Bread and revolution

Cookbook reference: Māmā's parāoa mīhini

Image credit: Kate Logan ; bread baked by SamKate

 Humans have been consuming processed grains of various kinds for millennia. Archaeological evidence suggests that communities living in present-day Ethiopia pulverised sorghum between grinding stones nearly 100,000 years ago, perhaps preparing a kind of porridge from the flour.

Around 10,000 years ago, people in Western Asia and Europe began cultivating club wheat, grinding the kernels into flour and baking a kind of unleavened bread.

Bread prepared with yeast or other fermentation methods was probably invented in ancient Egypt, where it was so important that it could be used as a currency. Leavened bread subsequently became a staple food throughout Europe, western Asia and North Africa, emerging as a powerful symbol with significant economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. The word bread is often used metaphorically within Western societies to describe the essentials for all human needs. The Arabic word for bread is aish, which is also the word for life itself.  

With the development of capitalist economies in the West, however, bread became barely affordable for many, changing the conditions of life. Workers were compelled to sell their labour to survive, rather than producing and consuming their own food. Access to bread became a rallying point for protest movements. In France, the grain harvest failed in the late 1780s, leading to a steep increase in the price of bread. Unable to afford to eat, workers took to the streets, eventually leading to the French revolution.

Decades later, the British demanded grain as rent from Irish tenant farmers, leaving them dependent on potatoes. The commitment of the British government of the day to free trade ideologies led to the death of a million people from starvation during the “Great Hunger” of 1845 and 1849. Meanwhile, significant quantities of desperately needed grain were exported from Ireland, leading to huge public anger that these cereals could have been ground into bread to feed the people.

Poor grain harvests in early twentieth Russia led to protests over the price of bread, one of the triggers of the Russian Revolution.
​
Bread remains a powerful symbol of class struggle today. Ultimately, the price and availability of bread depends on the financial decisions of capitalists in a globalised world. Recently Tunisian workers raised loaves of bread in the air as they marched through the streets in the Ramadan of 2022, protesting against inflation and food shortages.

As the American anarchist Lucy Parsons once put it, “Bread is freedom, and freedom is bread.”



Links and references
A slice of life: the politics of bread
The politics of bread - resilience
Hidden Politics in Every Loaf: How Bread Shapes Society
Flour power: why every revolution begins with a piece of bread
A Lifelong Anarchist! Selected Words and Writings of Lucy Parsons
Bitter Bread - Perspectives from North Africa and the Middle East - Ruya - Goethe-Institut
​
​