Flour

The topic of flour is enormous. Hundreds of pages could be devoted to a discussion of it, and once written, hundreds more could be added. Civilizations have risen around wheat-growing regions; governments have fallen when their ability to guarantee the availability of bread faltered; individuals have made fortunes from manipulations of the grain trade; social injustice stemming from the grain trade has kept thousands of people impoverished. For centuries, in many parts of the world it was bread alone that provided people with the strength to live and to labor. During difficult times, for example in England at the end of the eighteenth century, it took more than 100 percent of the breadwinner’s salary simply to purchase the family’s bread (baker and anthropologist Jules Rabin of Vermont told me in conversation that bread functioned during that era as oil does in our own times, that is, as the fuel that did the work for society; bread was the literal fuel, and humans the machines). Hunger, that is to say, the lack of bread, was used as a tool to control the workforce (as the English Reverend Joseph Townsend wrote in 1786, speaking of the poor: “It is only hunger which can spur them on to labour. Hunger will tame the fiercest animal, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”). There were periodic failures of the wheat crop, or harvests too small to guarantee enough bread for all. Lack of bread led directly to civil unrest and rioting, as it has even to this day in parts of the world where bread remains a primary food source.