People can grow vegetables and simply eat. But bread is way too complicated.
There is a bakers’ dozen of big steps to go from wheat into bread. And multiple special structures needed too.
Same with beer. Wine makes total sense but how do you even invent ale? How are these common foods everyone knows and uses?
I was thinking “imagine if mediveal people knew how to boil seawater and sell salt” and now I spent 20 extra minutes in the shower.
Ancient people were just as smart as modern people, they just weren’t as educated.
Humans are really good at figuring things out and tweaking things based off of previous results.
They also had more free time to figure things out.
They also didn’t have televisions, computers or phones to distract them. So they’d watch the stars or nature for entertainment and eventually, naturally see patterns and wonder what would happen if they applied those patterns for their own gain.
A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as “stuff forgotten in a pot” - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.
Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.
Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.
Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn’t work in that case)!
Btw one of my crazier theories (although I’m not the only person considering it) is that it wasn’t us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.
