From crusty French baguettes to Mexican corn tortillas, Indian naan to Greek pitas, bread is one of the most universal foods. Every country in the world enjoys some form of bread. But bread is so much more than a tasty international food staple. Its significance throughout history is profound. Often thought of as a gift from the gods across cultures, it’s a measure of one’s value as a human, one’s ability to eat, to survive. This importance can be seen in a myriad of expressions: being the “breadwinner,” or “making dough” instead of money, something being your “bread and butter,” “breaking bread” with someone, “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” something not quite up to par is “half baked” or “crumby.” Even the Lord’s prayer mentions bread, “give us this day our daily bread.” It features prominently in religious rituals - Christian communion and Jewish passover. Fairy tales are littered with millers and bakers and other mentions of bread - Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs, Jack’s giant grinding bones to make his bread. Rising prices of bread have contributed to more than one rebellion and even all out revolution. Kings and Queens have quite literally lost their heads over bread. But did you know, the origins of this ancient, unifying food staple, tying all humans together throughout time and place, remain rather mysterious? Let’s fix that. 

 

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I’ve been thinking about bread a lot lately. People are anti-bread these days, my husband included. Now, don’t misinterpret that, bread is actually his favorite food. But he’s trying to do a carnivore diet where you pretty much just eat meat, fruit, and honey. Or something like that. It’s extreme. But he has health issues that necessitate extreme measures, I’m saving that story for another episode. He is adamant that bread is horrible for you and I’m like “babe, all of humanity was literally grown almost exclusively on bread. It’s kept people alive for millenia. How can it be that bad for you?” But the bread of today is quite different from the bread of the past, almost a different food entirely, one that is much less nutritious. We’ll get into that later. For now, let’s go back to the very beginning of bread, which is actually a bit of a mystery. 

 

It was believed for a long time that some form of bread first emerged around 10,000 years ago. This would have been unleavened bread, think tortillas or matzo (matza). They hadn’t yet figured out that, if you let the bread dough sit, yeast causes it to rise. It’ll be another 4,000 years before that happens. Although, they won’t figure out what yeast is until around the mid 1800s. It was just like magic back then. So 10,000 years ago, we have people baking unleavened bread in the fertile crescent. That’s Egypt, the Nile River Valley, Palestine, Israel, Syria, the Tigris - Euphrates Valley, and the Persian Gulf. This is where wild grains were first cultivated, mostly emmer and einkorn wheat which are indigenous to this area. According to National Geographic, scientists believe agriculture, planting and harvesting crops and raising livestock, started around 12,000 years ago. And this changed everything. Humans went from nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyles, moving around seasonally and following game to being able to settle in one place permanently, plant some crops, get some sheep. It’s the only way settlements, civilizations, empires were ever made possible. And it’s a big part of why the human population has exploded from just 5 million people 10,000 years ago to just under 8 billion people today. Agriculture was a big deal. And the timeline adds up. First, people start cultivating, planting, harvesting grains, then they start baking unleavened bread. Then, by around 6,000 years ago, they start baking leavened bread, letting the dough rise as the yeast produces air bubbles. And the discovery of this was likely accidental. According to Dr. Antonia Demas in an article for the Food Studies Institute quote “fermentation was probably an accidental discovery. It is thought that somebody - most likely an Egyptian housewife, left her dough out while doing some other chore. After sitting in the warm environment for a period of time, the natural yeasts grew and when the dough was baked, the product was lighter and tastier than the unleavened predecessor. Many of the best recipes are the products of unintentional experiments that are noticed and then duplicated by a receptive, observant cook.” end quote. 

 

Alright so that’s the timeline, right? 12,000 years ago agriculture starts, 10,000 years ago humans start baking unleavened bread, 6,000 years ago humans start baking leavened bread. It all lines up. That is, until the charred remains of bread were discovered at an archaeological site in Jordan dating back 14,400 years. That’s a big deal. Because it means humans were baking bread well before agriculture was even a thing. And this shatters preconceived ideas about the human timeline. This discovery was made by an archaeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen named Amaia Arranz-Otaegui. Amaia was working at a site in Jordan known as Shubayqa 1. According to the National Library of Medicine, Shubayqa 1 is a hunter gatherer site dated to the early Natufian period which was like 14.6 to 11.6 thousand years ago. It’s in northeastern Jordan in an area known as the Black Desert and it was first discovered in 1990 but excavated much more fully between 2012 and 2015. It is one of the oldest Natufian sites discovered so far. But there’s not a ton there, just the remains of two buildings that were built on top of one another. Structure 1 is partially sunk underground. It’s basically a circle of rocks with what is clearly a flagstone floor made of local basalt stones. In the center is a circular fire pit. Except there’s actually 2 fire pits, an older one with a newer one on top of it. According to that National Library of Medicine article quote “Archaeobotanical investigations at Shubayqa 1 have thus far focused on the contents of two fireplaces built in sequential phases at the center of Structure 1. The oldest fireplace is a large (approximately 1 m in diameter) circular structure made of flat basalt stones. The contents of the fireplace were left intact after its last use and were subsequently buried beneath a thick deposit that covered the building (approximately 0.5 m). In the next occupation phase of the site, the inhabitants built a new fireplace above the previous one in almost the same location, very similar in size and shape, using angular basal boulders. The contents of this fireplace were also left in situ after abandonment. Seven radiocarbon dates of short-lived charred plant remains from within the fireplaces indicate their use around 14.4–14.2 [thousand years ago] which corresponds with the early Natufian period.” end quote. 

 

So this, these fireplaces, are what Amaia was excavating when she made her discovery. Amaia is one of the authors of that article I just quoted, by the way. She was collecting food leftovers from those fire pits, mostly the bones of gazelles, sheep, and rabbits which the Natufians were known to eat. But she also found some black particles, charred food remains, that appeared to be processed plants. She took them to Lara Gonzalez Carretero at the University College London Institute of Archaeology for analysis. Lara specializes in identifying prehistoric food remains, especially bread. The National Library of Medicine article, which Lara co authored along with Amaia and some other scientists who were involved, goes into detail about how the burnt crumbs were analyzed with scanning electron microscopy and starch analysis and whatnot. But what they determined after all that is that they found 24 pieces that were quote “bread like.” Lara says in an NPR article by Lina Zeldovich quote “We both realized we were looking at the oldest bread remains in the world,” end quote. 

 

Now this is of course significant because it predates the cultivation of grains by several thousand years. We had always assumed that bread would come after agriculture. But it seems the Natufians of Jordan were gathering wild grains, processing them, mixing them with water, and baking bread in their fire pits. Lara says quote “In our opinion, instead of domesticating cereals first, the bread-making culture could have been something that actually fueled the domestication of cereal. So maybe it was the other way around.” end quote. Zeldovich adds quote “When you think about it, the idea that early humans learned to bake before settling down to farm is logical, Making bread is a labor-intensive process that involves removing husks, grinding cereals, kneading the dough and then baking it. The fact that our ancestors were willing to invest so much effort into the prehistoric pastry suggests that they considered bread a special treat. Baking bread could have been reserved for special occasions or to impress important guests. The people's desire to indulge more often may have prompted them to begin cultivating cereals,” end quote. So agriculture because of bread, not bread because of agriculture. And I’ll buy that all day long. Bread really is that good, isn’t it? That we, as a species, would up and change our whole way of life for it. 

 

But, allow me to spiral for a minute. So there was bread before there was agriculture. But what if there was agriculture before there was agriculture? I’m going to get a little pseudosciency on you for a minute, throwback to the Great Pyramid episode, episode 10, when I talk about Graham Hancock’s theory that there was some sort of major event around 12,000 years ago that basically set humans back to square one, the ancient apocalypse theory. So the theory is that there were advanced civilizations of humans living before this time, before this event. This is the time it has been proposed that the Great Pyramid was actually built as a power plant. It’s the time in which Atlantis would have existed if it ever existed at all. But this event, possibly some kind of solar plasma storm exposing the Earth to extreme radiation, would have killed off many living things including mammoths and saber tooth tigers which we know went extinct around this time. It also possibly could have instantly melted whatever ice was left at the end of the last ice age, flooding the Earth. As I say in the Great Pyramid episode, almost every single culture and religion has a great flood myth after all. Think Noah’s Ark. The theory is that this event almost entirely wiped out humans, destroying most evidence of them from before this time, and that those who survived essentially started over and had to climb their way back up, rediscovering lost technology like electricity and… possibly agriculture? Bread? Because these charred bread remains they found were 14,400 years old. That’s before this theoretical event. What if they did have agriculture then but it was lost in this reset that happened? I know, that’s crazy, and probably completely wrong, but fun to think about. I find it interesting that this bread timeline conundrum seems to line up with the ancient apocalypse theory. 

 

But Amaia and Lara are probably spot on in concluding that bread was just so freaking delicious people had to have more of it and the best way to do that was to start planting and harvesting grain themselves instead of searching for the wild stuff. It’s a chicken or the egg situation. We don’t really need to plant grain unless it has some purpose - bread. Dr. Demas backs this up saying quote “Early people settled around the wild fields to take advantage of harvesting the grain. Grain crops are somewhat tricky to harvest. There is a period of time as the grain ripens when it must be harvested before it disperses on the Earth to seed next year’s crop. If the weather conditions are such that the grain goes to seed quickly, much of the harvest will be lost. On the other hand, if the grain has been harvested too thoroughly there will not be enough seed available for next year’s crop. Observations of this process most likely led to the deliberate planting of grains,” end quote. So, while you could make bread with it, it was just too hard to gather wild grain. They needed more control so they started planting it themselves. Makes sense. 

 

Although this, the onset of agriculture, is where the degradation of bread as a healthy food began. According to Dr. Demas quote “Archaeologist J.R. Harlan did an experiment in the 1960’s to see if a diet based on the ability to gather wild grains was plausible. Using prehistoric tools, he camped out in Turkey during a three week harvesting period. He found that not only could he harvest enough grain for a family of six for an entire year during that period, but, also, the wild grain contained double the amount of protein as the cultivated counterpart,” end quote. So when we start growing grain instead of just using the wild stuff, we lose half the protein. 

 

Bread was very prevalent in ancient Egypt and we know this because there are whole scenes painted on the walls of tombs showing how the bread was made in detail. I’ve said this before, ancient Egyptians were like middle school girls with diaries. They recorded everything. The reason they included these domestic scenes in the tombs is because, culturally, religiously, they believed that the deceased would still need servants to take care of them in the afterlife. Like their job is not even done when the man is dead, sheesh. So they’re painted in the tombs baking bread so they can feed this guy after he dies. But because of this, we get an idea of how the Egyptians made bread. They actually kneaded the dough in large shallow bowls with their feet. They just hopped in there and pranced around, using a staff for balance. So, kind of like how grapes are mashed for making wine with the feet, right? I don’t know, is anyone still doing that? It’s probably all machines now. Actual bread was also included in Egyptian tombs to nourish the dead in the afterlife. One tomb contained a large cone shaped loaf, honey bread in the shape of men and animals kind of like a gingerbread man, a loaf of bread made with mashed grapes and grain, barley bread, plum pudding with made with fruit and grain, and a loaf of bread containing a sycamore leaf which was used in Egypt instead of hops cause they were also big fans of beer. So this is quite a spread and clearly shows the importance of bread in Egyptian culture. Owning a grain warehouse was the ultimate sign of wealth and part of the reason cats were domesticated and held in such high esteem in Egypt because they kept the vermin, rats and mice, out of the grain. The grain was as good as money. Poor laborers, subsistence workers, were literally paid in bread and beer. So this necessitated some kind of standard unit to make sure everyone was paid fairly. That led to beer jars of a set size and bread loaves from a standard recipe. 

 

Bread spread throughout the Mediterranean and was really perfected by the ancient Greeks and Romans. An enslaved Greek man named Eurysaces (your-i-sa-sees) who worked as a Roman baker is credited with the invention of the first mechanical dough mixer. This was a stone basin with wooden paddles that turned, mixing the dough, as a horse or donkey walked in circles. So we’ve moved on from Egyptian feet to donkeys because making bread is hard work. Lot of kneading. Too much elbow grease. Mills are also an important part of making bread. Grain is inedible in its natural state. You have to grind it to separate the inedible parts from the edible parts. At first this was done in the home by hand with rocks. The grain is placed on a big rock slab and rubbed by hand with a rubbing stone. Eventually, they started using donkeys for this too which increased bread production and this is when we see bakeries become a thing, bread made to be sold. Enough bakeries have been uncovered at Pompeii, complete with petrified bread, to suggest their importance in ancient Rome. But one discovery made just last year is a bit darker. New excavations at Pompeii uncovered what’s being called a “bakery prison” where enslaved people and donkeys were imprisoned, like actually locked in, and forced to grind grain into flour using these mills. It’s a small, dark space with a few high barred windows, like a dungeon for breadmaking. I think a lot of people overlook how big of a deal slavery was in Roman society. Enslaved people made up a large proportion of the population of ancient Rome and basically built the whole empire but they’re rarely talked about. 

 

In ancient Rome, we start to see bread being used strategically to control the masses. Juvenal (who-vay-nal), a Roman poet famously said “give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt,” referring to the way leaders distracted people into overlooking flaws in society. In the year 140, Roman officials came up with a grain dole in order to keep the votes of poor people who would otherwise have a hard time affording grain. They were given cheap food and cheap entertainment, distractions, and this became a political strategy for staying in power - bread and circuses. 

 

So, okay, everyone is eating bread. But we can’t have the Roman emperor, the elite, the aristocrats eating the same bread as the poor people and the enslaved people. We start to see bread being adapted for different social classes. This actually happened in ancient Egypt with the invention of white bread. The ancient Egyptians are really the kings of bread. As far as we can tell, they invented bread ovens, leavened bread, and white bread. Or maybe they were just  the only ones recording any of that, who knows. But white bread comes into play as the bread of the rich. And that’s because white flour was more expensive. It had to be processed more to remove the bran. And I find this so ironic because they’re taking nutrients out of the bread in order to make it white. A hearty whole grain bread is so much better for you than white bread with the bran removed. So they are doing more work to make the bread nutritionally worse and then the rich people are eating the crappy bread and the poor people are eating the bread with substance. This would change later in the mid 1800s with the invention of the roller mill which mechanically separated out the bran and the germ when processing wheat. This made white flour easier to make and therefore cheaper. It also made it way less nutritious. Bran and germ have oils in them that can cause the flour to go bad faster. If you take them out, you increase the shelf life of the flour by a lot. But they also contain most of the vitamins and minerals in the bread. So here we really see bread becoming a much less nutritious food on a grand scale. But for thousands of years, white bread was only for the rich. 

 

But the degradation of flour is nothing new. You know how drug dealers cut cocaine with like flour or baking soda or whatever? I don’t know if they really do that. I feel like I’ve just seen it in movies. But the idea is, you know, mix in some flour and you can double the amount you have to sell. No one will ever know. Well that was definitely done with actual flour throughout the ages. Pliny the Elder reports from ancient Rome quote “pound the wheat grains with sand to remove the husks, the grain then being but one half its former measure. Then 25% gypsum is added to 75% of this meal and mixed, and the flour is bolted,” end quote. Gypsum is basically chalk. So they were adding that to the flour in Rome to stretch it a bit and probably also to make it more white. This carried on. A British pamphlet published in 1757 states quote “there is another ingredient, which is far more shocking to the heart, and if possible more hurtful to the health of mankind. It must stagger human belief; I shall only just mention it, to make it abhorred. It is averred by very credible authority, that sacks of unground bones are not unfrequently used by some of the bakers amongst their other impurities, to increase the quantity, and injure the quality of the flour and bread. Thus, the charnel houses of the dead are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living,” end quote. Throw back to the cannibalism episode and also way back to episode one about the Paris Catacombs when I talked about a time the French took bones out of the charnel houses in cemeteries, and ground them up to make bread so they wouldn’t starve during a famine. Spoiler alert, they all died. So adding bones to flour is not a good move or talc or gypsum or alum or any of this other stuff they were cutting the flour with to boost their profits. Because it has no nutritional value and people are starving to death without even realizing it. According to Ella Risbridger in an article for Prospect Magazine called “Flour Power: Why Every Revolution Begins with a Piece of Bread” quote “it’s a historical fact that Victorian millers’ habits of adding alum to the flour gave children rickets.” end quote.   

 

Bread has often been used as a vehicle for other foods. In medieval times, they used a plate made out of stale bread called a trencher. They would put something wet like stew on top of the trencher and use it as a plate or bowl. The broth would seep into stale bread, softening it enough to be eaten and when all the stew was gone, they’d eat the bread. The original bread bowl. Sandwiches, what an incredible invention. A way to eat a whole meal between two slices of bread, no fork or knife required. This concept is credited to the British Earl of Sandwich John Montague. Sandwich is actually a place. It’s a town in Kent in south east England. The dude was from Sandwich, he was the Earl of Sandwich so the food was named after him. According to Dr. Demas in her article “Celebrating the Story of Bread,” which is where most of this information is coming from by the way (linked in the description), apparently John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich, had a gambling problem, we’re in the mid 1700s here. He didn’t want to have to stop to eat a meal during his gambling sprees so he ordered that meat be brought to him between two slices of bread. You can hold a sandwich in one hand and carry on doing what you're doing without even getting your hands dirty. So this was out of convenience because he literally could not stop gambling long enough to eat a meal. But it obviously caught on. According to US Foods, Americans eat close to 300 million sandwiches every day. And there are around 300 million Americans. So that’s like every single American eating one sandwich a day. Which is insane and how are they even getting those stats. There’s no way every American is eating a sandwich a day which means some people are eating more than one sandwich per day? I don’t know if this counts breakfast sandwiches, are burgers sandwiches? Hot dogs? I don’t know, I need more details. Statistics are weird. But all of this to say, the Earl of Sandwich probably had no idea that his convenience gambling food would catch on in such a massive way. And I’m going to add that sandwiches were likely invented in other cultures as well. We just know about sandwich because Britain took over the world. 

 

So we know that bread was used throughout history as a way to control the population, “give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.” So what happens when you take that bread away? Nothing good. Food author Michael Pollan says in the Netflix documentary Cooked quote “Whenever the price of bread spikes, there will be political unrest. Governments work very hard to keep the price of bread down, because you can lose your head if the price of bread goes up too fast.” And it’s true. There are numerous examples of this throughout history, most notably in France. They really love their bread in France. 

 

Poor grain harvests in 1529 led to the Great Rebellion when thousands of French civilians looted and destroyed houses of the rich and spilled grain from a municipal granary into the streets. But it gets worse in the 1700s starting with the flour war of 1775. This was sparked by the French Controller-General getting rid of government control on the price of bread believing that France needed a more hands-off approach to their economy. That caused the price of bread to skyrocket, because, why not?. According to Harrison W. Mark writing for worldhistory.org quote “The price of bread was of the utmost importance to the French lower classes… Bread made up three-quarters of most ordinary peoples' diets, and even in normal times, the poorest of workers might spend up to half of their income just on bread. Even modest increases in bread prices, therefore, threatened many with the prospect of starvation, making sudden rises in prices the most dangerous moments for public order,” end quote. This particular spike in bread prices led to the flour war which involved some 300 riots over a span of just 3 weeks that only stopped once soldiers had been deployed to restore order. Mark writes quote “It was one of the first physical manifestations of the crises that led to the French Revolution,” end quote. 

 

So there was the flour war in 1775 and then there was the revolution starting in 1789. And while there were a lot of factors involved in that revolution happening, bread, the price of bread, was definitely a contributing factor because it angered people to no end. It stirred the pot. This all started when the grain crops failed for two years in a row 1788 and 1789. Now there’s a shortage of grain. The cost of bread shoots up to the point where an average French worker is spending 88% of his income on bread according to a Smithsonian Magazine article by Lisa Bramen. That’s insane. So the bread’s too expensive. They can’t buy it. They’re already upset about how the government is being run. How the king and queen live in the utmost luxury in the Palace of Versailles, which, if you’ve ever seen Versailles, it is above and beyond. It’s excessive. It is insultingly luxurious when the common man cannot afford to eat. And the King, Louis the 16th, and Queen Marie Antoinette do not seem to get it. You’ve probably heard the famous expression “let them eat cake,” supposedly uttered by Marie Antoinette as sort of exposing that she did not grasp the severity of the situation, right her privilege was showing, and this really ticked people off. It’s fun cause it makes her look dumb or uncaring or whatever, justifies her being executed a little more, but there’s actually no evidence whatsoever that she ever said this. First of all she actually said brioche, not cake. But also, she probably never even said that. The “let them eat cake” urban legend, if you will, was already a thing long before Marie Antoinette came along. In 1766, when Marie Antoinette was just 10 years old, philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote about the line “let them eat cake” in his book Confessions and attributed it to Spanish Princess Marie Therese who married Louis the 14th in 1660. So I don’t know. I don’t know if Marie Therese said something along those lines. If she did, it didn’t spark a revolution at that time. For some reason it resurfaced a century later and Marie Antoinette got the blame for saying it which did spark a revolution. Yikes. The people storm the Bastille, Louis and Marie get their heads chopped off, and France becomes a totally different country and while bread alone didn’t cause all of that, it certainly played a large role in turning people against the monarchy. 

 

Let’s go to Richmond, Virginia in 1863. It’s the middle of the Civil War in the Confederate capital. There’s more than 100,000 people living in Richmond and times are tough. It’s a war. There are union blockades completely halting trade in the south which raises the costs of basic necessities like food and clothing which affects everything else, rent, wages, everything. The working class could not keep up with what Encyclopedia Virginia calls the “inflationary spiral.” So what happens is, and I did not know this, I’ve never heard about this, this pretty wild. A group of women gathered at Capitol Square determined to speak to Virginia’s governor John L. Letcher to bring him their grievances and demand relief, basically. And considering the position of women in society at this time. This is bold. But it gets even bolder. He supposedly refused to speak to them, surprise surprise. Or other accounts say that he did speak to them but refused to do anything to help. So the women marched out of Capitol Square towards the business district chanting and gathering hundreds of followers as they went. According to encyclopedia Virginia quote “Several eyewitnesses reported seeing a gaunt woman raise a skeleton of an arm and scream, “We celebrate our right to live! We are starving!” Others heard a chant of “Bread or blood!” The mob then began attacking government warehouses, grocery stores, and various mercantile establishments, seizing food, clothing, and wagons, as well as jewelry and other luxury goods. Some merchants resisted the rioters while others watched helplessly as the looters seized bacon, ham, flour, and shoes,” end quote. The mayor arrives, he’s pleading with the mob, they ignore him. The governor, this Letcher guy gets there he’s like “okay, okay, let’s talk, geez, sorry, chill out guys,” they ignore him. And finally the Confederate president Jefferson Davis gets there cause they're all in Richmond right. There’s the mayor of Richmond but Richmond is the capital of Virginia so the governor of Virginia is also there and it’s also the capital of the Confederacy so the president of the Confederacy is there too. They all rush to the riot trying to stop it. Jefferson Davis’ wife Varina Davis wrote in her memoir that her husband quote “pleaded with the rioters to disperse and then threatened to have an artillery unit open fire on the mob.” Although others claim it was governor Letcher who threatened violence if the mob didn’t disperse within 5 minutes. I don’t know, it was probably both of them and it worked. Ultimately the crowd scattered, fearing for their lives. They tried to keep this covered up. They were in a war and it did not look good for the Confederacy. Plus it was super bad for morale. But unfortunately for them, they have all these Union prisoners of war everywhere. They’re stashing them in old tobacco warehouses in Richmond. If you listened to episode 50 about Mary Richards and Elizabeth Van Lew then you’re already familiar with this world. Davis is like “not in front of the prisoners you guys, you’re making us look bad,” actually what he really said was “cut it out or I’m going to kill all of you,” “you have five minutes,” “I’m going to count to 5… 1… 2…” and they’re like “sorry dad,” and they all go home. But word leaks to the north, probably through the Union prisoners, or I don’t know, maybe through people like Elizabeth Van Lew who were actively passing information to Union Generals. The New York Times finds out about it and they run a front page article referring to the uprising as the “Bread Riot of April 2, 1863.”

 

There were bread riots in Egypt in 1977. According to a CBS news article at that time quote “nine out of ten Egyptians lived in poverty. Half the male population was unemployed. When President Sadat cut public subsidies for flour, cooking oil, and other staples, people took to the streets in two days of violent protest. Known as the "bread riots," the public's rage forced Sadat to restore food subsidies, but when the army stepped in to quell rioters, 800 were injured, 80 were killed, and more than 1,000 were imprisoned. In [an interview] following the deadly riots, President Sadat insisted ‘I'm proud because I have the full support of the man in the street in Egypt.’ Sadat was assassinated four years later.”

 

There were bread riots in Iran in 1942 and again in 2017. There were bread riots in Jordan in 1996 and in Sudan in 2018. This is not a thing of the past. Bread, access to food, is such an indicator of the health and stability of a society that the Economist came up with the Big Mac Index in 1986. And yes that’s referring to Big Macs like the cheeseburger at McDonalds. The index compares the cost of a Big Mac cheeeseburger in different countries as a unit to measure purchasing power. So if a big mac costs $5 in your country and the average person makes $20 an hour. That’s a very different scenario to big macs costing $8 and the average person making $12. Right, can people afford to buy big macs aka bread? Cause it’s all bread. Bread has become a metaphor for food in general because for a long time it was the majority of most people’s diet. It was bread. Now it’s other things but bread has become almost symbolic. It represents all food. Without bread, people freak out. According to Risbridger quote “rebellion follows famine because if the people don’t have bread, what else have they got to lose?” end quote. 

 

And governments are well aware of this. The prices and quality of bread have been controlled by governments throughout time. There are regulations in place. In Britain this started with the Assize of Bread and Ale law of 1266 which regulated bread, how much bread you could get for what price. It’s the reason a baker’s dozen is 13 and not 12, because they had to meet the minimum weight requirements or face paying a fine. So bakers just threw in an extra one to be sure. And we already touched on how this was regulated in ancient Egypt where bread and beer were quite literally forms of currency. Risbridger says quote “Those laws governing the price of bread have been in place in Britain since the thirteenth century, because what we’re really governing is the worth of a person’s labor. When we say that all revolutions start with bread, what we mean is that all revolutions start when your labor is no longer enough for the food you need to feed it,” end quote.

 

So once again, it’s not literally bread. It was bread once, it’s not bread now. It’s food in general. When the ratio of how much money you make compared to how much it costs to eat is off, there are going to be problems. History clearly illustrates this. So of course I looked up a graph of bread prices in the US. In 1980 the cost of just basic cheap white bread was 50 cents per pound. That’s up to $2.33 per pound in 2024. There’s a noticeable spike in 2008 when the recession hit and a much larger spike in 2020 which I can only attribute to Covid. So I don’t know why everyone was hoarding toilet paper, never could figure that one out, we should have been hoarding bread. Food prices in general are on the rise. According to the US Department of Agriculture, US food prices rose by 25% from 2019 to 2023, outpacing inflation. They’re rising higher than they should be. And that’s scary. Because if you know your history, you know that bread can make or break an empire. It’s more than a delicious buttery morsel of fluffy floury goodness. Bread has always been a unit with which we have measured success, accomplishment, and self-worth, take it away and we’ve got nothing to lose. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from NPR, Food Studies Institute, the National Library of Medicine, Smithsonian Magazine, Grants Bakery, Technogym, National Geographic, the University of Nebraska, Prospect Magazine, worldhistory.org, Encyclopedia Virginia, CBS News, FRED Economic Data, and the US Department of Agriculture. Links to these sources can be found in the show notes.