Bread, beer and agriculture
Last week Onkel Bob posted a long response to my post, Bread first or beer first? A bad question. He made several interesting points but the most important point, to which he kept returning, was “How did agriculture start at all?” or “What prompted widespread fields?”
That’s an interesting question. But in my opinion it is a mistake to tie it to discovering how to make bread or beer. If you look at my original post, you will see no reference to farming.
Surely, some considerable mastery of grains has to precede grain farming by a significant period? Why in the world would people go to all the trouble of farming grains if they did not already have techniques for turning them into food?
Onkel Bob’s response, I suspect would be turning grasses into food is easy. To quote “grasses could be easily prepared without substantial effort. Just add fire.”
I like the phrase “just add fire” because that’s what our ancestors, who thought of fire as a thing, an element, that entered into chemical combinations, would have thought they were doing.
I’m not so happy about the “just” though.
What about the classic paper by Gordon Hillman of University College London where he studied contemporary Turkish ways of turning emmer wheat (that is a wheat typical of the early wheats in that it is enclosed in a hull) into bulgur (the form used in tabbouleh for example)?
Result. From harvest to getting the wheat ready to process. 14 steps.
(Threshing, primary winnowing, coarse sieving, medium coarse sieving, storage, parching, pounding, secondary winnowing, medium coarse sieving, fine sieving, washing to semi-clean, storage, second fine sieving, hand sorting)
From ready to process to bulgur. Another 5 steps.
(Par-boiling, sun-drying, bran removal, winnowing, cracking, and sifting).
Although these numbers vary slightly depending on whether you count multiple sievings or winnowings as one or several steps, what food scientists call post-harvest processing is a tedious, meticulous, time-consuming, energy-consuming operation.
In the distant past people might have gone about this in a more rough and ready way. But there’s nothing to suggest it was easy.
Soon. A cook’s eye view of the grains.
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No pdf for Hillman’s paper but here is the reference. Hillman, G. C. (1984) Traditional husbandry and processing of archaic cereals in modern times. Part I, the glume-wheats. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1, 114-152.
Dorian Fuller, also of University College London, does very interesting work on grain history. I now discover he also has a blog.
Thanks to Fred James for this.
As fast food it certainly pre-dates McDonald’s