Introduction

My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression in a rural town outside of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her family did the wash by hand. Milk was delivered to the doorstep every day. And the baker showed up at their house with a cart. While her mother would buy their bread, gram would swoon over the pastries that her mother couldn’t afford. Fifty years later, when she told me about it, Gram would close her eyes … You could see it on her face … she could still smell that bread … still could feel the spongy give and the warmth of a loaf just a few hours out of the oven.

Bread might not exactly seem like a subject that someone could… y’know … talk about … for 40 minutes. I mean, sure, there are passionate enthusiasts about everything and everyone seemed to hava a temporary baking obsession during COVID lockdown. But I think for many people bread is just … there. I mean … it’s good … but on its own, it’s … kinda boring. 

It’s the palette cleanser, the backdrop for the stuff you put in the sandwich. 

But today, I’m going to make the case that bread isn’t boring. In fact, in a world of strange foods, bread may be the strangest, most unlikely substance that humans have ever ingested. The story of what bread is and how we came to eat it, is one of alien biology and lost civilizations. It turns out that we only have bread because of a long chain of bizarre and unlikely coincidences. 

So preheat your ovens, everyone, and set your dough to rise. Today we’re going to break bread together. You’re listening to I Heart This.

Chapter 1: The Alien Evolution of Bread

You can get used to anything. I mean, most of us don’t even bat an eye about taking a real-time video call … or carrying a supercomputer around in our pocket … Bread is like that. It only seems non-weird because we see it so often. 

But think about it for a minute. We only eat living things. Food is basically just body parts. We may not often think about this, but it’s easy to recognize when we do. Lettuce is leaves. Drumsticks are chicken legs. Carrots are roots. We eat seeds of the peanut plant and the flowers of broccoli and the muscle-flesh of cows.  

But .. imagine for a moment, that you had never seen, nor ever heard of, bread. And then imagine that I presented you with a fresh-baked loaf of challah. What would you think it was?  

If you poked and prodded, it would squish a little and bounce back like a sponge. “You eat this?” you might ask. “What is it? Where does it come from?” 

Bread is Grass

Where, indeed? The answer isn’t obvious, even in our own culture. When I do science lessons with second and third graders, I sometimes ask them just this kind of question. It doesn’t take much time in a garden, or even looking at pictures of gardens, for kids to identify most fruits and vegetables that we eat. Kale is a leaf. Walnuts are seeds. Tomatoes are indeed a fruit. But show them some bread and everyone is flummoxed. Even showing kids bread’s ingredients doesn’t help. Cuz, what living creature does flour come from? 

It’s not uncommon for a whole class to knit their brows when I say, “Bread comes from a plant too,” and then, after a moment of puzzled silence, “No, really, it’s made of ground up seeds.” 

“Seeds?” they ask. 

“Yeah, the ground up seeds of a grass.” 

“Wait. Bread is made from grass?!” someone says. “Does grass even have seeds?”

“Yes,” I assure them, “Even the grass in your lawn could get seeds if you let it grow long enough instead of mowing it down.” I’ll show them pictures of grass gone to seed. And I’ll hear this chorus of “oh’s” as kids recognize that they’ve all seen this before. 

“So could I make bread if my dad just let the lawn grow?” someone asks. 

I shake my head. “Wrong kind of grass.” I say. 

“Wait!,” says a boy in the Pikachu shirt, “There are different kinds of grass?” 

“Oh, yes,” I say, “there are lots and lots of different kinds, about 13,000.” This, of course, is a number so big that it is meaningless to most second graders, but they’re impressed anyway.  

“Bread isn’t just made from any grass seed. In fact, in all the world, with all its many, many kinds of grass, there is only one type of grass that makes almost all of the world’s bread.” 

“Just one?” someone asks.  

“Just one in all of the world,” I say.  

“Cool,” says a girl with disheveled braids. 

“Yeah, it sure is.”  

Seeds are Space Capsules 

The fact that bread is basically grass seeds may not be a surprise to you, but one of the best things about hanging out with kids is that they remind me of how wonderful this is. But this is only the beginning of the strangeness of bread. The closer you look at where bread comes from, the stranger and more wonderful it gets. For example, consider this: 

You and grass and all living things are made of microscopic bags of water. Life is made of water. The rule is, if you dry out, you die. This isn’t a problem if you live in an ocean or a pond. But life on land is much harder. When ancient creatures moved onto dry land, a world of constant evaporation, they had to evolve ways to carry their pond around inside their bodies. In some ways, land for a plant is like space for an astronaut. Both need some serious life-support to stay there. But unlike astronauts, plants need to reproduce. They need to send out babies, alone, into that inhospitable environment if their species is going to survive. Come to think of it, maybe plants aren’t actually like astronauts in a space station. Maybe they’re more like Superman’s parents. 

In the classic DC comic, Lara and Jor-El have just had a baby boy. But the planet that they live on … the planet Krypton … is dying. And Lara and Jor-El forsee that soon Krypton, and everyone on it, will be destroyed. Sending their baby into the hazards of space seems terrible, but what choice do they have? So they do the best they can. Together, they create a hermetically sealed space capsule, they pack its tiny interior with the few bare essentials it could fit … just enough to get their baby started wherever he might land … they put him in a kind of suspended animation so that he could survive the long journey. And then they send him off …. and hope. 

That’s what a seed is. It is a space capsule. It has a genetic computer programmed to only awaken its infant crew if it has landed someplace habitable. It is sealed against the desiccating world, with a sleeping baby inside, a care package of food, and the hope of its ancestors. 

That’s what bread is made of.

Life. Is. Awesome. 

Let’s Talk About Plant Sex

The species of grass that sends out these little Kryptonian space capsules, as you may already know, is called Triticum aestivum. Or in English, wheat. 

But … wait, wait, wait … If all seeds are space capsules then why can’t we make bread out of any seeds? Why not other grasses? Or for that matter, why not carrot seeds or maple seeds or avocats pits? To understand what makes wheat seeds so unique, we’ll have to look deeply how those seeds work and where they come from. We’ll have to talk about where plant babies come from. We’ll have to talk about sex.

So for this next section, folks, listener discretion is advised. If you think you might be squeamish about candid descriptions of plant sex parts and what they do … or if you’re a parent who might not want to answer some uncomfortable questions about the birds and the bees … or if you’re my mom… well … no one will fault you if you fast forward through the next five minutes. But … if you’re open to the idea of alternative life cycles, listen on. Because plants definitely do it differently.  

Plants Have Sex

For those of you who might not know, flowers are the sex parts of plants. Yes, they are plant genitals. And this includes grass flowers, like the flowers of wheat. And yes, grasses do have flowers. They might not be brightly-colored, show-offs like a dandelion or a tulip, but they are flowers nonetheless. Chances are you’ve seen them. If you didn’t recognize what they were, you might have confused them with the seedhead that those flowers turn into when they mature. 

The fact that flowers are sex organs scandalized the Enlightenment scholars who figured this out … and also some of my 21st century high school students. But there’s no getting around it. Like us, plants, including grasses, have sex to make babies. But their sex lives are so different that talking about plant sex can sound like we’re talking about aliens. 

Pollen is Plant Semen

Let’s start with the basics. Just like in animals, plant sex is all about getting sperm and eggs together. To do this, sperm cells have to get inside the female sex organs. But remember, plants are having sex in space … or at least in a hostile environment where everything is in danger of drying out and dying. We humans have evolved our own fun way of doing this. We deliver sperm in a nutrient-rich liquid (called semen) right into the female body. If we carry the pond around inside us, we’re just transferring sperm from one pond to another. Unfortunately for plants, that part of sex is a lot harder when you can’t move. Plants don’t just have to send their babies into space. They have to send their sperm out into space too.

 So what’s a plant to do? 

Well, most plants make tiny sperm space capsules. You and I call it pollen. And yes, pollen is basically plant semen–a mixture of sperm and the stuff that keeps it alive. The difference is that “plant semen” is designed to survive long-distance travel. 

But even if plant semen can keep from drying out, they still have to find some cute and compatible female bits. 

Some Plants Have Sperm Couriers … But Not Wheat

Some plants get around this problem by outsourcing the fun parts of sex to third parties–bees or moths or birds or bats. Pollinators are sperm couriers … paid in nectar. And the brightly colored petals of flowers are kind of like sexy lingerie. Except that instead of dressing up for their mates, flowers are quite intentionally trying to seduce the delivery man. 

Other plants have a less targeted approach. They release their sperm to the wind, giving off giant sperm clouds that cover everything in their path. Think about that the next time you have some hay fever allergies. 

But wheat doesn’t do much of either of these things. Wheat stays at home and pollinates itself. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Wheat plants are both female and male at the same time. They are hermaphrodites. (This actually isn’t that unusual for plants.) Each wheat flower has three male genitals growing in a ring around three female ones. Yes, that’s genitals plural, (Why have just one?) And remember, that’s not just six genitals per plant, that’s six per flower of which a single stalk of wheat might have up to a hundred. 

With all of those genitals hanging out right next to each other, it’s only a matter of time before each flower fertilizes itself. And wheat seems to like it that way … so much so that fertilization usually happens before the flowers even open. All it takes is one grain of pollen to land on the female bit of the flower. 

Then things really get strange. 

In one hot and heavy romantic encounter, a human male might donate 10 or 100s of millions of sperm cells. But a pollen grain has just two cells inside it. That’s it. One of those cells will develop into exactly two sperm. The other cell divides and grows  … and grows …  into a tube. And that tube grows and burrows like a worm down, down, down into the female part of the plant. (Not even Japanese porn is this weird.)

Eventually, the little worm tube burrows into the chamber inside the female genitals. Botanists call this space the ovary even though it actually performs both the functions of the human ovary and the human uterus. In any case, that’s where the egg cell is. And that’s where the two sperms end up after travelling down their tube. 

Two Sperms

Why two sperm cells, you ask? You might think that, like in humans, it’s for redundancy, so that if one sperm doesn’t make it, there’d be another to carry the standard to victory. But you’d be wrong. The first sperm does exactly what you’d expect. It finds the egg, sidles up next to her and … hubba hubba … they become a baby plant. (Congratulations! It’s a beautiful baby hermaphrodite. This makes planning the nursery easy! We’ll decorate in blue AND pink.) 

But the other sperm? That’s the one that will perform the deep magic of bread. But in order to do so, it will need help. 

Endosperm

There is another cell inside the ovary-uterus. It is like the egg cell … but weirder. It is much bigger. It fills the inside of the ovary. And instead of just having one nucleus like any normal cell … it has two. The other sperm, the one that doesn’t fertilize the egg, fertilizes this big, weird, central cell. It fuses with both (yes, both) of the central cell’s nuclei in a kind of cellular menage a trois.

The result of all of this is that there are now two fertilized cells in the ovary. One is the baby wheat plant. The other is the baby wheat’s Frankenstein of a double-half sibling. Both of them grow rapidly. The wheat baby gets a leaf and a stem. But the double half-sibling swells up into a bloated pillow of starch and protein. And one warm, wet spring day … when the baby wheat finally awakens from suspended animation, it will eat its half-sibling alive. 

The baby plant’s sibling is the storehouse of space rations. It is the care package. 

Bread is Endosperm

By the time the wheat-seed space capsule matures, then, there are three basic parts. There’s the seed’s shell (the space capsule itself) which is called the bran. There’s the plant baby, the passenger, which is called the germ. And finally, there is the double-half sibling, the cannibalistic care package. This is what botanists call endosperm, and there is nothing quite like it in all of biology.

And it is the essence of bread. 

Wheat endosperm is unique among all plants. But why? Many other species of grass have seeds (rice, millet, corn, and oats) that make great food. But, on their own, none can make bread. What’s so special about the seeds of this one species of grass? To answer that question, we will have to dig beneath the biology and down into the chemistry that it is built upon, for the strangeness of wheat extends all the way down to the molecular level. 

Gluten is a Protein

It’s hard to think about the tiny atoms and molecules that make up the world. Nobody’s ever seen them. It’s abstract. They feel just like … words. But take a moment here to try to imagine them. As small as they are, they are real physical things. They are objects with sizes and weights and shapes. And for purely accidental reasons some molecules in wheat endosperm have some very unusual shapes. 

Even if chemistry isn’t exactly an everyday topic of conversation in your life, I’m willing to bet that you have heard about the molecules in wheat seeds that makes bread the miracle that it is … gluten. 

Okay, gluten is not actually one kind of molecule. It is a molecular superstructure made of several different kinds of molecules working together. And despite over a century of research, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how it’s put together. What we have figured out is strange. What we do know is that one of the gluten molecules forms long springy chains that unwind in water and stick to each other. Another of the gluten molecules doesn’t unwind but stays in compact little balls or rods. To make something with the texture of bread, you need both of these. The chains give bread its stretch. They stick together and create a massive connected web. Without them, cooking dough would produce only a pile of dry flakes. Nothing would hold together. There would be no sponge, no rise. 

On the other hand, the compact molecules give the web its softness. They help the long chains to slide against each other without getting too stuck. Without them, there’d be no give to the web. Bread would congeal into an unchewable, rubbery mass. 

But together, they work magic. The chains connect in their stretchy web. The rods act like little ball bearings. Everything sticks together, but not too much. The result is a matrix that can trap bubbles of air and expand as those bubbles grow. And miracle of miracles, at higher temperatures the gluten proteins coagulate. Those bubbles become permanent. It is a transmutation that would have inspired the alchemist of old.

So far as we know, this particular combination of molecules has only evolved once in an ancient grass that was the ancestor of wheat, rye, and barley. Rye and barley both have gluten, and can be made into bread, but in both of them, other molecules interfere with the formation of the gluten web. Pure rye or barley breads exist, but they are dense and crumbly. With a few exceptions, even barley and rye bread recipes call for at least a little wheat flour. Lately gluten-free breadmakers have experimented with all kinds of alternatives, often relying on additives like guar gum to hold other gluten-less grains together. Depending on who you ask, they’ve met with some success. But wheat bread is the OG … by far the most versatile and the most widely consumed. 

The real miracle of gluten, though, is its improbability … so far as I know, all of this stretching and sliding is of no use to the plant. All the plant needs is storage, a convenient place to keep protein for its baby. The wonderful stretch and strength that gluten has in dough doesn’t seem to have any function while it’s in the seed. It arose accidentally and might just as easily have been lost to chance. There could so easily have been a world without bread. The odds are so against it ever having existed at all. This remarkable food, which makes up one out of every five calories consumed by humans, has no good reason to exist. 

Chapter 2: Bread as Innovation

Once upon a time there was a famous baker known to her fans as The Little Red Hen. She was always looking for help because, frankly, she had just so much to do. She had to sow the wheat, reap it, thresh it, winnow the chaff, grind the flour, mix the dough, knead the dough, prove it, and bake it. The Little Red Hen reminds us that bread takes time. It takes work. It takes skill. It takes  technology. And there are so … many … steps. 

Bread isn’t just a botanical phenomenon. It’s also a human one. And the evolution of wheat is only the beginning of this story. Because bread doesn’t just happen on its own. How did people discover that some unassuming grass could be turned into baguettes? Listening to the story of the red hen, I’m left thinking, no one person could have figured out how to make bread on their own.  How that happened is the second part of our story. 

Humans Learned to Make Bread

Once upon a time there were no cookies … there were no biscuits or crackers, no cupcakes and no bread. But nobody missed these things, because they’d never seen them before. Probably couldn’t even imagine them. People made a living by hunting and trapping, picking fruit, digging roots, gathering nuts, and catching insects. Food was body parts of whatever you could catch. 

One of the first things that you have to do if you’re going to invent bread though is to come up with the idea that some foods might be better if you put the work into grinding them up into a fine powder. That’s what flour is. And why would someone go to the trouble when there are so many things to eat that don’t require so much grinding? One possible answer is suggested by tiny starch grains that scientists find on grindstones from about 30,000 years ago–the oldest signs of flour that we have. 

First You Need Flour

Those starch grains didn’t come from wheat. They didn’t even come from grass seeds. They came from ferns and cattails. Cattails are common and widespread. They have underwater, root-like stems that are easy to pull from the marsh, and full of high calorie starch … just the kind of body part that a hungry cave dweller would want to eat … Unfortunately, those underwater stems are so fibrous, that they’re basically inedible. Unless … unless … you grind the starch out of it. What you’re left with is a fine, high calorie powder–a flour. You couldn’t make a twinkie out of it, but you could thicken a stew. 

Next You Need the Right Flour

The oldest evidence we have found that someone decided to turn this flour-grinding idea to grass seeds is almost 7,000 years later. Wheat didn’t really even exist … at least not a wheat that your typical Iowan would recognize. But still … about 23,000 years ago, some stone age innovator turned her grindstone to some wild grass seeds in Asia Minor. 

Wheat is Hard to Make Edible

Why’d it take so long?  The leap from cattail-like flours to grass seed flours was bigger than you might think. First of all, grass seeds are freakin’ tiny. Oh, and each individual grain is wrapped up in an inedible husk … oh, and all of that is stuck on a piece of straw. To separate the seeds from all of that inedible stuff by hand would take forever. But to do it otherwise requires figuring out a lot of steps. First, people would have had to figure out how to efficiently cut large amounts of straw. And there’d be no metal tools at this point, so they’d probably have to do that with a rock. Then they’d need to figure out how to break the seed out of their hulls. This process, called threshing, is a butt-ton of work. And it’s hard to figure out a way to make it easier. Even as recently as 150 years ago, threshing would consume as much as one quarter of the world’s agricultural labor. At first, threshing probably involved beating the grain with sticks until the seeds fell free onto a mat. But then, you’d have to separate the seeds from the bits of straw and husks that got beaten out with them. Again, doing this by hand would be obscenely tedious. But at some point, someone figured out a clever trick. You see, the seeds of wheat are heavier than the husks and bits of straw. And if you  tossed all the debris from your hours of threshing into the air on a breezy day … the seeds would fall more or less straight down onto your mat while the bits of husk and straw would get carried away by the wind. This handy trick is called winnowing. 

Only then, after you’ve figured out how to efficiently reap and thresh and winnow, would you have a pile of seeds big enough to grind into flour. 

You can see why it might not have caught on right away. I can imagine a whole tribe of ancestors saying, “Yeah, cool story bro, but … ah …we’re gonna go fishing.” 

Natufians Did it Anyway

The oldest evidence that we have of someone doing all of this work comes from  an ancient group of hunters and gatherers that we now call the Natufians. (This, by the way, is a name that I just love. Natufians. Yeah.) About six years ago, a group of archaeologists were excavating a Natufian site in the Black Desert of Northeastern Jordan when they found a most amazing artifact–24 tiny crumbs. These are, so far as I know, the oldest breadcrumbs that anyone has ever found. They are about 14,500 years old. 

These 24 crumbs were not really like any bread that you or I might eat. They were from an unleavened tortilla-like cake made from the ground tubers of a plant called a club rush. Now, like with cattails, you couldn’t really make bread from this flour. If you tried it would flake and crumble. But … this is genius … the Natufians found that if you mixed the flour of the club rush tubers with a little bit of the pain-in-the-ass-hard-to-get flour of a local grass … well, then you got something magical. A dough of this mix of flours would stick together when cooked in a . This grass, which we today call eikhorn, was a wild ancestor of wheat. 

Why Would Anyone Make Bread? 

But if it was such a pain in the ass to make, why did the Natufians do it? The scientists suggested a couple possibilities. Maybe it was because bread was portable. You could stick it into a pack on a long journey. Or maybe it was just a special occasion food–like a Thanksgiving turkey or a Buche de Noel … the kind of special treat that you make once a year, something special to share with friends and family. 

I would also offer another possibility … not necessarily exclusive of the other two … bread just tastes good. Maybe even the Natufian bread. Dense with easily digestible carbohydrates, bread hits all of our taste buttons … We evolved to enjoy something just like it, even though it had never existed before. Our tongues are covered with little molecular detection devices, our taste buds, that are built for the sole purpose of rewarding us for finding food that is rich with just the kinds of nourishment that bread contains. Maybe the Natufians made bread because they could. Because of the smells that fill your hut while you make it. Because of the warmth on your hands when you take it off the roasting stone. Because of that first bite right after it comes off the fire. 

Farming Happened Later

2,500 years is about the amount of time that separates you from Buddha or Pythagoras. It is enough time for the greatest empires of history to rise and fall and be forgotten. It is also about how much time elapsed between the baking of those Natufian crumbs in their heaths and the first farming villages.

We can’t really put a date on exactly when farming started. It wasn’t really an event. It was a process that took about as long as all of what we call human history … but by about 12,000 years ago that process was reaching its climax in the ancient middle east … and wheat was one of the crops in those early fields.

When They Had to Learn to Culture, Prove, and Bake

By this point, people had been making wheat flatbreads for a wicked long time. But even after thousands of years, there still wasn’t anything like the spongy puffiness of modern breads. That would require the domestication of more than just a wild grass. In order to make puffy bread, what we call leavened bread, people had to domesticate creatures so small that they were invisible. So small, that they didn’t even know that they were creatures. They had to domesticate yeast. 

Yeasts are microscopic fungi. There are many, many kinds of them, and they live everywhere–on plants, in the dirt, on your skin, in your gut, in the ocean, in ancient glacial ice, and (as some scientists found when taking high-altitude air samples) they can even be found in the stratosphere. Like most fungi, they make their living by decomposing stuff. Some decompose dead things in the soil. Some decompose living tissues, like the kind that give you athlete’s foot or a vaginal yeast infection. (Those yeasts are literally trying to eat you.) 

Modern bakers intentionally add a kind of yeast fungus to bread dough and let it decompose the dough for a little bit. That’s how you make bread rise. Remember, bread dough is basically full of the space rations for a baby wheat plant. For the yeast, this is a smorgasbord. Millions of little yeasts gorge themselves on the stored rations and burn the food inside of their little one-celled bodies. Then, they breathe out a bunch of carbon dioxide gas as a kind of exhaust. That gas gets trapped in the stretchy gluten web and makes most of the bubbles that you see on the inside of a well-risen loaf. Basically, bakers intentionally rot their dough for a few hours. 

Ha. So cool.  

But also, so not intuitive. How’d they figure it out? No one would have been out there trying to discover leavened bread. No one would have ever seen a croissant or a popover before. Nothing like them would have existed in the imaginations of these ancient peoples. And it’s not something that would just happen by accident. Yeast might be everywhere, but there’s not enough of the right kind of wild yeast hanging around to make a forgotten loaf rise.  

So how did people figure out how to leaven bread? 

We don’t actually know. 

But here’s a possibility … beer. 

Beer, which developed around the same time is basically liquid bread. It is made from the same ingredients (flour and water) just in different amounts. But a little bit of grain in some water is a much better medium for culturing wild yeasts than a little bit of water in some grain. Here’s one way that the discovery of leavening might have played out. For some reason, an ancient baker uses beer instead of water to make her dough. Maybe she was out of clean water. Maybe she was hoping to improve the flavor. Then, for some reason, she leaves her beery bread alone for the day and returns to find it mysteriously bloated and strange. And then, instead of thinking that something was terribly wrong and tossing the dough, she decides to bake it anyway. If she had a real oven and not just a stone to fry it on, the bread would get hot enough to hold its shape after the bake. This might not have happened all at once, of course. But maybe, just maybe, this might have been the sequence of discoveries that led to the bread we know today.  

What are we to take away from this story? I take two things.

The first is that bread is brand new. This might seem counterintuitive after talking about the thousands of years that it took for bread to develop. But think about how all of this fits in the whole human story. Even if we discount all the other human species on our family tree and just focus on anatomically modern Homo sapiens … we’re talking a timetable of 250,000 years!  

How much time is that? As my daughter says, “Sometimes when people talk about numbers that big, my brain just glazes over.” Fair enough. So, for perspective, think of the great pyramids of Egypt. For most of us, the pyramids are a symbol of the dawn of human civilization, made right at the beginning of recorded history. I mean, they’re old, right? They were built around 4,500 years ago. By the time the ancient Greeks were telling stories of Zeus and Aphrodite, the pyramids were already 2,000 year old ruins, their origins shrouded in mystery. 

But great-grandma sapiens … she lived more than fifty-five TIMES longer ago than the pyramids. That’s fifty-five all-of-recorded-histories back-to-back. 

Civilization is just a recent blip in a human story that is unfathomably long … and for more than 95% of that story, there was nothing like a piece of bread. 

And even for that five percent of history when somebody had bread, it was mostly just a local thing. Of all of the grains that have been grown and ground … only wheat can make bread … and wild wheat only grew in the middle east. After bread was invented it would take another length-of-human-history for it to spread to Europe and North Africa and Persia. Other places may have independently invented their tortillas, their arepas, and their injeras, and one could even argue that they are breads depending on how you define it. They are all beautiful and delicious. But even if you do include them, bread is still brand new to humanity. How profoundly lucky I am to live when I do! 

The second thing I take from this story is that we have bread today only because of dozens or maybe hundreds of lucky accidents … and only because some ancient people were observant enough and clever enough and adventurous enough to put it all together. 

If we have baked far, it is only because we have stood on the ovens of giants. 

Chapter 3: Bread and Anarchy

I didn’t always feel this way. Despite all of my starry-eyed waxing on, there was a time when I thought that bread was humanity’s greatest mistake. Part of me, still, cannot help but think that this is true. It started with a moment of infidelity in college. 

Let me explain. 

In the days before the internet, professors would often set aside a shelf of reserve readings in the library. Books that you were expected to go and read in the library, but that you didn’t have to buy. And one semester, I was a frequent visitor to the reserve shelves for a philosophy course that, frankly, I’d lost interest in. Nevertheless, every Tuesday and Friday, I would make myself go to the library with every intention of slogging through some incomprehensible Heiddegar. It was on one of those trips that I happened to look over and see that right next to Heiddegar were the reserve readings for a cultural anthropology course. Now, I’d never taken anthropology, but just reading the titles on the spines of those books … Whew …They were so sexy. I couldn’t help myself. It was like it had a mind of its own. Before I knew what was happening, I’d have a stack of books about coming-of-age rituals and kinship traditions. Heiddegar never stood a chance. I got the lowest grade of my entire academic career in that philosophy class. But I regret nothing. I read almost the entire cultural anthropology reserve shelf. 

And that reading changed my life. The human family was so diverse. There were so many ways to do things. Marriage, power, ownership, sex, family, music, work, language–if there was a way to do something differently, someone somewhere had done it. 

But even more profoundly, my readings in anthropology made me realize that the story I’d had in my head (about what human culture was and how humans had gotten there) was … incomplete. I realized that I’d been blinded to humanity’s true story by history. 

When I was young, my history textbooks had glossed over the first 95% of human culture as if it were nothing but a preface to the real show. Real history, and by implication, real humanity began when people settled down and started to farm. Before that, people were grunting brutes, stupidly eking out a living on the edge of starvation and sparring with rocks and sticks.

But what I read in anthropology turned all that on its head. It turned out that the people who lived in history’s prelude had lived lives of comparative ease and security. They had no bosses or kings. Their work was hard but interesting and had little of the repetitive drudgery that farming (and later, civilization) demanded. Women and men had different, but often equal status. And bullies and despots had little recourse for exerting their will over their nomadic neighbors who could usually walk away and go live somewhere else when someone got obnoxiously overbearing. 

Our stone age ancestors had few possessions, but from what I could tell, they had the things that make life good: freedom, adventure, companionship, and meaningful work. 

Those history books of my childhood had cast the dawn of agriculture as one of humanity’s greatest achievements–enabling things like specialized labor and big building and writing and science and ice cream. 

But what they glossed over was that unless you were a member of one of the privileged classes … subsistence farming kinda sucked. Like really sucked. You can see it in the bones of early farmers. They died young and they were shorter than their hunting and gathering kin. Their teeth were terrible. Their bones were weaker and their joints were arthritic from the endlessly repeated motions of grinding and threshing and winnowing. This was especially true for women who did the lion’s share of this work. To my surprise, I learned that the life of a subsistence farmer is LESS food secure than that of his hunting and gathering neighbors. One drought or flood could destroy a farmer’s food supply for an entire year. While hunters and gatherers could just switch from one food source to another that wasn’t doing so badly. And even if times were good, early farmers would often have a whole season’s worth of food stored up in a granary–something that would have to be diligently defended against vermin and hungry neighbors. 

But most damning of all, for me, was the way that agriculture made early farmers vulnerable to exploitation. If your family depends on a storehouse of food, all it takes is a gang of bullies at the granary door to make you into their serf. 

This was the cost of civilization. This was, in effect, the cost of bread. Slavery, poverty, environmental disaster, and war. And as far as I could tell, people were still paying it. And, because of when and where I was born, it was a cost that I couldn’t opt out of. 

Bread was bread and circuses. It was both the instrument of people’s disenfranchisement and the sedative that kept them docile. I didn’t want bread. I wanted to be free. If you’ve listened to I Heart This’s episode on school, you’ll know that this kind of thinking already aligned completely with my desires to live wild and free in the woods. This new, extended version of human history inspired countless hours of trying to learn how to live off the land. Even if it was hard, I thought, I would rather be miserable and free than hand over my freedom for a little bit of comfort … for a little bit of bread. 

And I wasn’t the only bread skeptic. Around the same time as all of this, a new dietary movement was gathering followers—people who thought that optimum health could be gained by eating the way our ancestors had evolved to eat. They were fans of red meat and eschewed dairy and … of course, bread. This movement, in time, became known as the Paleolithic, or Paleo diet. And while I was never really an adherent, (for most of that time I was vegetarian) I felt a real affinity for their claims that eating like our stone age antecedents would certainly be healthier than what us civilized people normally do. 

But my own eat like a caveman project went much deeper than opting for a few rare steaks. I wanted to actually hunt and gather. 

In subsequent college semesters, I spent hours poring over Peterson’s Guide to Edible Wild Plants. I got credit for a group study on wild food. And as my adult life began, Laura and I would start a blog together, called the Foraging Family, that chronicled our wild food adventures. I learned to harvest, process, and prepare hundreds of species of wild foods. Eventually, Northern Woodlands magazine asked me to write a regular column on foraging which I still write to this day. I went on many wilderness adventures in which I was often very hungry where I tested my ability to find something edible and sustaining. 

It was a lot of fun. 

I really enjoyed it. 

And … it slowly changed some of my naive ideas about living off the land and about the human story.  

I can remember one time when I was learning to process wild rice at a survival school in northern Vermont. We had dug a pit in the ground, lined it with buckskin, and filled it with wild rice. Then we donned moccasins, and ground our toes into the grains, loosening the husk. We danced the rice to separate the grains from the inedible husk. I had been excited about learning this craft because wild rice was a staple of foraging peoples. And while I had a wide and growing knowledge of the wild edible plants around me, few of them had the high-calorie nutritional power that would leave me feeling satisfied after a meal. Here was something that could really set one free, a food source substantial enough to subsist on. 

And as I danced through the afternoon, it dawned on me …  that I was threshing. Wild rice is a very distant relative of the other cereal grains, but processing it requires much the same kind of work as wheat. Just like wheat, it requires threshing and winnowing. It was the type of work a primitive farmer might do. All of a sudden, the line between wild and civilized blurred. 

And the deeper I went into the world of wild foods and into the world of adult life, the blurrier that line became. I began to realize that not only was it not possible to recreate the diet of my ancestors … but it was also not what I really wanted. 

My idea of stone age eating wasn’t the same as the paleo diet, but it made many of the same mistakes. It smacked of a kind of dietary perfectionism. I realized that I too had succumbed to ideas that somehow there is an optimum human diet. Part of me secretly hoped that if I really did eat like a caveman, I would somehow be imbued with everlasting health or preternaturally long life or clear and beautiful skin that would glow like a beacon and never wrinkle. 

The more I learned to gather wild foods, the more I learned that there was no optimum diet. Every food had cost and benefits. Rabbits were lean protein but they carried tularemia. Bracken fern was high in vitamins but increased your risk of stomach cancer. Even eating too many blueberries would give you the runs. 

But what really drove the lesson home were the few times in my life when I was genuinely hungry. One time in Utah, after having walked for days on little more than a few berries, I just started laughing at how crazy I was being. My wild walkabout, my self-imposed poverty was only possible because I came from a place of extravagant wealth. I had flown to Utah on a plane so that I could starve. 

In the long course of human history, most people (foragers and farmers alike) didn’t have the luxury to ask what they would eat. They’d eat what they could and hope that it was enough. Can you imagine what it would be like for someone who had spent their life scraping their fields with a hoe to walk into a modern market? Can you think of what it would be like for someone who made their living or digging roots from the ground with a stick walking into a corner store? 

What would they say? What would they think? 

I have heard that women from the former USSR who traveled to the US after the collapse of state communism were taken to a supermarket and wept. They wept to see so much food at once. 

My obsession with wild food was a kind of entitlement–a fantasy that I could only entertain because I had so much abundance–abundance that I took for granted. I was expecting that I had the right to choices that my ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of having. 

“Can you believe they’re selling that droopy lettuce?” 

“American cheese isn’t real cheese.” 

“Oh my god, can you believe what they charge now for blackberries. I mean, I know it’s February … but still.”

It can be so easy to feel that we deserve choices–that we deserve food that tastes good and is good for us and is convenient and is fast to prepare and isn’t too expensive. But deserving is not built into the system. We are not entitled to nutritious food by Nature. Nature doesn’t care about our tastes at all. Nature doesn’t want to be eaten. All food is body parts, and, plant or animal, every organism tries to defend itself from us. Nutritious food isn’t a right. It isn’t even a privilege. We take it when we can. We always cause harm when we do. It is a blessing, a fortuition, a stroke of good luck. It is grace. 

After years of foraging, the biggest thing I’ve learned about food is to be thankful that you have some. 

Part of me still thinks of bread as humanity’s biggest mistake. Part of me still sees kings and pharaohs extorting work from their fellow humans by putting locks on the granary doors. But I have gone back to the story of how bread came to be over and over again, and I can tell it a dozen different ways … as a story of injustice and empire, as a story of ingenuity and creativity, as a story of serendipity … as a story of beauty. Bread might be the fulcrum of injustice, but it is not the cause. 

I still yearn for freedom, but I don’t do much foraging any more. It turns out that for someone in my time and place, bread is a faster way to be free. It is so abundant. A short but honest day’s work seems a fair price for what I need and a little comfort besides. Then the rest of the day is mine. 

The story of bread that I most often think of these days is one of my childhood hero, John Muir, would throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea into an old sack and jump over the back fence.

In that story, bread is a way to freedom. It is its simplicity that makes us free. It is the freedom of enough. 

Bread, of course, is not the only symbol of enough. But it is a good one. It is the food of peasants and of royalty alike. We break it to show friendship and communion. We give it for comfort. In a world where many of us could have whatever food we want, whenever we want it, bread shows us a middle way between our cravings for cheetos and the anxious pursuit of dietary perfection. Bread is the background food, the palette cleanser, but it is also an unasked for abundance that we have stumbled into. And bread is enough. 

And in a world of ever bigger houses and more exotic vacations, of more convenience and bigger portions, of faster service and more constant entertainment, … enough feels like a radical idea. 

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