humans after inventing bread
f a t
Make bread, cook bread. Put some bread in water, let it get the funny mold. Cook the rest so it’s toasty. Strain the moldy bread water, chill the bread water. Cook down the bread soup gunk until it’s a paste, smear it on the cooked cooked bread and drink the bread water.
Vegemite on toast with a beer on the side is weird when you spell it out.
I used to listen to Boring Books to Help You Sleep podcast. I turned off the stupid book from the 1800s on The History of Bread because I found myself actually intrigued a little.
Just checked out the podcast and some of them are intriguing as hell - Life on a Medieval barony for example.
I once tried and failed to start a discussion with some colleagues about how insane it actually is that humans invented bread and they all looked at me like I was an idiot. But honestly, if you have no frame of reference, you have lived as a hunter gatherer and then suddenly one day you find a way through trial and error to come up with the concept of bread. Like how??? You just look at the withered grass and go: I bet I can eat that.
You eat the seeds for awhile and then you play around with a rock and start smashing the seeds, only after you have understood that they must be completely dry and tasteless. And you create flour. Maybe you use it for face paint or dry and eat it and it kinda sucks and maybe you start thinking "aye, when I eat it, it turns into clay sort of. I bet I can do something with it. Maybe you try using it for glue or painting the cave walls. Maybe it doesn’t really work like you want it to and then one day, because you have fire, you just try and see what happens when you throw the flour clay on the fire. Maybe several steps have come before this and the experiment is more calculated. Maybe it all happened by pure coincidence. But suddenly you have made the clay hard and inside it is either soft or it is flakey. Kinda tastes good. The burnt edges from the fire taste nice. The consistency of the bread is new and interesting. And from there, it is iteration upon iteration, learning to make bread.
I don’t know anything, I just think so many aspects of the crossover from hunter gatherer to the humans be are today is so incredibly interesting and weird. The most mundane things we take for granted now, are kind of amazing inventions that I find wild to think about. I dunno. I just think human creativity is cool and weird.
A lot of food preparation techniques of ancient origin come from efforts to store or preserve food. Pickling, smoking, and salting being among the most obvious.
Bread likely shares a similar lineage. Wheat that has been ground to flour is much easier to store, keeps for a long time, and can be reconstituted into more appealing food in small batches as needed.
Whole wheat berries last a good long while if stored in an airtight container. But ground wheat berries oxidize and spoil really fast, unless you filter out the bran and the germ, which I very much doubt ancient people were bothering to do. And lean bread only lasts a couple days before either molding or going rock hard. Basically what I’m saying is that grinding up flour and making it into bread is actually a pretty shit method of preservation, we’d be better off just eating a porridge made from whole wheat berries, and I bet bread stuck around just because it’s friggin delicious.
Hard tack is a very basic cracker that stored and traveled well.
Yeah, I don’t think a lot of folks really appreciate how absolutely insane modern life is compared antiquity
The entire journey of mankind is bizarre. I remember a teacher drawing a line on the blackboard and then the last tiny snippet of that line was recorded human history. The rest was humanity’s entire existence on this planet in total. What was it that made us leap from clever apes to technologically advanced? How many amazing things did humans achieve before the recorded word. Did we achieve anything at all or did we just live in constant survival mode?
I mean, the obvious answer is the invention of agriculture, of which bread is a part of, but I’m still so incredibly fascinated by the insane speed we evolved as species from then on. I could read all the books about it and have all the answers and still be cemetery amazed and in awe at how we got to this point. It’s stuff like this that makes me understand why some people think there is a higher power out there that makes decisions for all of us. Because to have this type of stuff happen organically or by chance is just too weird. It feels better and more simple to just say that some god did it.
Friggin bread, man. I can be impressed with us genetically manipulating plants and animals to become part of our diet, but to pluck a fruit or kill an animal and then roast them or eat them raw or make a juice or something other, that is still nowhere close to the same wtf as the creation of bread. At least not for me haha.
Isn’t bread just solid form of beer?
I prefer to think of beer as liquid bread. Delicious and nutritious!
Yeah makes sense
Asking the REAL questions here ⁉️
every civilization that invented bread also invented toast, the reason is it is a form of preservative believe it or not dry toast is better than dry bread.
That’s just a loaf of raw toast.
It’s toast ore
It crafts into Bread Ingots
Bread? I don’t see any bread. All I see is some white piece of recycling cartons pressed in the form of something that resembles a bread.
This bread is only half cooked! We must cook it again to guarantee tastiness!
