The Real Work Behind A Loaf Of Bread

I've been sitting and pondering the amount of work that goes into the things we take for granted in this modern age, and how they would have been produced before we had automated machines to make them.

A single loaf of bread (let's use sourdough for simplicity's sake, but that's usually what our ancestors would have had available) has what? Two, three ingredients: Flour (usually wheat), water, and maybe salt (maybe sugar too, but it's not strictly necessary- neither is salt, for that matter).

So someone had to grow the wheat in a field somewhere, harvest it, thresh it, and grind it. Not to mention that the grain itself had to be safely stored it so it didn't go bad. That's a farmer plowing a field by foot plow or under animal power, sowing and growing the grain. A person or people cutting the crop with sickles or scythes, using flails and baskets to shake the grain away from the husks, then using either a hand powered mill of some kind or a water or animal driven millstone to grind it, and then of course, someone built the mill and storage barns or whatever used to store the grain so it would last.

Someone would have had to dig a water well, or pump or carry the water from another source in buckets. The salt would have had to be gathered from the ocean or some other source (such as hickory salt, or salt caves). Salt itself in the ancient days was a commodity that not everyone had access to, so it might not even be in the equation. Sugar (if it could be gotten at all) would have come from sugar cane (in tropical areas), certain trees (such as maple and birch), or honey (bees, obviously).

Then they'd have to bake the bread, either in the coals, in a pot on the fire or in an oven someone built. Which means someone had to gather or cut the firewood.

So, by the time you finally got around to eating your loaf of sourdough bread, there's a helluva lot of energy and effort that has gone into it. And that is just the bread!

Viewed in that light, you'd have to have a pretty good community of helping hands around you if SHTF, because the production of such products we just buy today needed many skilled folks to make back then.

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The Real Work Behind A Loaf Of Bread