Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, your go-to podcast for exploring ideas, insights, and intriguing reads, with today’s episode: Weekend Book Review. This week, we’re diving into a fascinating slice of history, one that was once the staple of life itself—bread. Our featured book is A History of Bread: Consumers, Bakers, and Public Authorities since the 18th Century by Peter Scholliers, published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Imagine a world where bread accounted for more than half of your daily calories, where one-third of a household’s expenses went to this single, indispensable food. How did something so vital become just another item in the grocery aisle, contributing a mere 12% of our daily energy today? That’s the question Peter Scholliers, a Professor of Contemporary History at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a leading expert in European food history, seeks to answer in this meticulously researched book.
Scholliers is no stranger to unraveling the stories behind what we eat. With a career dedicated to exploring food culture, he has edited seminal works like Food, Drink and Identity and authored Food Culture in Belgium. In A History of Bread, he takes us on a journey through centuries of cultural shifts, political interventions, and technological advances, showing how bread evolved from the life-force of Europe to a symbol of industrialization and, later, health-conscious reinvention.
Through this lens, Scholliers doesn’t just tell us about bread. He explores broader questions of economic development, social inequality, and changing food cultures. From the home baker to the factory, from white bread to brown, this book is about much more than what’s on your plate—it’s about the forces that shape the world we live in.
So, as we break this loaf of history apart, here’s a question to ponder: if bread can tell us so much about our past, what does its story say about our future?
A big thank you to Peter Scholliers for this enlightening journey through the ages of bread. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure to subscribe to the Revise and Resubmit podcast on Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, or Apple Podcasts. And don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher, for even more content. Until next time, keep questioning, keep reading, and keep learning!
Reference
Scholliers, P. (2024). A History of Bread. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/a-history-of-bread-9781350361799/
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