People can grow vegetables and simply eat. But bread is way too complicated.
There is a bakers’ dozen of big steps to go from wheat into bread. And multiple special structures needed too.
Same with beer. Wine makes total sense but how do you even invent ale? How are these common foods everyone knows and uses?
I was thinking “imagine if mediveal people knew how to boil seawater and sell salt” and now I spent 20 extra minutes in the shower.
They knew about boiling water for salt since the Bronze age at least.
Salt price was largely determined by transport cost and it was just not worth the effort to gather the firewood instead of trading for it in many places.
Ancient people were just as smart as modern people, they just weren’t as educated.
Humans are really good at figuring things out and tweaking things based off of previous results.
They also had more free time to figure things out.
And less things to work with, so had to get creative to avoid diet fatigue (which is lethal) and only those creative enough people survived to create the people today.
Nah dude just read about the earliest versions of beer and bread and it all makes sense. The earliest version of beer was more like a fermented porridge of malted barley, and the earliest version of bread was like a rough corn bread. Over time people improved both products but it was slow going. The key is knowing that dough and wort will just naturally ferment on their own if left out in the air and that both of those things can be made way more simply than a modern bread made with white all purpose flour or wort made with malt syrup.
The first step with bread is grinding the corn. This a basic way to make it edible for the tribe. Have you ever tried to bite on a corn of wheat or rye?
Mix it with water and cook it to make it softer, and you get a kind of porrige. Leave it warm over night, and you have a sourdough. Rekindle the fire on the next day, and you’ll have a proto bread.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process
Or there’s just, you know normal bread, flour, water, yeast and salt. You don’t need all that extra crap.
Of course nobody needs it. But >99% only know it that way.
You think the rest of the planet is like the US. It actually isn’t. It’s more like 4% know it that way.
How Bread Built Civilization: From the First Farmers to the Modern Factory [1 hour documentary]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=892yaBEwtbM
How Salt Shaped Society: From the Roman Empire to the French Revolution [53 minutes documentary]
Short as it is on the cosmic scale, history’s been a pretty long time. Nobody found wheat and started making bread the next day. It was an incredibly long process that probably started with soaking the grains they were eating to make them more palatable and easier to consume. Then somebody thought to heat the wet grains. Then someone decided to crush the grains and you had porridge or gruel. A few iterations later someone comes up with a simple unleavened bread. Naturally-occurring yeast and dough left alone for a few hours could probably lead to rudimentary rising dough from there, and eventually we have brioche and marble rye.
You ever just boil some wheat then leave your leftovers in a jar too long?
People already explained that salt was relatively easy to get, steps to make bread are not that complicated and probably occured through trial and error, and for ale, it’s quite probably just cereals left to soak in water too long + natural yeast and you get an accidental alcohol. The trickiest part is to finetune the process to make it a bit consistent, but finding it out is very easy
Also once you have yeast going, keep that shit. It’s easy enough to do for yogurt, beer, wine, and bread with some extra steps.
Shit once wine is fermenting you can usually just take some of it say 1/10th, sit it aside mash more grapes and throw it in and that fermentation will take hold on the new sugars and keep going. Beer shouldn’t have been much different there. Bread starters you have to feed, but if you are making bread daily or a few times a week it’d be easy to keep.
Want to make yogurt, the easiest way it to buy yogurt, and use the end of it to start your batch.
Clearly it’s some kind of [perpetual stew] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew?wprov=sfla1) of yeast, which would make a good name for an obscure local band of extreme metal
