I am trying to comprehend how something that required methodical steps and ‘good luck’ came to be a staple of civilisations for thousands of years. Thank you. (Sorry if this question isn’t correct for ELI5, I searched and couldn’t find it asked. Hope it’s in-bounds.)
In: 1505
Ancient wheat was not “breadable.” The wheat that can make flour and then bread is something that we have selectively breeded.
Ancient hominids probably found this plant that was chewable that also didn’t kill them. After several millennia of chewing it into a pulp some guy realized you couldn’t grow it yourself.
Add another few millennia of figuring out you could selectively breed this chewable plant it to so much more you had semi modern wheat.
Then over a few centuries some other guy probably realized you could grind the shit out of it to purify it.
Then some other asshole realized you could mix it with water and when heated it would make something far more digestible and tasty that chewing the stalks.
Here’s the thing about anthropology, discoveries take several dozen to several hundred lifespans to happen. We, as modern humans, have trouble even beginning to comprehend that long between discoveries.
The first hominid stone tools are like 2.6 million years ago and it wasn’t until 200,000 years ago that hominids began attaching sharpened pieces of stone to wooden handles or spears
That means it took hominids over 2 million years to realize that fastening a hunk of worked over stone was actually more effective if you tied a piece of wood to it.
Us moderns cannot even begin to comprehend how long initial technologies take to develop
While I don’t know about this particular development, a lot of developments in technology are incremental.
This particular discovery makes some degree of sense. Eating plants is a pretty old human tradition. Crushing them up to make a denser and more palatable food is a logical step forward.
Mixing this with water and drying it follows – you can turn a powder into a solid wafer this way. We’d been doing this with many powders for a long time.
Cooking it would make some sense, too. We fired clay and dried substances by fire. Why not do that with our food wafers? Especially since we were already cooking some foods like meat.
Incremental steps lead to bread.
Gathering— later cultivating— wheat? I mean, wheat is just another edible seed, it was on the menu since paleolithic times.
Soaking and cooking wheat? Makes it easier to chew, tastes better, and, though it’s hard to recognize it from ground level, unlocks better nutrition.
Smashing and grinding wheat berries? Makes them cook faster; you need less firewood. Now you’re got a kind of porridge. (Btw, this porridge might often become alcoholic, which is a bonus.)
You might want to make to-go porridge, so maybe you’d clump up a handful of it and dry it out by the fire. Now you’ve got something between granola and crackers.
Hey, you get better crackers if you grind the wheat finer!
Hey, have you tried these crackers Sin-apla-adisa makes, the puffy ones? They still keep for a few days, and they stay kinda chewy on the inside. Way better than the ones grandma used to make.
And that’s basic bread.
All kinds of animals eat seeds. Lots of plants have seeds available to eat. You can try and chew them, but they’re hard. Boil them and they soften. This mixture of boiled grain and water has names like “oatmeal”
If you do this with wheat, you’ll have a bunch of shells that don’t taste good. You have to break the seeds first if you want it to have better texture, so you *separate the wheat from the chaff* before boiling the wheat. Boiled wheat is called “gruel.”
If you mix wheat and not enough water and then DON’T boil it, what you’ve made is called *dough*. If it sits out for a while, it’ll naturally ferment from the *yeast* that lives in wheat.
Boiling it at this point doesn’t work too well, and eating it raw might make you sick… so… apply heat from a fire, and it’ll turn into bread.
Think of things like that the same as evolution. Small advancements through observation that build, eventually, to a new complete idea that seems incomprehensible. Our knowledge of such things as what can we eat are older than our species. Humans have always eaten eggs. Because the things we evolved from ate them, and so on down the line. Humans figured out slowly that you could mill it down to a powder that could be mixed with waters or milk to make a more substantial meal by letting it get hard by the fire. It could also be carried easily and once baked hard it lasted a long time. The practice is good for our survival so we kept the idea and have constantly elaborated on the simple ingredients and cooking method. Now we have the art of baking and all the dishes associated.
Good question (and answers that made me think).
I always thought that the greatest input into inventions and discoveries are accidents. Accidently crushed something into a powder, accidently got it wet, accidently left it out in the heat/cold for too long, etc. Each time, observations were made, a hypothesis formed and tests performed until something new came to be
Why did that just happen, logic and deductive reasoning. How humans have evolved? Well, except over the last few years. 🙂
make sure to turn on captions – [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMZY_9QNe4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMZY_9QNe4I)
you can see that each step is solid on its own – the tuber doesn’t taste great, so he washes it, breaks it down, and works it till it tastes good, and after each step it tastes “better”.
Iterate on any given food, and you get modern food practice.
They probably started with a mash. Grinding it with water. Then it’s like oh that’s too much water, put it by the fire. Come back and it’s flatbread.
You see birds eat grain from grasses. Maybe it’s good? You try some.
Raw wheat kernels when chewed make a kind of gum. It tastes okay and it’s clearly edible, but it’s not as easy to eat as something like fruit. Still, it’s satisfying in its own way.
While standing there in a field of mostly grain grasses when it’s ripe enough for the birds to be eating it, it’s easy to see that there is a *lot* of this stuff. So you go from picking a handful to picking a basket-full. (And hey, these grasses make good basket material too!)
It’s still hard to chew, but you get to thinking: chewing it grinds it up, and gets it wet. Maybe if you grind it between a couple stones to crack it, it’ll be easier to chew. And sure enough it helps. It leaves a kind of dust behind, but whatever, it’s a win.
Then it rains, and your millstone gets wet. When you go to grind more you see the leftover dust in it has gotten kinda gloopy now that it’s wet. Weird. You try a bit. Hey, that’s not bad.
You decide to make more, but on purpose. You grind a handful of grain and add water. Playing with your food, you fumble around with it long enough to make a kind of dough. Weird, but kinda neat. Kinda tasty too really.
Eventually you leave some out accidentally and it dries out. You come back to it and realize that even dried out the stuff is not too bad. You make some more, and put it next to the fire where you have some meat drying. Works great.
But you know… cooked meat is pretty good. What would this be like if you cooked it too? You lay it on a hot rock, and after poking it with a stick you discover it kinda holds together and comes off the cooking stone in more or less one piece and holy moly you have invented flatbread!
Achievement unlocked, you have discovered an entirely new portable food! If you knew what pajamas were, this would be the cat’s pajamas!
So anyway you keep fiddling with it to make it better, and make a lot more of it. This stuff keeps for days, and longer if you dry it really well like you do with meat.
Somewhere along the way though you get distracted while making it, or make a bunch of dough but the fire has gone out. Anyway the dough sits out a while before you cook it and it gets kinda puffed up. Smells weird, too. But you’re hungry so you cook it anyway, and find this might be even better. It’s kinda soft and fluffy inside. It doesn’t keep as well as the flatbread because it’s harder to dry out, but this is definitely good stuff even so.
And that’s how you invent bread from scratch.
People ate what animals ate. They would see animals preferring the seeds/fruit of a plant over its leaves. Seeds of grasses grow plentifully. At some point, someone probably roasted or boiled these grass grains to try to make them taste better, and it actually turned out decent. People who are starving will try to eat anything. It isn’t surprising to see a starving person try to eat what they see animals eating. They discovered the wild grasses with tasty seeds grew almost anywhere, and over hundreds of years selectively planted the ones with the larger or tastier seeds.
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