Bread is a basic food made by mixing flour, water, and often yeast, then baking the mixture until it becomes firm and golden. For thousands of years, bread has been one of humanity's most important foods, so essential that many languages use the word “bread” to mean food itself. When someone asks “How do we earn our daily bread?” they're really asking “How do we get the food and money we need to live?”

The process of making bread is remarkable: tiny living organisms called yeast eat the sugars in flour and release bubbles of gas, making the dough rise and become light and fluffy. Without yeast, you get flat, dense breads like tortillas or matzo. With yeast, you get puffy loaves, soft sandwich bread, or crusty baguettes.

People make thousands of varieties of bread around the world: Italian focaccia, Indian naan, Ethiopian injera, Jewish challah, and Irish soda bread, to name just a few. Each culture developed bread recipes that worked with their local grains, ovens, and climate. In the United States, sliced sandwich bread became so common that people sometimes say “the best thing since sliced bread” when they want to describe something as really wonderful or innovative.