We ended our day at a Persian restaurant in Kensal Green. We took the 18 bus to Sudbury, which was packed, causing us to alight about 6 stops prior to our intended stop. On the walk, we had passed an old English style bakery that reminded me of the boulangeries in rural France that I went to growing up when I’d be visiting with my family. I flirted the idea out loud for a moment of owning a bakery one day. His response was ‘but you’re not a baker’ and I said ‘yes but I’d employ bakers’. My fleeting desire was less about the baking, it was more about providing this service which has been, and still is, the life source for civilisations across the globe. In the restaurant, you’re greeted by a man holding a bread pad which resembles a circular cushion, used to stick the bread on the inside of the tabun oven. It seemed to be his only job, but an important one because every table is given these flatbreads baked over fire.
Bread has remained the backbone to societies for almost as long as people have roamed the Earth. Early grains like einkorn, emmer, and barley were ground into a coarse flour and mixed with water and baked on hot stones to make flatbreads. An archaeological site in Jordan called Shubayqa 1 shows traces of bread crumbs dating back to the Neolithic era. Perhaps one of the earliest processed foods, as this represented the shift from nomadic hunting-gathering to settled farming around 12,000 years ago. This shift from cooking and eating raw, whole ingredients to processing them into preserved, portable, storable food was crucial for early settlements and civilisation building. The excavation findings at the Shubayqa 1 site predates agriculture by about 4,000 years, meaning people were making bread before they fully domesticated crops— helping to trigger the agricultural revolution. With the rise of agriculture, wheat and barley cultivation began; bread became a staple in the fertile crescent of the Middle East around 10,000 years ago.
In Ancient Egypt around 6,000 years ago is where it is suspected that the first leavened bread was produced, discovered by wild yeast causing the bread to rise. As a result, they start to produce baking ovens and bread begins to diversify in shape, texture and size. The Ancient Greeks and Romans experiment using different grains and ingredients, and the food becomes central to daily life. This continued across time and cultures, onwards across Europe as a result of trading and the expansions of empires. In the Middle Ages around 1000 and 1500 CE bread’s nature continued to diversify, despite remaining a staple for all. The cultural phenomenon of bread began to take a new form. The type of bread you ate showed your social rank. The nobles and the clergymen ate a white, soft, light and expensive bread called manchet, which symbolised purity, refinement and power. Whereas, peasants and labourers ate maslin or brown bread, made from a blend of wheat and rye (sometimes with beans or peas ground in), which was denser, tougher, and sometimes sour. In hard times like famines or bad harvests, people resorted to "famine breads", adding whatever was available — acorns, tree bark, or old grain — often making the bread bitter and barely edible.
What differentiated the breads for the poor and the rich was the grain, and the consumption of grains was ultimately determined by land ownership. With the fall of the Roman Empire, we saw a shift from ‘codified property rights’ to Feudalism. Under the Roman Republic, land could be bought, sold, taxed, and inherited for the first time, and the rich owned estates called Latifundia.
Latifundia (singular: latifundium) comes from Latin:
latus = broad, wide, extensive
fundus = farm, estate, piece of land
Feudalism meant that Kings technically "owned" all land, but they granted it to lords, barons, and the church, whereas peasants or serfs farmed the land but did not own it — they owed rent, labour, or a share of the crops. Nobles, monasteries, and large landholders owned the best farmland — land suited for wheat, which needs richer soil and better conditions. This produced prime grain for the purest, softest breads. And rockier, mineral deprived and wetter lands grew hardier grains like rye, barley, or oats — these were more common among peasants. Technology enforced the divide, as finer sieves and better milling systems were needed for finer flour for softer bread. Further, market laws and guilds regulated access. In cities, bakers' guilds controlled who could bake what. There were strict rules on the quality, size, and price of bread. Bread assizers were official bread inspectors employed in some markets who checked weight, quality, and pricing, especially to prevent fraud against the rich. William Shakespeare’s father John Shakespeare served as a high baliff in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and he was responsible for the quality of the beer sold in town as well as checking on the quality and quantity of bread sold. Before Shakespeare’s time, the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 wasn’t just about taxes, access to land and food security was a huge underlying cause. Peasants wanted freedom to grow food for themselves, not just work lords' fields. Similarly, in the German Peasants’ War (1524–1525) farmers demanded the right to hunt, fish, and grow grain freely — against aristocrats who monopolised land and mills. It is known to be the biggest and bloodiest peasants revolt in Europe.
In the 20th Century, we began to see the rise of the production of processed breads. When discussing the shift of food habits in the context of the UK, I often go back to the 50s and the 60s. Women were ‘liberated’ from the home and into the workplace, meaning less time for food preparation and cooking. Which paved the way for our dependancy on ultra processed foods which we see today.* Less time in the kitchen, more time at your desk. Bread went from hard to soft, whole loaves to slices, and to having a shelf life of a few weeks.
Bread culture in the UK died. The casualties line our high streets with the vacant bakeries with paint-smeared windows. The act of going to the bakers to pick up some bread was more important than we know, and in more ways than I’ll list. It decreases footfall on a high street (less opportunity to bump into your neighbours), it creates a dependancy on supermarkets (which also emerged in the UK around the same time women were being liberated from the home), and a dependency on poorer-quality bread. Bread has always consisted of a grain of some kind and water, with the addition of yeast if you want it to rise, to make breads which resemble the ones we eat here in Northern Europe. There is no good reason for your bread to be containing more than 10 ingredients. Preservatives create the luxury of not having to buy bread every other day, but it’s needless to say that too many preservatives are not a good idea for the body. But what’s important, is that our pallets have changed significantly in the last 60 years. Our demand for softer food has increased. Less chewing time, means it’s less taxing on the jaw, meaning we have a desire to eat more. Chewing longer gives your brain more time to register fullness by triggering the release of satiety hormones (hormones that make us feel satisfied) like leptin and cholecystokinin. It also slows eating, allowing the digestive system and brain to coordinate signals that tell you to stop. Ultimately, both of these factors lead to higher consumption. Being born in the 90s means I’ve never known a culture where you go to the bakers every morning to pick up the daily bread. I’ve only seen that in European countries where you see people with their bread sticks in the morning to take home to their families. They even make long drawstring bags designed to put your bread in.
Christ’s body is symbolised by bread. There’s something beautiful about a prophet comparing his body to an item of food made from grains and water. At the Last Supper, Jesus is said to have broken bread and said, "This is my body, given for you" (Luke 22:19). And to break bread is to share and give food to someone. When me and Nabil (his name translates to ‘noble’) have bread (usually Middle Eastern bread), he always breaks me the first piece. It’s a small beautiful thing I notice that he does. To give someone food, you receive nothing in return. It is not a trade, or a transaction. The body consumes it and nourishment is provided. I struggle to think of something more pure. Breaking bread doesn’t really work the same when it comes in individual pre-slices.
He who owns the land, ultimately dictates what you eat. With land sovereignty, comes food sovereignty. Bread predates agriculture, trade and formalised societies. It feeds the rich and the poor. Humans have worked over time to cultivate grain, mill it to produce flour, and find new ways to make it work in varying conditions and trying times. We found a way to get the wind to grind our wheat, we got it to rise, and we broke it to share with those less fortunate than us. There’s no wonder why we’re all so lonely as a society, because we don’t even need to go to the bakery anymore, it comes to us. No more bumping into neighbours, no more chatting with the baker or the person on the till. Everything is available to order, or centralised in a supermarket. And even in the supermarket you can be served by a robot if you so wish. Every product that passes in and out of a supermarket is heavily regulated and monitored. The concept of bread assizers seems absurd, but they never went away. Trading Standards Officers are what we have now (FSA), and they dictate production, distribution and consumption patterns of food and drink in the UK, and they serve the same people as they did in the Middle Ages. They don’t walk around the supermarket inspecting, they sit behind computers, speak at conferences and in board rooms determining who gets to eat what. I’ll be surprised if you go into a corner shop or a dirty spoon and find fresh sourdough with your Full English. Agreed, tastes have changed, but that implies that we have choice. You might be thinking to yourself ‘but some people might just like softer baps and sliced bread’, but that implies that those people had full control to determine what they eat and can’t eat, and like and don’t like in the first place. The sugars and refined starches are what make the bread addictive, making it easier to eat than sourdough and ‘moreish’. I grew up having Kingsmill 50/50, and my brother liked Crusts Away. It saved my mum time cause he always had his crusts removed. I only had sourdough when I was older and was able to choose for myself. “[Y]our choices are limited to the products they put before you, or the limits of your now limited imagination.” (Benjamin Zephaniah).
After all this, I wonder if Christ would still compare himself to bread?
*Though, it is important to mention that there were plenty of women who had already been forced from the home and into work. This accounts for the ethnic minority women here at the time brought from the colonies to build our state system, specifically the NHS. And a notable mention to single women, single mothers and impoverished women, often the groups excluded in the context of Second-Wave Feminism. But the shift from home-cooked meals to leaning on convenience foods was determined by the majority of women, who were mostly White and Middle Class.