From porridge to parchment, how bread has shaped our for better or worse and the part it has to play in our future. As the title suggests, this book will explore how bread, a ubiquitous staple, has helped connect communities and shape society as well as how it has been the agent of disease and disorder. The principal question to be answered will Is bread good or bad? Starting with the first loaves of bread, an imagined euphoria at a novel food that allowed the first of us to eat on the move, the book will chart a history strewn with significant periods of our shared culinary history. Wheat, wars, disease, starvation, hallucinations, gluttony, chemicals, adulteration, deconstruction and industrialisation. We will journey through and unpick some of bread’s triumphs, failures and flaws.