BREAD, A SIMPLE FOOD WITH AN AWESOME HISTORY, TRADITION AND CULTURE

A simple food, but with a complicated history

The history of bread has always accompanied that of human civilization. Obtained thanks to the cooking of flours derived from cereals, this food has represented the basis of nutrition over the centuries, so much so that the control of the ovens has often been an essential aspect of power, to the point of being at the origin of riots and revolutions. Simple and essential food, however, it had its own technological development, especially in the Renaissance with the introduction of artificial leavening

A RANDOM DISCOVERY

Bread has accompanied human history for at least ten thousand years. It is in fact in the period of transition between the Paleolithic and Neolithic (between 10,000 and 8,000 BC) that man began to cultivate cereals (wheat, rye, spelt). This is testified by archaeological finds in various areas of Western Europe and the Middle East. It is difficult to establish an exact date when man ‘invented’ bread. For long periods, in fact, man ate whole grains – raw or cooked – or ground with stones. The next step occurred when the flour, coarse and not pure, was mixed with water. The porridge thus composed had a good nutritional value, but was not easily digestible. The first important step in the evolution of bread probably occurred by chance: that is, when a container with flour and water was left near a fire for a long time. It was then seen that these ingredients tended to firm up and create a more or less homogeneous mixture;

ANCIENT, BUT NOT OLD

Archaeologists agree in asserting that, in the ancient western world, it was the Egyptians who obtained the first forms of bread leavening. Equal diffusion bread had in all subsequent societies, from the Greek to the Roman. During the Republican age, in 168 BC, the Romans, aware of the importance of bread, delegated the control of the public ovens to the construction judiciary – which in the ancient city of Rome numbered over 400 – so that the processing and sale took place according to the law mode. However, the use of cereal or legume flour mixed with water to make bread or focaccia – often cooked under the ashes – is not only a Western tradition: archaeological finds tell us that they were also consumed by the Central American civilizations of the pre-Columbian period and in Asia. The consumption and culture of bread had a period of decline with the fall of the Roman Empire and with the advent of the barbarian civilizations. A relatively short period, however, because the consumption of bread never stopped, thanks above all to the monasteries (since the 7th century) and then to the advent of feudal civilization.
The importance, even political, of the control of the crops, of the flours, of the mills, and therefore of the bread, was immediately clear to lords and vassals, who soon imposed the monopoly of their collection, grinding and cooking structures, at least of the bread derived from wheat. The people, however, continued for centuries to produce low quality bread at home, but still edible, with barley, oats, millet and sorghum, cooked or in the embers of the fireplace. It was with the communal age that the bakers returned to being numerous and, in some respects, also well considered in the social scale of the artisans. Guilds of bakers were also established in many municipalities, often united with millers.

THE YEAST REVOLUTION

The real great revolution in the field of baking took place only in the Renaissance. Brewer’s yeast was introduced into the bread, until then naturally leavened, produced by the complex processing of natural yeasts and malt, precisely the main ingredient for producing beer. It was thanks to this leaven and to the increasingly massive consumption of bread by the wealthier classes that the bakers, in the following centuries, gave free rein to their creative imagination. Thus, not only new forms were born but also different types of bread: with oil, butter, olives, aromatic herbs; and then sweet breads, with raisins, with chocolate, with aniseed. A tradition, that of breads combined with other ingredients, which is by no means new, if anything rediscovered: in their works, Greek and Roman writers have in fact handed down to us that in Greece more than thirty different types of bread were made, a clear sign of how much, even at the table, that civilization was developed.
Until the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the work of bakers had remained practically unchanged. The flours had refined, brewer’s yeast had been introduced to make the loaves lighter and softer, but nothing else had changed in the ovens: packaging and leavening of the dough the night before, wake up in the middle of the night of the baker who, at the dawn, he was preparing the wood-burning oven. Once the oven had reached the necessary temperature (from 120 to 150 °C) the baker put the loaves of bread to bake, so that in the early morning he could already sell them to the housewives or to the workers who went to the shop.

FROM HOME TO INDUSTRY

The baker did not always complete the entire production process. It was in fact a tradition – which lasted, in some places even in Italy, up to the threshold of the Second World War – for the dough to be made at home. In the evening the housewife would prepare the loaf of bread and put it, wrapped in a cloth, to rise in the cupboard, a special piece of furniture with a folding opening. In the morning he went to the oven to cook it and paid a small amount to the baker. Once the bread, more consistent than today, could be kept for many days, without hardening too much. Thus, the ‘rite’ of the dough was a task that the housewife usually performed once a week. Now this tradition of bread practically no longer exists, at least in Western civilizations.
The first attempts to mechanize the work of the baker already took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that the first real technological innovations were created. The mechanical mixers were born – later replaced by electric ones -, the dividers, the moulders. Today being a baker remains a heavy job, but much less demanding than in the past, because all stages of bread-making are mechanized and the machines have pre-set electronic systems for the various stages of processing.

THE POLITICS OF BREAD

Bread is so intimately linked to human life that it has become an integral part of it. Bread is the result of work in the fields and the success of the crops. The balance of every society has been maintained, for millennia, on crops, and above all on the centralized control of flour and its fair distribution among the people. Whenever famine drastically reduced the available quantities of flour, popular revolts arose, often with tragic outcomes. Not surprisingly, according to the Roman writer Juvenal, the Roman emperors kept the people at bay by putting the motto into practice: “bread and circuses” food and entertainment”. Less attentive to this aspect, medieval societies often recorded popular revolts, the spark for which was given by the sudden shortage of flour or by the increase in the cost of bread. Still in the modern age, among the many, we cannot forget the revolt of the Milanese, in 1628, described by Alessandro Manzoni in the episode of the assault on the ovens of The Betrothed. The revolt was caused by the increase in the price of flour caused by the famine of the previous year. The French Revolution itself had, among the non-secondary causes, that of the lack of bread. Famous, but perhaps invented by the revolutionary circles themselves, the phrase that Queen Marie Antoinette would have uttered when she saw an angry crowd of Parisians in front of the royal palace asking for bread: “If they have no bread, give them brioches “. Finally, still in the second half of the 19th century, the so-called milling tax was much hated in Italy, introduced in 1868 by the finance minister Quintino Sella, shortly after the unification of Italy to meet the enormous expenses of the young Italian government.

AGRICULTURE FROM THE 19TH CENTURY TO TODAY

With chemical fertilizers, agriculture began to produce more wheat and cereals “green revolution”. However, the use of chemical substances alters the biological balance and can easily pollute the waters.
Currently, only 20%-30% of the fertilizers applied is absorbed by the plants, the rest is released into the environment, polluting the water and the soil. The excessive use of synthetic substances in agriculture, combined with a reduced biodiversity of crops, is causing environmental and social problems for Grain, leaving the price of food exposed to fluctuations in the cost of energy, gas or chemicals and allowing a few multinationals such as Bayer and Yara Belle Plaine to monopolize the market. Furthermore, the effectiveness of fertilizers has significantly decreased since 1960: it means that to produce the same amount of crop it is now necessary to use a much greater dose of nitrogen. This is creating a vicious circle where farmers are forced to buy more and more synthetic substances to keep the productivity of their crops high.
A further problem concerns the growing separation between agriculture and livestock which is leading the fields to no longer be fertilized with “natural” fertilizers. To achieve decarbonisation, the Grain researchers point out, it is also necessary to act on the agri-food sector, reducing its ecological footprint and its dependence on the chemical sector. Currently this industry has a serious impact not only in terms of emissions, but also in terms of deforestation and biodiversity loss caused by intensive farming.
According to the NGO, in fact, it is not possible to reduce emissions from the agri-food industry without rethinking the current breeding model. “The obstacles to a gradual exit from synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers are not of a technological or economic nature, but come from multinationals, intent on protecting their profits”.
This is why it is necessary to pay attention to the “false solutions” presented by multinationals and relating to “precision agriculture” and a more accurate use of products: all strategies aimed at defusing substantial changes. To overcome the dependence on synthetic fertilizers it is instead necessary to build an agriculture capable of preserving the health of the soil and of enhancing resistant varieties and crops, capable of growing without excessive use of synthetic products.