this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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A lot of food preparation techniques of ancient origin come from efforts to store or preserve food. Pickling, smoking, and salting being among the most obvious.
Bread likely shares a similar lineage. Wheat that has been ground to flour is much easier to store, keeps for a long time, and can be reconstituted into more appealing food in small batches as needed.
Hard tack is a very basic cracker that stored and traveled well.
Whole wheat berries last a good long while if stored in an airtight container. But ground wheat berries oxidize and spoil really fast, unless you filter out the bran and the germ, which I very much doubt ancient people were bothering to do. And lean bread only lasts a couple days before either molding or going rock hard. Basically what I'm saying is that grinding up flour and making it into bread is actually a pretty shit method of preservation, we'd be better off just eating a porridge made from whole wheat berries, and I bet bread stuck around just because it's friggin delicious.