The history of bread

Bread may be older than agriculture itself. In 2018 archaeologists reported charred bread remains at a site called Shubayqa 1 in northeastern Jordan, made by hunter-gatherers about 14,400 years ago from wild cereals and plant roots.

With the domestication of wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, bread became a staple food. Grinding grain between stones produced flour, which was mixed with water and baked on hot stones or in the ashes of a fire as flatbread.

Ancient Egyptians are often credited with developing leavened bread on a large scale. Wild yeasts in the air and on grains would ferment dough left to stand, making it rise. Egyptian bakers produced many varieties of bread, and workers building the pyramids were paid partly in bread and beer, which were made from the same grains.

Egyptian tomb paintings show bakeries in detail, with workers grinding grain, kneading dough and baking in conical moulds.

In ancient Rome, bread was central to politics. The state distributed grain, and later bread, to citizens in the city, a system known as the grain dole. The poet Juvenal mocked Roman citizens for caring only about bread and circuses.

Rome had professional bakers organised into guilds, and large commercial bakeries used animal-powered mills. At Pompeii, archaeologists found a loaf of bread preserved in an oven, carbonised by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

• In medieval Europe, white bread made from finely sifted wheat flour was eaten by the wealthy.
• Poorer people ate dark, coarse breads made from rye, barley or mixed grains.
• Many medieval towns strictly regulated the weight and price of bread through laws such as England's Assize of Bread and Ale.
• Bread was sometimes used as a plate, called a trencher, which could be eaten or given to the poor afterward.
• The word lord comes from the Old English hlaford, meaning loaf-keeper.

Because bread was the main food of the poor, its price had enormous political importance. Bad harvests and rising bread prices fuelled unrest in many societies. In France in 1789, soaring bread prices contributed to the anger that led to the French Revolution, and in October 1789 thousands of women marched to Versailles demanding bread.

Bread riots have occurred in many places and times, from eighteenth-century England to twentieth-century Egypt, where government attempts to cut bread subsidies in 1977 led to widespread protests.

Industrialisation transformed bread. Roller mills in the nineteenth century produced cheap white flour, and commercial yeast made rising faster and more predictable. In 1928 Otto Rohwedder introduced a commercial bread-slicing machine in the United States.

In 1961 British researchers developed the Chorleywood bread process, which uses intense mechanical mixing and additives to make bread rapidly from lower-protein wheat. Most bread in the United Kingdom is still made this way. In recent decades, interest in traditional methods has grown, with a revival of sourdough, whole grains and small artisan bakeries.