As apparently was the case for many people, my relationship with food underwent several transformations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the initial months of isolation. I think the first time the pandemic got me thinking about food was in the early days of the first lockdown in the city I lived in, in early 2020. At that time, I went to the market with my wife, as I did weekly, and chanced upon something that I hadn’t seen in years: entire aisles with completely empty shelves. It made me think of when I was a child and I went with grocery shopping with my mother the day after “special deals day.” She always laughed as we walked in the deserted corridors, saying, “It looks as though a hurricane made landfall here.”

On that day in March 2020, I had that same feeling of walking over rubble. In the bakery section, only a few scruffy and beaten bags remained in the space previously filled with dozens of colorful packages by different brands. In the baking aisle, not even that. No bags of flour in sight—no yeast. In the days to come, these everyday products, now suddenly scarce, mobilized the formation of small solidarity networks in our small immigrant community. If someone found flour in some obscure market, everyone else was immediately notified on social or WhatsApp. If someone had some leftover yeast, the neighbors would soon organize a drive to share it.

This bread rush, so to speak, made me think a lot about food and culture, and about how food is one of the central elements around which societies are organized. In retrospect, it seems to me that we were looking for some kind of autonomy and—why not—a sense of control in the face of such a frightening and unfamiliar situation. By making our own bread, we would necessarily reduce our trips to the market and other establishments. Having flour at home, we would have a range of food possibilities always at hand, for all main meals. But it wasn't just that, I'm sure. Making their own bread seemed to have become a kind of collective catharsis and therapeutic activity for many people.

In my network of friends and acquaintances, homemade bread became one of the main topics of exchange and engagement on social media. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was sharing recipes, baking things, making sourdough starters, sharing memes about the process. Of course, as is the nature of the internet, the subject wore off after a few weeks. Also, the shelves were re-stocked, and we learned some sanitary strategies to get to the market and other places with some safety. On the other hand, many people seem to have developed an appreciation for the particular flavors of homemade bread, or even for the process of gathering the ingredients, activating the yeast, kneading the dough, and all the other laborious but engaging steps.

Thinking of this collective and spontaneous interest in baking reminded me of a publication by physicist Seamus Blackley. Blackley is best known for his work in the video game industry, but in this post I’m referring to, he was talking about how he brought two of his greatest passions—cooking and archeology—together in one incredible experiment. His Twitter thread chronicled his endeavor to make homemade bread using natural yeast produced from dormant yeasts from ceramic pots that had been buried in ancient Egypt for over four thousand years.

The yeast culture used in Blackley’s project was provided by two museums in Boston, directly from their archaeological collections. Due to the practically infinite nature of yeast, which can multiply and renew indefinitely with the right precautions, it was possible for institutions to produce several samples of the levain for laboratory study and grant one of them for Blackley’s personal project.

Naturally, the extraction of the material and the entire process of reviving the yeast were monitored by experts. Archaeologist Serena Love and microbiologist Richard Bowman helped to ensure that no artifacts were damaged in the extraction, and that the culture reproduced without contamination. The three of them were careful to feed the yeast with a species of wheat genetically identical to the one grown when the ceramic pots were buried 4,500 years earlier, and which is significantly different from the wheat we consume today.

Genetic tests carried out on the culture sample showed that the yeast came from a yeast strain that had existed for at least 700 years before being placed inside the excavated ceramic pots used in the experiment I describe here. But we know from archeological remains that humans had been making bread long before that, at least 10,000 years ago. It is interesting to mention that, for a long time, the creation of bread was credited with making our species transition from largely nomad to farmers—it made sense to think, after all, that bread would have been created after we had mastered the cultivation of wheat. But a discovery made by archaeologist Amaia Arranz-Oteagui in Jordan in 2018 called into question the prevailing theory.

Arranz-Oteagui found traces of bread dating back to 14,000 years ago. The discovery opened two new possibilities for scholars in the area: the first, that the Natufiana gatherers, and not the Egyptians, would have created the bread; the second, endorsed by researcher Lara Gonzales Carretero, an archaeologist specializing in prehistoric food traces, was that bread would have inspired the development of planting and encouraged the development of agricultural techniques that would allow the emergence of sedentarism as a way of life. Contrary to what was believed until then, agriculture could have been developed after humans started making bread.

In any case, there have certainly been developments in the production of this food since we started producing it. Part of the Gaulish people, for example, developed the use of beer foam as a leavening agent, which produced a lighter bread with a milder taste than the one made from levain, and which became popular with the French. The Gauls actually developed very sophisticated technologies in relation to bread, from wheel-driven harvesters to underground silos capable of preserving and hiding the grain.

So, what always brings my thoughts back to the history of bread made with some four-thousand-year-old yeast is a certain fascination with the idea that science and technology derive directly from our species’ relationship with food, and with the different demands that the food brings to a community. Food needs to be safe, and for that to happen, a large part of food requires some kind of intervention, whether in the form of heat or sterilization. Food needs to be durable, and that’s why amazing conservation technologies such as pickling and dehydration have been invented all over the world, just to name a few. Food needs to be strategically reproduced to feed as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.

Finally, food is a primordial necessity, and for this reason, it is likely that it was the main catalyst for the first technoscientific practices and experiments of our species—many of which so sophisticated that they survive to this day, some almost unchanged. This makes me think that we often need to remind ourselves: technology and innovation didn’t arise during modernity, with our factories, super vehicles and subsequent digital revolution. Technology comes up when the first group of people apply their knowledge to solve problems and improve their daily activities.

So, while the yeast I use doesn’t come from the bottom of a historical artifact buried in the desert, its technology somehow connects me to these ancestral bakers, the first men and women to test interactions between a specific set of fungi and ground wheat. Even before writing allowed for systematization and communication of knowledge throughout eons in different places around the planet, yeast made it possible for us to transmit a technology forward for at least 14,000 years. This technology has travelled from nomadic gatherers in the Middle East, through the millenary empire of the Nile peoples, through navigators in the Gaul region—besides the dozens of other civilizations that developed other versions of this food across time and space.

I find it very interesting, therefore, that many of us, at a time of crisis and uncertainty as profound as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, have revisited our relationship with bread and yeast. Some things have changed in the last 14,000 years, it’s true; for example, we have made it a habit to record and share the results of our culinary experiences through our small high-end smartphones. On the other hand, this food still carries an ancient history of cooperation and victory over scarcity. It is, above all, a fundamental milestone in the production and multiplication of knowledge.