How is bread formed?
July 10, 2022 10:40 AM   Subscribe

Bret Devereaux (previously, many times) goes on a deep dive into how things were made in pre-modern societies, looking at how grain is farmed and eventually turned into bread, with a particular focus on the people and social structures involved. posted by wesleyac (17 comments total) 48 users marked this as a favorite
 
for Kow to Lik
posted by The otter lady at 12:07 PM on July 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


Wait, why do the British call wheat corn? that's like a whole thing. I guess we should all be saying maize, unless Monsanto has patented that, too
posted by eustatic at 12:19 PM on July 10, 2022


He also has similar excellent series on clothing and iron.
posted by migurski at 12:30 PM on July 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


why do the British call wheat corn?

Presumably it's related to the German word for "grain" being "korn"? (The German word for "corn" is "mais", so there's no confusion as long as you don't also know English :/.)

On reflection, I should probably search for this and then I might find something like https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/kurn%C4%85
posted by Slothrup at 12:40 PM on July 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Corn was originally just a generic term for any cereal grain before Europeans became aware of maize, which was originally slotted into the system as "Indian corn". But this got truncated down to "corn", which made the earlier definition obsolete... except in Britain, where they still use the word with a more general meaning.
posted by Earthtopus at 12:43 PM on July 10, 2022 [14 favorites]


Oh neat Slothrup. And - I’d thought of "quern" as coming from the same word as "corn", but it comes from 'heavy' instead.
posted by clew at 2:35 PM on July 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Every person in an agrarian society whose job – mining, smithing, tanning, timber-cutting, trading, tailoring, everything – doesn’t involve primary food production is subsisting off of the food production of others
Still true today! In industrial societies, we’ve inverted the proportions of ag to non-ag workers, but still true.

What is novel and might lead to novel disasters: agricultural production now depends on non-agricultural production.

(Deveraux probably covers that in passing somewhere.)
posted by clew at 2:44 PM on July 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Specifically, Ag Production depends on Methane production. (but also, disregard for the lung health of African Americans living in Cancer Alley, USA)

Or, in the words of CF Industries, on why they make money making our food:

"Our access to abundant low-cost North American natural gas provides us with some of the lowest feedstock costs in the industry and position CF firmly on the low end of the global cost curve.

Additionally, nitrogen fertilizers have no substitute and must be applied each year. As the global population and demand for food has increased, global demand for nitrogen has grown at about 2 percent per year."


the methane thing is a big part of why inflation skyrocketed when the USA started exporting methane to asia and the international market en masse in 2021.

Even the recent explosion at Freeport LNG lowered gas prices...
posted by eustatic at 3:22 PM on July 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Corn as 'grain' or maybe something like 'pellet' still has a few remnants: 'peppercorn', corned beef (beef preserved by packing it in with coarse rock salt 'corns'), a hard lump of skin on the foot is a painful 'corn', one individual grain of barley is a 'barleycorn'

One just has to remember when reading something pre-1500 or so that when it says 'they had many acres planted with corn', they mean wheat or oats or anything but maize.
posted by bartleby at 3:29 PM on July 10, 2022 [9 favorites]


I enjoy Devereaux' blog but hadn't got into this series yet, so thanks. One interesting point made in the first post is where he's talking about risk mitigation and explaining the factors that led subsistence farmers to (rationally!) invest in relationships rather than economic efficiency. I have occasionally gone down the rabbit hole into prepper blogs and YouTube and it's interesting to see which people who are super into prepping recognize the fundamental reliance on relationships that would characterize any hypothetical post-apocalyptic society.
posted by Wretch729 at 4:23 PM on July 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


Related: This excellent book by Dinosaur Comics' Ryan North has a couple of thick sections dedicated to farming technology (crop rotation, plows and harnesses, baking etc) and how crazily long it took us to develop it all. "How to Invent Everything - A Guide for the Stranded Time Traveller".
posted by Popular Ethics at 5:27 PM on July 10, 2022 [5 favorites]


Consequently, for the family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most

So what else is new....
posted by eustatic at 2:41 AM on July 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


I would summarize this first one as: Grain rots, money is made to be stolen, but communism keeps, year after year.
posted by eustatic at 2:52 AM on July 11, 2022


Grain rots

But not whiskey!

Actually, I'm a little disappointed there isn't more coverage of the linkage of brewing and baking, which seemed to have progressed hand-in-hand in ancient Mesopotamia. Though I suppose it's typical of a Classicist to act as though history started in Greece (I kid... a little). In the Americas, use of maize as a brewed beverage may have even been more important early on before larger and more efficient cobs were developed. Even getting into more modern times, processing grains into other products is an essential driver of the economics of agriculture and the politics that surrounds it (cf. The Whiskey Rebellion). With such a large topic though, I can see how that aspect might get put aside as too much to cover outside of a book.
posted by Panjandrum at 3:54 AM on July 11, 2022 [5 favorites]


I’ve only read the first post so far, but the thesis behind the (fascinating) historical narrative - that poor people are more likely to optimise for loss avoidance than production efficiency, for extremely good reasons - is very striking, and makes total sense to me. I don’t know much about economics, but this seems to me like something more economists/ economic decision makers/ neoliberal growth cultists need to be reminded of - that there’s more than one market logic out there, and there are existing ones that are built for sustainability. Which, uh … might be handy right about now.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:34 PM on July 11, 2022 [6 favorites]


Wait, why do the British call wheat corn?

On the bright side, there's no confusion, because we call maize sweetcorn. Except when it's corn on the cob. Or popcorn. Or when it's been turned into cornflakes, which were of course originally made with wheat, or into cornflour, which I think Americans call cornstarch, and which is of course completely different from cornmeal, which we call polenta. Oh, and according to my dictionary (Chambers), the Scots and the Irish call oats corn.

See, no confusion at all.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:12 AM on July 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


In case anyone has ever wondered what 'grits' (the food) is. Every grain has its ground up and boiled version.
Oats make oatmeal, rice makes congee, wheat makes farina, I forget the name for the millet version. Maize makes grits.

US English calls all these dishes 'hot cereal' (as opposed to 'cold cereal', which is flakes/bubbles/loops from a box with milk).
Muesli is cold cereal, Kasha is hot cereal.
Pro tip: try making couscous with apple juice instead of water & add raisins. Breakfast pilaf.

So if you're dealing with an English that calls all cereal grains 'corn', and all boiled grains 'porridge'...then I suppose that describing grits as corn porridge still works?; but it's a lot less specific.
posted by bartleby at 3:54 PM on July 13, 2022


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