Bread, How Did They Make It? | Hacker News Reader

Bread, How Did They Make It?

acoup.blog

120 pointsyoloswagins15 comments

Warning: this specific post is not about how bread was made. It's about the economics of the average farm in ancient society.

Was on a road trip with my girlfriend and thought she might like to learn about how bread was made. 30 min of reading later, not much to say on that topic specifically. Very interesting nonetheless.

I always love to see anything by Brett Devereux on here. His articles are one of the highlights of the week for me. Always interesting, always entertaining, and I always learn something. His blog doesn’t have an obviously visible RSS feed, but if you point your reader to it it’ll find it. I think it’s at /feed.atom or some such.

Me too! I really enjoyed his collections on the "Fremen Mirage"[1] investigating the "hard times make hard men" trope and "Practical Polytheism"[2]. Brett's articles are mainly social histories which are very accessible and interesting reads. While we're all human, we can easily misunderstand the people of the past in fundamental ways if we assume that they had our identical beliefs and values.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

[2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...

> His blog doesn’t have an obviously visible RSS feed, but if you point your reader to it it’ll find it.

The feed is at [1]

[1] https://acoup.blog/feed/

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g , How To Make Everything, a guy trying to replicate (IIRC) a steam engine starting from nothing; i.e. making stone tools first, making pots from clay, using those tools to collect copper ore, making better tools, and so on. Very interesting. He make various kinds of bread over the years too.

The implied lack of an incentive to be taxed was good writing in this. Regrettably, for Roman occupied lands, the tax had been precomputed and sold on as a derivative. This kind of CFD doesn't play well when you can take what you want as the tax farmer.

Also led to 1789 in France. Post roman market economy didn't help.

Subsisting is only partly viable as a tax avoidance mechanism. Ultimately, you need a surplus for a lot of reasons

For readers jumping to the comments: Any surplus went into the social capital (dowry etc), distributing it inside the countryside as non-fungible untaxable wealth. Putting a year's saving or even surplus into easily transportable goods like money would be a really dumb thing to do, as it was incredibly risky (dumb) thing to do. The author links to a talk on how this still plays a role in poor communities today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4

TBF and respect this response, I nitpicked a minor side note of an otherwise fascinating and great read which made me think, and I appreciate being made to think.

The discussion of risk is interesting. It is not uncommon for small farms with one or a few crops or animal species to have an annual net income which varies considerably from year to year depending on weather, disease, pests, market prices, and the cost of inputs such as fuel, fertilizer, etc. Small farmers have to tolerate variations in income greater than most salaried city dwellers.

The risks and consequent variations can be reduced by increasing scale, diversifying crops and animal husbandry, and by using financial tools, such as futures.

The history of economic development follows this trend even more so over the centuries. Business units become larger, technological processes more diverse and complex, and financial tools are created to smooth out variations in growth.

Thus, short term risks are reduced and mild adversities are avoided, but this comes at the cost of increasing long term risks and great catastrophes. Ultimately, global warming may put an end to this strategy.

I'm not sure it's right to see this as a cost. Natural famines were themselves long-term risks and great catastrophes - every premodern state lived with the knowledge that, if the weather turned bad, they might suddenly run out of food and lose a tenth or more of their population. As far as I know, none of modern farming's tail risks approach that scale of disaster.

> a meal ... consisted mostly of bread

This might be pendantic, but wasn't gruel ([1]) consumed more often than bread?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel

The hard answer is that the historic record does not allow for a comparison between staples in absolute numbers. What we can establish from archaeological finds and historic sources is that bread has been a staple food throughout history. That doesn't exclude anything else: Quotidian Roman cuisine, for instance, is quite rich and diverse. Gruel was definitely something that people ate, depending on the context (demographic, location, time).

Within historical research, uncovering old or ancient recipes and meals, and trying to remake them today is a proper niche. There are a number of good cookbooks that allow you to try it for yourself. Alternatively, you'll find plenty of inspiration on YouTube.

It is also becoming clear that bread has come after beer, which has come after gruel.

The theory is that gruel from wild grains came first, where soaking them helped to soften them up for consumption. Leaving gruel sit there in certain conditions starts fermentation, so beer making probably followed closely after. There is evidence that larger scale cultivation of grains precedes bread, so it is an interesting thought that we owe the switch to (semi-)sedentary lifestyles to beer ;) It takes quite a bit of grains to produce bread, so it makes sense that bread was only developed once there was a large amount or surplus of grains available.

Great article, really nice style of writing. I found many points on farming strategy and risk mitigation to be the ones frequently brought up by Nassim Taleb in his blog posts and book: hedging trough diversity and avoiding optimization

You know you are in too deep when you thought this was about a specific app.

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