{"id":3313,"date":"2011-10-24T20:49:23","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T03:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/?p=3313"},"modified":"2011-10-25T12:33:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T19:33:58","slug":"our-daily-bread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2011\/10\/24\/20\/49\/our-daily-bread\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Daily Bread"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bread runs deep. One of the characteristics of the decline of allegiance to the Idea of Rome in Western Europe during late Antiquity was that, as its economy increasingly stratified and its food production system (pursuing efficiency and profit) increasingly employed mostly slaves and coloni<\/a> in progressively more specialised latifundia<\/a>, urbanised\/displaced Roman citizens and Romanised foederati<\/a> became alienated from the products of their labour and their ability to consume bread and other basic foodstuffs, identified with and distributed by the (failing) Roman State. Thus it was that the later Germani immigrants<\/a>, chief among them the Franks, took the decaying Roman villa system and, being extraordinary agriculturalists, created the Manorial System<\/a> that would reshape Europe for a thousand years (and become en economic system capable of sustaining impressively lethal groups of cavalry for long periods of time). Primary among Frankish culture was the notion of shared community in small, militaristic groups united by kinship and comradeship. The Franks lionised these small groups of people that would stick together through thick and thin and they created a special, culturally specific term for this identity that has endured: companions<\/a> – from Low Latin comp\u00c4\u0081ni\u00c5\u008dn (with + bread). The sharing of bread among the Franks was so priviledged that the identification and remit of companions<\/em> was enumerated within Salic Law<\/a> (or so Medieval Private Life<\/a> says).<\/p>\n

On a lighter note, it took me several months of trial and error to finally formulate a recipe for salt-free, sugar-free wholemeal flour mixed with 30% soy flour and oat fiber that would rise well and produce a fluffy bread texture. This requires industrial quantities of pure gluten, ascorbate, and an unusual ratio of water and oil. Trying to figure out bread making has finally accomplished what decades of university classes could not: helped me come to appreciate chemistry and condensed matter physics. We are all humbled before the Power of Polymerisation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bread runs deep. One of the characteristics of the decline of allegiance to the Idea of Rome in Western Europe during late Antiquity was that, as its economy increasingly stratified and its food production...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1114],"tags":[1116,1117,1115],"class_list":["post-3313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-bread","tag-franks","tag-history-rome"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t