Introduction to the Food System: The Story of Bread

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise now.”

Omar Khayyam
Persian Philosopher, Astronomer, Mathematician, and Poet
1048-1131

Bread is a staple food in many societies. It is one of humanity’s oldest foods. The cultivation of grain to produce bread marked the beginning of agriculture in the Middle East around 12,000 years ago. So a good place to start this course is to focus on bread to explore how the food system works and what functions it performs. From a personal point of view, how it is that we can go to our local food store or supermarket and be pretty confident that we will find bread and lots of other food products on the shelves. This is something that we take for granted in the United States and other rich countries – but is not always the case in some poorer countries.

As the quotation above from a poem by Omar Khayyam illustrates, bread has been a highly significant product in the history of many cultures. There are over 800 references to bread in the Bible and over 400 in the Koran. When crop failure caused famine in France in the late 18^th century, there is a story that the French queen was told that the peasants had no bread. She was recorded as saying “Let them eat cake”. She may not actually have said those words, but the disregard of the nobility for the condition of the French people at the time and the inability of the average person to obtain food, almost certainly contributed to the French Revolution of 1789. Bread is a product that has played a major role in history.

Although there are many varieties of bread, the basic process of making it is much the same. Some type of grain is ground (crushed) to make flour. The flour is made into dough by adding water. This is then baked to create bread. The texture of bread is often made lighter through the addition of a leavening agent (a gas-producing substance) such as yeast when making the dough. Wheat flour is most commonly used for making bread, but flours from rye, barley, corn (maize) and a range of other grains can be used. Each type of grain provides the protein and starch needed to make bread.