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| Egyptian breadseller that is one of the symbols of the wars that started after rising bread prices |
You are on holiday and what do you miss most, food-wise then?
For many people from northern Europe the answer might be bread, which for us
needs to be made of a dense dough and preferably consists of whole wheat. As bread
is one of the food products that is available everywhere it is actually strange
that we miss it. But bread is so popular that it even has caused wars! Let’s go
into this and unravel what else a bread can do.
The greeks and romans, whose society was built on the
cultivation of cereals, used to makes soups out of them. Only later they
learned to make bread, as they first had to understand what cereal was the best
to make a dough with: spelt wheat was grinded with the force of a donkey while
a big installation allowed the dough to rise before it was cooked in probably a
wood oven.
Then the bread making process was spread over the world, each
continent, country or even villages with its own particularities, amongst
others by the type of grains or cereals available. For many centuries these
bread where made in public ovens,
that did not only increase social relations but also gave power to the owners.
Lately there is a new interest for these ovens, as more and more people like to
make their own bread.
Since agricultural products became commodity goods and play an important role on the market, you can imagine that also
grains and cereals - the most important ingredients for a bread - suffer from
the people that are ’gambling’ with these products. And that is how the wars started: more people get hungry, become grungy and get out of control
as the situation they lived in was already impossible. So a simple ‘ingredient’
that usually unites people around the dish (think of the religious uses of
bread), now becomes the reason for fights between people.
But when bread is appreciated so much in many places in the
world, why do we miss so much the bread we know from our own home country? Does
it have to do with culture, or is it more a habit which we refuse to change?
In New York, a smart entrepreneur had the great idea to open
the Hot Bread Kitchen, a kind of co-working space for bakers. Female bakers, in
this case, coming from places all over the world that until recently did not
have the possibility to make money out of that what they are good at, namely
making baked products. And so this place becomes a peaceful workspace and shop
that offers bread coming from places you did not even know they existed.
It might be clear that if the ‘bread balance’ moves into the
wrong direction a can go wrong. So maybe it is better to respect the tastes of
the country you spent your holidays in and support the local economy by buying
and trying their locals delicacies. You just have to accept that it is different
from that what you are used to. But is that not the reason you go on holidays?
Easy for me, as France is my holiday destination. See you in
a few weeks!
