Hello and welcome back to the Curious Kid podcast. This week, we are getting curious about a food for the first time in 41 episodes. It's a food that's been eaten for thousands of years and is eaten by people all around the world.

It also pairs well with the last food we learned about back in February, which was cheese.

Mail bag.

Mail bag.

Hello, this is Sevilla, age six, and Everett, age three, and their mom, Ashley, from Salt Lake City, Utah.

We love listening to your podcasts on road trips, and now in the time of distance learning.

We haven't had a chance to listen to them all yet, but so enjoy them every time we do.

We have been baking some bread with our extra time at home, and Sevilla has lots of questions

about bread, yeast, how it rises, and also about water, as we have had to learn about our

city water and additives for baking sourdough.

Keep up the good work and thank you.

That's an amazing email from Severe and Everett.

I also did lots of baking this spring and summer when I was staying at home.

We can't wait to learn more about the history of bread, how it's made, and some really

interesting facts we were able to uncover about the delicious food. What's the question

of the week? The question of the week is, how many pounds of bread does the average American eat in a year?

That is a sneaky question. Bread shows up in so many different foods that it's hard to even imagine how much bread we consume throughout the year.

There is evidence that people were eating bread 30,000 years ago.

That's because starch residue was discovered on rocks.

It's possible that people would spread starched from plants onto flat rock

and place it over a fire to create something that resembled flat bread.

The bread that was made thousands of years ago contained only flour and water.

...