Bread has been around for thousands of years and plays a major role on the breakfast menu.
Bread is an important part of the diet for people all around world. In America bread is a fixture on the breakfast menu. It is one of 
humanity’s oldest forms of prepared food. It is believed that bread started off as a simple dish made from extracting the starch from plants by pounding them and then spreading the starch on flat rocks that were then cooked over fires. When agriculture started to spread around 10,000 BC at the start of the Neolithic age, the cultivation of grains and the presence of natural wild yeast made bread an important staple. With just two main ingredients, flour and water, endless varieties of bread can be made.
Fast forward thousands of years to the creation of the modern restaurant and you’ll see bread, and related baked items all over the menu, particularly at breakfast. Where would the breakfast menu be without bread? Can you imagine life without biscuits, pancakes, waffles and French toast?
Here’s some fun facts about bread to help you appreciate the hero of the breakfast menu.
- The automatic bread slicing machine was invented by Otto Rohwedder in 1928.
- The outside of the loaf is called the crust and bakers refer to the inside as the crumb.
- Americans consume on average 53 pounds of bread per year.
- Farmers receive approximately 5 cents (or less) from each loaf of bread sold.
- A single bushel of wheat will make 73 loaves (one pound each) of bread.
- The color of the twist-tie on loaves of bread designates which day of the week the bread was made. However, manufacturers use their own color code so no one color applies to every type available.