METAMORPHIC ROCKS

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Bread

Ingredients:  Flour, yeast, water, pinch of sugar, lard (depending on the kind of bread you prepare)

 

Metamorphic comes from the Greek, meta as in after, morph as in to form.  

 

Making bread at home really shows a metamorphosis in action, where it always surprises me how flour, yeast and water are able to rise and puff up to create a spongy end product.  

 

Like the metamorphosis of flour into bread, the farming of wheat for flour caused a metamorphosis of the way humans live.  Bread making goes back a really long time.  We know from archaeological research people were grinding up wheat and barley tens of thousands of years ago, but at that time people were still nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Starting at 13,000 years ago some people in where we now refer to as the Levant (modern day Iraq) started farming full time.  Despite farming being extremely labor intensive and a much more unhealthy lifestyle compared to hunting and gathering, farming spread like wildfire across the Old World.

 

Later on, people in the New World (the Americas) invented farming independently and domesticated a lot of the most prized foods today, like corn, cocoa (chocolate), potatoes and tomatoes.  Bread is still just such an important part of our lives, and we don’t often realize it.  In so many languages the words for bread are synonymous with money.  Like in English, we so often use the slang word ‘dough’ referring to cash.