight rehash  of Mark 7 v 28

²⁷“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

²⁸“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  NIV

So, clearly dogs and the Eucharist are inextricably intertwined. I, however, digress.

Today, as the Eucharist was celebrated our Jack Russell’s nose began to sniff the air: he’d smelt bread – he had recognized the importance of the liturgy and of Holy Communion, and was put out when he was left out. So does the Eucharist play on an instinctive desire to be fed by our masters? Why else would the proposition of eating “the body of our Lord Jesus Christ” not be off-putting, or, indeed, repulsive?

Collecting the crumbs

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that bread really has made our world what it is today: a mess, yes, but ultimately a success. It’s given us a financial crisis, but it’s keeping hundreds of mediocre journalists in highly paid jobs. Bread has such an important role in modern life that it slips into many frequent expressions: “the best thing since sliced bread”, “bread-winner”, “dough”. But look at all of the bad things that it’s done: a financial meltdown, the Great Fire of London, and Hovis TV ads.

So bread: evil or benign?