specifically about what bread tasted like

right before the women's march

on Versailles in 1789 in which a group of

French women who were, depending on your perspective, either protesting

or rioting, besieged the King's palace in Versailles

and forced him and his family to return to Paris.

It was a big moment in French Revolution, and it was caused, in part,

by bread, mostly the price of bread, which had

risen dramatically due to failed harvests and bad monetary

policy, but also the quality of bread

which always declined in hard times. Like the

French peasant bread in 1789 often included lots of chaff

the indigestible husk surrounding the

edible kernel of grain and wheat. But it was also common to bulk up

wheat or rye or buckwheat dough with sawdust or hay

or even animal dung. And at that time bread wasn't just, like, a staple

of the French people, it was the diet.

Like, the average French adult ate two to three pounds of

bread per day, every day

And while they did sometimes have access to other foods,

many days, possibly most days, it was just bread.

Sawdusty, possibly animal-poopy

bread. I've been reading about these partly for the cooking history videos that

Sarah and I are gonna make later in the year and partly because I -

I don't know, I just fall down research rabbit holes, like I'm reading one book

book and then another, and pretty soon I'm looking up 5000 year old

recipes for grain paste and my kids are like "Dad! Can you make

breakfast?" and I'm like "Oh my God it's morning?!" Anyway the thing that

gets me about bread is not how shockingly horrible

it used to be, it's how recently

it was shockingly horrible. Like you know Hay-ley's comet

or possibly Halley's comet, or Haw-ley's comet, depending on

who's pronunciation you believe, it's this comet that is visible from

Earth every 75-ish years. So,

like a good human lifetime. The last time Halley was visible

from Earth in 1986, I was 8; the time before

that was 1910, and the time before that Louis

the XVI's cousin Philippe the first was king of

France having become king after the so-called second French Revolution

which was caused, in part, by

you guessed it, failed harvests and rising bread prices.

Put another way, we are two human lifetimes

removed from the US Civil War and only three

removed from the time when not just the poorest people but

most people were eating sawdust bread in France.

Of course this doesn't mean that we've achieved some

great victory that we ought to celebrate or anything, there are still

lots of people who don't get adequate nutrition and not only in

impoverished countries but also in wealthy ones. But it does mean that

we can make progress, and when you look at history through the lens of

lifetimes, both the pace of change and the nature

of change are to me really encouraging. And frankly I could

use some encouragement in these strange times because I find that despair

mostly just makes me complacent, like "Oh there's

nothing to be done about this horror or that

horror. It's just the nature of things." On

the other hand, feeling like progress is inevitable also makes me

complacent, like "Oh I can just sit back and watch rising

grain yields feed the world and Elon Musk fix

climate change and disease cure itself."

But reading history fills me with the uncomfortable but productive

feeling that better human lives are possible but

not guaranteed. Of course it's overly simplistic

to say that the women who led the march on Versailles brought about a

freer, more equitable, less hungry

France. The French Revolution, like so many revolutions,

failed to achieve many of its ambitions. In my experience

anyway the changes we seek in the world almost always

prove harder to make than we first think they'll be. But

looking at history in lifetimes shows that change

can, and does, happen anyway, something I'm reminded of

every time I bite into a nice, sawdust free slice of bread.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.