The Bread Must Flow - With Dr. Noel Buttigieg

We take the availability of bread as a given these days, but for many people of the early modern period a consistent supply of bread was an existential question; more so in places like Malta where the population had long outpaced the land's ability to produce grain.

With demand constantly high and a country often one meal away from rioting, the history of the grain-bread cycle in Malta was surprisingly... colourful. Today I am honoured to welcome back Dr. Noel Buttigieg, whose recent book "Bread and Bakers in 18th Century Malta" turned out to be an amazing account of political manoeuvring, clandestine transactions, and occasionally outright violence; sometimes in pursuit of social order, sometimes in pursuit of profit, and sometimes for pure and simple survival.

Dr. Buttigieg is a Senior Lecturer, Researcher & Coordinator of Undergraduate Programme of Studies (Institute for Tourism. Travel & Culture, University of Malta). His areas of research include food history and the history of tourism, and he is the ideal guide into this frequently underexplored but critically important facet of the past.

His most recent book, "Bread and Bakers in 18th Century Malta" , can be found at https://www.midseabooks.com/shop/hist...

You can find some of Dr. Buttigieg's publications at https://malta.academia.edu/NButtigieg

The Malta Historical Society has uploaded his talk "The Muslim's drink: Coffee and Embodied Imagination" at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WJcl...

The Malta University Historical Society has uploaded his talk "Fenkata: Fragments from Malta's Culinary Culture" at    • Dr Noel Buttigieg: Fenkata: Fragments...  

You can also watch his previous contribution to this channel, "Food and Food Culture History" at https://youtube.com/live/eiT4wg4OWrc

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Video chapters (Work in progress!)
Starting soon: 00:00:00
Introductions: 00:00:40
Bread in a God Forsaken Land: 00:01:30
Finding Knowledge in Unusual Places: 00:15:02
Crime and the Grain-Bread Cycle: 00:17:03
Criminal Baker Gangs: 00:18:18
Flour Diplomacy: 00:43:15
The Honour of Millers and Bakers: 00:50:35
Buying grain at cannon-point: 01:17:07