| WHEAT an interesting history!
About 10,000 years ago when man began to till the soil, he learned to breed new grasses from the seed of the wild plant, But it was to be another 4,000 years before our ancestors discovered that these seeds can be crushed between simple grindstones.
Even in the first advanced civilizations the grains were ground by hand, but around 3,000 BC.The Egyptians introduced an innovation that brought decisive progress to bread-baking: yeast. Using the warmth of the sun they exposed dough mixed with yeast to a fermentation process, and after baking this yielded a soft . Pleasant-tasting loaf of bread.
Even before the wheel was invented , a revolutionary technology had been discovered: the production of flour. The realization that indigestible seeds could be ground into nourishing dust steered the history and fate of a man in a new direction. Without the invention of the grinding stone there would be no bread or buns, no pasta or pizza, no cakes or courcous.
Flour has become the daily food of millions. The cereal powder that feeds a large proportion of the world's population is the result of thousands of years of development. The history of flour is one of brilliant innovation and growing prosperity, but also of famine and hardship. Cereals, flour and bread are inseparably bound up with human civilization: wherever enough could be harvested, ground and baked, the economy flourished and culture emerged. |
