Changes

The earliest bread may have been made from cattails and ferns, where these plants were pounded into a fine substance using primitive mortars found that date to nearly 30,000 years ago. This suggests that even before the rise of agriculture, humans had begun to form a type of flour that they would then bake, perhaps in an open fire, to form bread. The earliest wheat and barley-based breads developed from pre-agricultural and agricultural societies in the Middle East, including in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Syria), Turkey, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Iran by around 12,000 years ago. The earliest breads were likely unleavened. However, probably accidentally, leavened bread developed as yeast naturally occurring in the environment respires as it consumes natural sugars in wheat. Leavened bread is the release of gases by the yeast bacteria. A document from around 3900 BP indicates how beer was also made from bread. One problem with the production of early bread was preservation, where often it would quickly mold. The solution was to convert unused bread into beer, which proved far more amenable for storage. <ref>For more on how bread was developed from wild grains and then developed from agricultural grains, see: Rubel, W. (2011). <i>Bread: a global history.</i> London: Reaktion Books.</ref>

Already, with the development of the earliest breads, new technologies arose to help with the baking process. This included enclosed ovens and open ovens that used mud or brick to make a hot surface that flat breads could be prepared from a dough mix. Bread and earlier agricultural foods affected the development of many food preparation technologies, including mortar, pestles, querns, and mills. The production of bread led to many major changes in society, where production and processing of wheat and barely for bread and other foods transformed economies and social structures. Large-scale labor was employed for the production of food with the rise of cities, where increased population required bread to be made at more industrial scales in large ovens and prepared by many people (Figure 1). Initially, the grinding of grain to flour would have been done by hand, often resulting in coarse grains. However, mills and large flat stones were used by early historical periods, perhaps by the 3rd millennium BCE, to make more refined flour. This helped bread to become less coarse. <ref>For early technologies related to bread production, see: Qarooni, J. (1996). <i>Flat Bread Technology.</i> Boston, MA: Springer US.</ref>

Millet was another grain used to make bread, particularly in India and China, where a form of flat bread made of millet is still a main food type in India. In China Sorghum and rice were used as varieties for making bread, which made the consistency and quality very different from wheat and barley based bread. This also likely explains why bread developed into different levels of significance in Chinese foods and often did not always accompany Chinese food. In the New World, corn was pounded and used to make bread, which was mostly a flat, unleavend bread that is similar to the modern tortilla.<ref>FOr more on grains that can be used for bread, see: Brown, A. C. (2013). <i>Understanding food: principles and preparation </i> (5th Ed). Belmont, CA: Cengage.</ref>