What Is the Historical Development of Bread

In Western societies, bread has come to symbolize the primary food that God has given us. Bread and life are intertwined as being seen as being part of each other. The utility of bread to societies in the Old and New World has evolved significantly, where different grains became important and those grains were used to form different types of breads. However, some of the important qualities of bread were likely accidental discoveries, while others still only developed much later.

Early History of Bread

The earliest bread may have been made from cattails and ferns, where these plants were pounded into a fine substance using primitive mortars found that date to nearly 30,000 years ago. This suggests that even before the rise of agriculture, humans had begun to form a type of flour that they would then bake, perhaps in an open fire, to form bread. The earliest wheat and barley-based breads developed from pre-agricultural and agricultural societies in the Middle East, including in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Syria), Turkey, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Iran by around 12,000 years ago. The earliest breads were likely unleavened. However, probably accidentally, leavened bread developed as yeast naturally occurring in the environment respires as it consumes natural sugars in wheat. Leavened bread is the release of gases by the yeast bacteria.

Already, with the development of the earliest breads, new technologies arose to help with the baking process. This included enclosed ovens and open ovens that used mud or brick to make a hot surface that flat breads could be prepared from a dough mix. Bread and earlier agricultural foods affected the development of many food preparation technologies, including mortar, pestles, querns, and mills.