In the world, there are countless edible plants. Some bear fruits, others have roots, and some produce young, tender shoots. Interestingly, some plants boast massive edible parts. For instance, eating just one coconut can keep you full for an entire day…
Yet, for some reason, people have focused their attention on the unassuming wheat bush. We know the modern varieties of this plant, which have undergone hundreds of generations of cultivation and have been refined by breeders. It’s hard to imagine how inconspicuous these bushes were in the wild when primitive humans first discovered them…
But that’s not all. To turn wheat grains into food, people had to devise a complex baking technology. They needed to harvest the ears of wheat, grind them into flour, mix it with water, and bake it over a fire. Even then, what they produced was not bread, but rather a flat, unleavened cake.
Then, humans found an obscure and invisible ally in nature—yeast. By combining the ground wheat flour with these tiny organisms, they created one of the most remarkable food products—bread.
It’s no wonder that the great Russian scientist Timiryazev said that a slice of well-baked bread is one of humanity’s greatest inventions.