Bread is a staple food prepared by baking the dough made of flour and water. Often additional ingredients such as butter or salt are added to improve the taste. The word bread, is common in various forms to many languages.

Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods. Evidence from 30,000 years ago in Europe revealed starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants. During that time, probably, the starch extract from the roots of plants was spread on a flat rock, placed over a fire and cooked into a primitive form of flat-bread.

Around 10,000 BC grains became the mainstay of making bread. Any dough left to rest will become naturally leavened. Airborne yeasts could be harnessed by leaving uncooked dough exposed to air for some time before cooking. The foam from Skimmed beer produced a lighter kind of bread.

Wheat bran was steeped in wine as a source of yeast. The most common source of leavening was to retain a piece of dough from the previous day to use as a starter for sourdough.

A major advance to the bread making process occurred in 1961. The intense mechanical working of dough dramatically reduced the fermentation period and the time taken to produce a loaf.

The high-energy mixing allows for the use of lower protein grain, a technique widely used around the world in large factories. As a result, bread can be produced very quickly and at low costs to the manufacturer and the consumer.

Recently, domestic bread making machines with a fully automated process have become very popular. Bread made from the central core of the grain gives white bread. Brown bread is made with a similar flour mixed with 10% bran. Whole meal bread is made from the flour of the whole grain.

Although eaten by nearly all people, some critics have rejected bread entirely or rejected types of bread that they consider inferior. The criticisms depended on the time and place.

Whole grain bread has been criticized as being unrefined and white bread as being unhealthily processed; homemade bread was deemed unsanitary and factory-made bread was deemed adulterated and so forth.

Amylophobia, literally “fear of starch”, was one such movement in the US during the 1920s and 1930s.