On this day in the 14th Century, your bread was baked with sand and then your teeth turned into nubs.
Humans have been making some form of “bread” for probably at least 30,000 years. Until modern times making bread meant spending hours, sometimes most of the day, grinding grains either by hand or using grindstones into some version of flour in order to create a “dough” for baking (“the daily grind”).* Bread has been a major factor in the human diet, and therefore human flourishing, for millennia.
Tiny grains of sand or rock from the grindstones were worn off and eventually baked into the bread that people ate.* Consuming bread created in this manner over the course of a lifetime made people’s teeth wear away, regardless of status in society. While modern dentistry, the introduction of fluoride into
Oddly, the use of millstones to make flour for bread has made a comeback in recent years as it becomes part of a specialty bread-making process in artesian bakeries primarily in western countries.* The best thing about living today, especially in the west, is you can decide for yourself if delicious bread is worth some extra grit!
— This has been your very banal report —
Learn more from the sources used for this article:
- https://www.history.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bread
- https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/science/q-a-teeth-and-millstones.html
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290251601_Unlocking_the_past_The_role_of_dental_analysis_in_archaeology
- https://www.fournosveneti.gr/en/the-company/the-history-of-bread
- https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/24/490120509/bread-grains-the-last-frontier-in-the-locavore-movement
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/30001637?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
- http://cdalebrittain.blogspot.com/2014/05/medieval-teeth.html
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