Man I love bread. I kid you not, I enjoy a plain toast like Raymond Holt from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Breads are amazing, breads are life. I am one of those who happily accepts carefully discarded Neapolitan crusts from my partner.
This is my entry to Indie Web Club’s prompt on favourite food group. Spoilers: it’s bread.
I was amazed to learn that humans had grouped together as large societies with the advent of farming. We had a reason to be together, as growing grains requires coordination, manual labour, planning and scheduling, bookkeeping, storing, fallowing and repeating.
Yuval (of Sapiens fame) and many other historians often claim that wheat domesticated humans, not the other way round. A grass that needs so much of our attention literally forced a species of hunters and gatherers to “settle down”.
Think of all the heated arguments between those who couldn’t understand why we should have a “home” and “adjust” to seasons, and those who were addicted to this grass and wanted to stop millions of years of way of living. Think of the anxiety a hunter gatherer would’ve felt being in the same place every day, cleaning up a room, making the same bed daily, going to the same places, seeing the same views. Think of the boredom they would’ve gone through. They must have “run away” many times, only to return, and slowly thinking indeed it’s better to have food safety most days of the year, than daily freedom of travel, it’s better to have fences and be lazy than run away from any danger that may come up in pursuit of the pleasure of new stimuli, it’s better to sing near a bonfire, eat or drink bread (ales are often considered to be liquid breads), than to wander alone collecting fire wood.
It led to infrastructure, administration, writing, immigration, economics, taxes, politics, climate science, art, culture. To earn is to be a breadwinner. Everyone is trying to get some dough. Literally everything that we engage in today, dates back to an addictive grass.
But boy is this grass multi functional. The next unhinged string of words is gonna be offensive to sufferers of celiac disease and those who are on the other side of the spectrum of mereological reductionism.
You’ve got naans, kulchas, rotis, (shoutout to rumali roti), parathas, kottu, pitas, taftoon, lavash, focaccia, baguette, sourdoughs, GARLIC BREAD, pancakes (oh this is just the beginning).
But those are your standard types, you’ve got pizzas, sandwiches, burgers, hotdogs. To push the sacrilege a bit further, I’d count pies as breads too, they’re layered sheets of bread, or literally crunchy containers for a stew or (mock) meat or fruits (apple pie). Shout out to Pieminister’s vegan pies.
Similarly wraps, burritos (only wheat based tortilla), puffs/pasties are bread + something else. Speaking of fatty breads, biscuits are breads too, biscotti as well (shout out to rusk).
Heck, while you are scoffing and utterly aghast, dumplings are breads too! Imagine momos/gyoza/baos without a good refined flour. Without it, you’re just eating steamed fillings. Even pasta and noodles are boiled breads of some sort (oh baby). Lasagna is hence bread too.
Seitan is a kind of bread too, with all the starch removed and just the gluten protein, creating a wonderful mock meat relished by monks and vegans alike.
Maybe some puddings or halwas can be considered breads too. I don’t necessarily have a sweet tooth, but Upma or a “gruel” is an occasional comfort food for me. Oat milk is some sort of “bread milk”. Oh, and bread pudding.
I mean, you can literally have a full-course meal of different forms of “bread”. You most definitely had some sort of bread today, at least an imitation of it if you can’t handle gluten. Cancel me I don’t care, 👏 breads 👏 are 👏 awesome. I’m proud of my ancestry for simping for wheat. It literally changed our lives.