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Sawdust Bread

2018-02-06 · letter vlog · John · 3:23 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities (also: Personal life) · mode: Personal essay

John describes the sawdust-and-chaff bread behind the 1789 Women's March on Versailles and argues that, measured in lifetimes such as Halley's Comet's 75-year cycle, such hardship is recent, so better lives are possible but not guaranteed and change, though harder than expected, does happen.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Bread before the 1789 Women's March on Versailles: prices, chaff, sawdust and an all-bread diet

  • ★★ John says in the 1789 Women's March on Versailles, French women, protesting or rioting depending on perspective, besieged the king's palace and forced the royal family back to Paris. — 00:00:03
  • ★★★ John says the march, a big moment of the French Revolution, was caused partly by bread: mostly its price, which rose sharply from failed harvests and bad monetary policy, but also its quality. — 00:00:17
  • ★★ John says French peasant bread of 1789 often contained chaff, and dough was commonly bulked up with sawdust, hay or even animal dung. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says bread was not just a staple but most people's whole diet: the average French adult ate two to three pounds of it every day. — 00:00:44

00:01:03 — Reading for Cooking History and falling down research rabbit holes

  • ★★ John has been reading about this partly for the Cooking History videos he and Sarah will make later in the year. — 00:01:03 · Sarah Urist Green
  • ★ John falls down research rabbit holes, ending up looking up 5,000-year-old grain-paste recipes until his kids ask him to make breakfast. (playful, unsure) — 00:01:06

00:01:19 — How recent it was: Halley's Comet lifetimes, Louis Philippe and bread prices, two lifetimes from the Civil War

  • ★★★ What strikes John about bread is not how shockingly horrible it used to be but how recently it was. — 00:01:19
  • ★★ John says Halley's Comet is visible from Earth about every 75 years, a good human lifetime: last in 1986, when he was eight, and before that in 1910. — 00:01:30 · Earth
  • ★★ John says at the comet appearance before 1910, Louis XVI's cousin Philippe I was king of France, after the so-called Second French Revolution, caused partly by failed harvests and rising bread prices. — 00:01:41
  • ★★★ John says we are two human lifetimes from the US Civil War and only three from a time when most people in France, not just the poorest, ate sawdust bread. — 00:01:55

00:02:06 — Progress possible but not guaranteed: despair and inevitability both breed complacency; revolutions fall short, yet change happens; sign-off

  • ★★★ John says this is no great victory to celebrate: many people still lack adequate nutrition, in wealthy countries as well as impoverished ones. — 00:02:06
  • ★★★ John says it does mean we can make progress: seen through lifetimes, both the pace and the nature of change are really encouraging to him. — 00:02:15 · progress
  • ★★★ John could use encouragement in these strange times, because despair mostly makes him complacent: nothing to be done, it's just the nature of things. — 00:02:24 · optimism
  • ★★★ John says feeling that progress is inevitable also makes him complacent, as if he could sit back while grain yields feed the world, Elon Musk fixes climate change and disease cures itself. (playful) — 00:02:36 · climate change
  • ★★★ Reading history gives John the uncomfortable but productive feeling that better human lives are possible but not guaranteed. — 00:02:47 · progress
  • ★★ John says it is overly simplistic to credit the march with a freer, more equitable, less hungry France: the French Revolution, like so many revolutions, failed many of its ambitions. — 00:02:53
  • ★★★ John says the changes we seek almost always prove harder than we first think, but looking at history in lifetimes shows change can and does happen anyway. (hedged) — 00:03:03

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description names Linda Civitello's Cuisine and Culture and Reay Tannahill's Food in History as the books that most inspired the video, plus a short Ultimate History Project essay on bread. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: progress · Women's March on Versailles

Also: People: Elon Musk · Louis Philippe I · Louis XVI · Sarah Urist Green

Projects: Cooking History

Concepts: climate change · crop yield · historical determinism · malnutrition · Monetary policy · optimism · revolution

Places: Earth · France · Halley's Comet · Palace of Versailles · Paris

Events: American Civil War · French Revolution · July Revolution

Only in the description or credits: Cuisine and Culture · Food in History · Linda Civitello · Reay Tannahill · Ultimate History Project

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