Our Daily Bread

Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn't all that difficult.

It's a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don't need a heat-proof container to boil water.

Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?

How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?

Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.

Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".

In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.

"In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the 'building material' required ... And to use their most valuable qualities for hybridisation."

Today's Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn't matter. People want Red Fife because it is Red Fife, not just any old high-quality Canadian wheat.

Credit where credit's due: The Father of the Green Revolution had an unacknowledged father himself.

Synthetic wheat; it isn't natural, but it is a very good thing.

That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. The rest of us can call it what we like.

How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called Bake Like an Egyptian.

Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.

Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.

A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.

Samson was grinding. He wasn't pressing. No matter what some artists may think.

St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.

A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!

Perhaps there's more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.

There's a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.

All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.

It needn't actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.

If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.

Bakers who grind their own grain are all utterly in love with the flour they get. I'm jealous.

Nathan Myhrvold is right: "The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”

Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.

Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can't deliver either.

"I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day."

The qualities that make durum wheat so attractive for pasta have nothing to do with the size of the semolina particles from which it is made.

"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough." Wes Jackson

What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.