After reading a lot of this book it has really changed my perspective on bread, let alone all of the history that comes along with it. People say that everyone has their own life story and now that I think about it so does food and all the ingredients it took to make that food.

Bread has a connection with just about every piece of history that you can think of. Somehow, somewhere bread had an impact on our history whether it be religious, laws, beliefs, good health, bad health, war, slaves, work and probably plenty more in the future.

The things that have really stuck with me while reading this book are the little facts about bread and its process of being made and how it has made its way through history. The roman engineers invented the water mill. Barbarians hated the mill but the Egyptians loved it and looked at millers as if they were magicians. However people grew to really dislike millers. People suspected that they stole grain from them. No one will ever truly know if millers stole grain because only the millers knew what they had done and if they were stealing grain from the towns folk they definitively were not going to turn themselves in.

Another fact that sticks out to me was that it wasn’t easy to become a baker. Anyone that wanted to be a baker had to do a lot of things before he could even have the chance to becoming a baker. First the baker had to be legitimate at birth to even enter the trade then there was a brief prohibition period before he could sign his articles. Apprenticeships for two to three years then indentures were signed and he was a journey mad out to study the art and techniques of baking from different places. When he returned he had to wait for a house to have a vacant “baking privileges” which meant that a baker had to die first. Bakers had a lot of health problems from not getting enough sleep, not eating enough and constantly breathing in flour. Bakers often developed Bakers asthma and bakers eczema.