17 February: Bread

In Ancient Rome on this date they celebrated the Fornacalia, or Feast of the Ovens, a festival of Fornax, the goddess of bread-making. Here are some things you might not know about bread.

1. Humans have been making bread for at least 14,500 years. Evidence of people making bread that far back has been found in Jordan. The ancient Egyptians used bread as money and even put it in tombs for people to take with them to the afterlife. In Greece in 2500 B.C. there were 80 different types of bread, and bread making machines have been around since a first century Roman slave came up with the idea of a mechanism for kneading dough, powered by a Donkey walking in circles.
2. Bread is probably the most widely eaten food on Earth, with no known race or culture that doesn't eat it as a staple food. It has even been eaten on the Moon. It has contributed many common sayings to the English language, such as the person providing for a family being known as the "bread-winner". Money itself is often referred to as "bread" or "dough". The English word "lord" comes from the Anglo-Saxon hlāfweard, meaning "bread keeper."
3. Which brings us to "the best thing since sliced bread". Sliced bread was invented in 1928 by a man named Otto Rohwedder in America. At first, people were skeptical - surely sliced bread would go off more quickly? But by 1933 80% of all bread sold in the US was sliced and wrapped. This may have been due to an extensive advertising campaign selling sliced bread as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”. So the answer to the question, what is sliced bread the best thing since? is "bagged bread".
4. Bread is mentioned 360 times in the Bible - 280 times in the Old Testament and 80 times in the New Testament.
5. 99% of households in Britain buy bread. About 12 million loaves are sold each day, and about 76% of those are white. Men eat more bread than women do. In the UK, men eat about 113 grams (4oz) of bread a day and women 76 grams (2.7oz).
6. Perhaps the 1% who don't buy bread are concerned about eating carbohydrates and think bread is bad for you (or perhaps they just make their own). However, bread is actually quite nutritious and provides a lot of the nutrients we need. Bread contains protein, thiamine, niacin, folate, Iron, Zinc, Copper, magnesium, fibre, calcium and manganese. What's more, a study by the Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism journal showed that people who ate more bread were actually less likely to be obese than those who didn't.
7. In olden times, the darker in colour your bread was the lower status you were. White flour was not only more expensive but harder to mix with other substances to make it cheaper. Today, darker bread is more expensive and more popular with richer people than white bread. In the 1600s, bread was cooked in stone ovens which meant the bottom of the loaf could be covered in soot and ash, so wealthy people would cut the bottom of the loaf and just eat the top - hence the expression "upper crust".
8. 32% of the bread bought in the UK ends up in the bin. People in the south east of England throw away more bread than any other part of the country while people in the north east throw away the least. Historically there have been other uses for bread besides eating it. In ancient Egypt, rather than throw mouldy bread away, they used it as a treatment for infected burn wounds. Soft breadcrumbs can be used as a pencil eraser, and it can also be used to clean delicate works of art such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
9. According to superstition it is bad luck to turn a loaf of bread upside down or cut an unbaked loaf. Other bread related folklore says that whoever eats the last piece of bread has to kiss the cook; and in Scandinavia it is said that if a boy and girl eat from the same loaf, they are bound to fall in love.
10. The largest loaf of bread ever (at time of writing) weighed 1,571 kg (3,463.46 lb). It was made by Joaquim Gonçalves in Brazil in November 2008.

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