Six thousand years of bread by H.E. Jacob is an idiosyncratic book, I picked it up because I was interested in the history of bread. It covers a great deal of history and religion with bread (and hunger) a central theme. I had expected a more technical focus on flour, yeast and the bread making process over time.
The author, Heinrich Eduard Jacob was a German-Jew – arrested by the Nazis in 1938, imprisoned in Dachau and then Buchenwald before being released and emigrating to the United States. He worked as a journalist and author throughout his life. Six Thousand Years was published in English in 1944, the result of 20 years of research.
Six Thousand Years is divided into six “books” with each book comprised of a number of chapters – about 36 in total. To avoid confusion I’ll refer to them as sections, the sections are as follows:
- The Bread of Prehistoric Man
- Bread in the Ancient World
- Bread in the Middle Ages
- Bread in the Early Americas
- Bread in the Nineteenth Century
- Bread in our Time
The first section on The Bread of Prehistoric Man covers the domestication of grain and the invention of the plough. Jacob lists the species domesticated grass from millet (earliest), oats, barley and wheat (also early), rye (late classical) and maize, suggesting Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as the source of wheat based on the diversity of species there. The modern view is that domestication happened further north in the Fertile Crescent centred on Mesopotamia. He locates the invention of the plough in Mesopotamia although he mentions China, he thinks the ancient ploughs found there were too sophisticated to have been invented there. I think this reflects the understanding of China in the West at the time of writing.
Bread in the Ancient World covers the invention of bread in the Ancient World, primarily in Egypt where leavened (sourdough) bread is believed to have been invented. There are tomb paintings from the period showing Egyptian bakeries. Bread was a de facto currency alongside beer, and was very central to Egyptian life. Herodotus referred to the Egyptians as “bread eaters” and made fun of their habit of kneading dough with their feet. Also included in this section are the symbolism of bread in Judaism, early Christianity. The parts on Greece are oriented around mythology and religion whilst Rome is more political. I was surprised the degree to which wheat was imported to Greece and Rome from Egypt and the area around the Black Sea.
After the fall of the Roman Empire a lot of agricultural knowledge was lost, this led in part to an outbreaks of ergotism most notably in 10th century France. Also lost was knowledge of water (grain) mills, and certainly an understanding as to why they were prone to exploding (flour dispersed in air is very explosive). A lot of the background to this section is the animosity between the peasant growing and harvesting grain, and the miller – often milling on behalf of a lord who banned milling in the home, the baker and the townsfolk. There is also a section here on transubstantiation and the Reformation, as well as hunger – which was a recurring feature of life in the Middle Ages. Hunger seems to have arisen largely because of the way society was structured with the peasants growing grain very restricted in what they could do with the grain they had grown, and obliged to pay significant tithes.
Moving to the Americas we learn about the introduction of maize and potatoes to the West from the Americas. Again Jacob seems to be a bit mystified that non-Western peoples could breed maize and potatoes without Western intervention. Maize is in many ways superior to wheat, it grows more quickly in the climate of much of the Americas and requires little in terms of preparation to plant. The introduction of maize and potatoes to the West was quite rapid but there were suspicions about both. Rye was more successful in the Americas than wheat. Interestingly there was a rye / wheat divide in Europe with Germany, Poland and Russia eating rye bread almost exclusively and France and England eating wheat bread – this division weakened in the period after the French Revolution as white bread became aspirational.
The main focus of the 19th century is on the mechanisation of agriculture, starting off in the United States with mechanized reaping machines in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that roller mills were introduced which allowed white flour to be made more easily, and improved throughput. Bread baking in the US started to be mechanised. Elsewhere Justus von Liebig was working on artificial fertilizers which improved yields – this was on the basis of improved understanding of plant biology. In the American Civil War bread played a role – the North grew wheat, made bread and transported it on the new railway lines – the South grew cotton which you can’t eat nor could it be sold abroad and grain import imported. Furthermore, the North grew and harvested wheat with a reduced workforce, many having gone to fight, which they carried on doing after the war allowing America to dominate the supply of wheat to the global market.
The final section covers the first half of the 20th century including the First World War and the American Dust Bowl – a result of over-exploitation of the land to grow wheat. Interestingly the Americans identified the problem quite promptly, and started to address it with a programme of converting wheat fields to pasture and planting trees. It finishes talking about Hitler’s very direct policies of starvation, allocating starvation levels of food to non-Germans and Jewish people. He also talks about the horticultural revolution which led to the cold hardy wheat grown in Canada and the Soviet Union, and other northern. It is here that we see most clearly that 6000 years was written 80 years ago – Jacob considers Lysenko, the Soviet biologist, something of a hero and the battle over the health benefits of white bread when compared to more wholemeal bread was still on. These days Lysenko is known as an anti-Darwinist, and for his suppression of opponents through his political power. Obviously the book was written before the further Green Revolution of the 1970s which also impacted the growing of wheat.
6000 years is rather long and rambling but I found it pretty readable and the wider focus made me curious about, for example, the mechanisation of agriculture in 19th century. It is anachronistic in places, and I think in some areas our understanding has moved on.
