Banning fresh bread doesn't decrease human caloric needs. Wouldn't making fresh bread less desirable just mean people replace it with other foods, spending the same amount of money overall (or more, since bread is probably cheaper than its replacement) and removing any benefit from bread price controls? Or was the English government working off a model where people were overconsuming food because of how tasty fresh bread was?
1) People are probably less likely to throw out stale bread if it's impossible to obtain fresh bread?
2) If the price of e.g. fish is less regulated but generally higher than that of bread, banning fresh bread would lead to a larger rise in the price of fish as more rich people switch to it, which would perhaps lead to fishermen working longer hours and catching more fish, helping make up the overall calorie shortfall from the poor harvest without increasing costs for poor people who could never afford fish in the first place. Whereas letting the price of bread itself rise would be more regressive?
3) Same as with fish but with meat from livestock, pushing tradeoffs in the direction of "slaughter this year" vs "keep fattening up for next year", which could be desirable if the wheat shortage is expected to be temporary, and might even decrease demand for wheat as livestock feed if that was a thing at the time?
Not sure how large any of these effects would be.
I don't understand either!
They did import rice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_vessels_for_the_British_Government's_importation_of_rice_from_Bengal_(1800–1802)
I think the best model for "why ban fresh bread" is something like what lexande said, but modified like this:
-People were buying fresh bread every day and (if wealthy) throwing out the bread from the day before (or throwing it out on some horizon). The idea was maybe that by preventing this use of flour (optimised for niceness) the economic forces would then optimise better for calories.
-A solidarity thing? Upping the price would disproportionately hurt the poor. Pushing the market by lowering the quality is more egalitarian in some sense. It pushes the rich into buying something more expensive, and the poor into just having worse bread.
-Bakers could optimise bread for deliciousness on the day of baking, or (somehow) make bread that was likely to last longer. Longer lasting bread would improve efficency by seeing less of it go bad.
-It was just really dumb. eg. People were arriving at the bakers to find the bread sold out. And were furious and petitioned the government to do something. The government (for some bizare reason) believed that if the sales were delayed a day that the bakeries wouldn't be out of bread when you visited (although they may be out of bread they were allowed to sell you).
(somehow) make bread that was likely to last longer
You could decrease the water content and not leaven it, making it into hardtack. This will last for years if kept dry. But it's very unpleasant to eat, and I don't think people would buy it or bakers would make it unless required to.
The cynic in me leans heavily on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists model of regulation. Most legislation is a compromise among many different interests, and it's easy to imagine that the parts which don't make sense are a mix of:
In World War II the UK government banned commercial bakers from making white bread, and required them to use national flour to bake 'the National Loaf'. This was particularly unappetising and unpopular. I think that as in World War I it had to be sold stale; or in any case, it went stale quickly. I suspect in part it was intended to be unappetising to limit consumption.
Yesterday I stumbled on the Assize of Bread, which set the price of bread in England by the price of wheat with rules like:
A 'quarter' here means eight bushels, or a quarter of a ton. This is a large amount of wheat, which makes sense since it's the baker buying. 'Wastel' bread meant good-quality white bread, and a 'farthing' is a quarter of a penny. In the British tradition of using confusingly similar terms for weight and currency, '£4 10s 8d' is a weight. With 20 pennies (d) to the shilling and 12 shillings (s) to the pound (£), that's 4.53 Tower pounds, which would be 3.49 lb (international avoirdupois pound, as used in the US).
I had thought the standard bread would be something cheaper than white bread, and this does look like the case later, but here cheaper breads are all given with prices relative to white bread (Ross 1956):
The rule gave different loaf weights for different wheat prices:
Each row is a wheat price (in shillings and pence per quarter ton) and the columns are for different sources. For example, if a quarter ton of wheat cost six shillings, most sources would give a £1 2s 8d (£1.2) weight for a farthing (quarter penny) loaf.
We can also convert this into modern prices. The commodity price of wheat today is $5/bushel ($40/quarter) and I'm going to assume the bushel hasn't changed size much. The table says that if a quarter of wheat costs six shillings, then a farthing gets you a 1.2 Tower pound (15oz avoirdupois) loaf. Six shillings is 480 farthings, so a $40 quarter gives a $0.08 15oz loaf, or $0.1/lb. Cheap white bread in the grocery store today is about ten times the cost. I expect this mostly comes from us seeing greater efficiency increases in grain production than in bread production?
It's interesting that they chose to fix the price of the loaf at a farthing instead of fixing the weight at a pound and letting the price vary. The farthing was the smallest coin at a time when metal was expensive, however, and it's easier to change the size of loaves than mint tiny coins. This made the math hard, since while a loaf price would be directly proportional to the wheat price the loaf size is inversely proportional. Not surprisingly, when doing division by hand with £/s/f/ob/q units, there are quite a few errors in the tables.
Over time people started standardizing the weight instead of the price. Here are some extracts from Jackson's Oxford Journal, via The Victoria History of the County of Oxford:
You can see there's been some inflation: the price of wheat is given per bushel instead of quarter ton (x8) and the smallest loaf is a penny instead of a farthing (x4). The first version of the Assize dates from ~1200 (Ross 1956) and this is 1765, ~565 years later, however, so it's not much inflation considering the amount of time.
They've also switched from tower weights to avoirdupois, so weight is given in the modern pounds, ounces (x16), and drams (x16). Under the traditional ratios a six shilling bushel would give a two penny loaf of £1 2s 8d, which would be 14oz 13dr avoirdupois, while they give 13oz 4dr. That's about 10% smaller, but might be due to changes in the size of the bushel?
They're also not listing the prices of white loaves larger than 13oz, and instead list only 'wheaten' (whole wheat) and household (even higher bran content). I'm not sure why; maybe people were a bit poorer?
This is also an example, with the heavier loaves, of picking a weight and determining a price instead of the other way around. They list prices for the Peck Loaf (17lb 6oz), Half-peck Loaf (8lb 11oz), and Quartern Loaf (4lb 5oz 8dr). The Quartern costs 16.25x the minimum currency increment of a farthing, so it looks to me like prices now have the sufficient resolution when using coins to support holding the size constant.
Also note, though, how heavy these loaves are! The Peck Loaf is absolutely enormous, and the others are still not small. How do you evenly bake something so large? You could make it ridiculously long, but I doubt they did. Old recipes are not especially clear, but The Housekeeper's Domestic Library; Or, New Universal Family Instructor In Practical Economy (1805) says:
My read of "mould it into loaves or batch two pieces together" is that you could either make loaves or leave it all together ("boule"?), and that if you did the latter you could bake two one-peck loaves in the oven at once? When it says "a middling sized loaf will require an hour and a half in baking" in a "brisk oven" (cooking.stackechange guesses 200C / 400F) that's quite a long time, and perhaps a full peck would be more like two hours?
I found another recipe in A Modern System of Domestic Cookery, Or The Housekeeper's Guide (1822) which says:
This gives a bit more detail, though not much: "round or oblong forms", "a quartern loaf [~4lb] will require about an hour and a half'd baking in a brisk oven".
They're also keen on home baking as a way to avoid the baker using alum for artificially whitening bread.
Getting back to the Assize, I found more detail in The Assize of Bread at Oxford, 1794-1820 (1907):
By this point the price of wheat was allowed to float but the price of bread was still fixed to that of wheat by the Assize. The University wanted cheap bread, so it claimed the market price for wheat was ~10% lower than it actually was, forcing bakers to work more cheaply.
They're quoting prices per a fixed size, instead of saying that the loaves in Wootton were larger for the same cost. The bread they're using for their comparision is a peck of household bread, which shows matches the pattern of focus shifting from white (wastel) to household (with bran).
What's wrong with selling "hot bread"? It's so much better that way!
Why would you require bread be sold day-old? The wheat harvest of 1799 was about half the usual size and the next year's was about three quarters (Neumann and Kington, 1992), and the government was trying to reduce bread consumption. They had tried requiring all bread to be whole wheat (Making of Bread Act, 1800) but this was unpopular enough that they needed to repeal it. The Sale of Bread Act, 1800 banned fresh bread for a year:
Fresh bread is too tasty, and people would eat less bread if it weren't allowed. Later it prohibits using "any Art or Artifice whatever for preserving the Heat or Moisture in Bread longer than such Heat or Moisture would be preserved by the fair Mode of keeping bread in the ordinary way of his Business", just to make sure.
In 1917, during WWI, the United Kingdom (Monthly Review of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Volume 4, Issue 6) again banned fresh bread. This time the requirement was 12hr, but in practice it was often longer.
One question I had was, why not use prices? While regulations that reduce the tastiness of food mean people will enjoy their food less, they also have some effect of distributing food to people who need it more. With higher prices some people will not be able to afford the bread and will starve, while with lower prices and lower tastiness consumption goes down among people with other options. The whole wheat requirement seems like it does this better than requiring bread to be old, but apparently people wouldn't stand for it?
Overall, I was surprised how regulated the pricing and sale of bread was, going back ~800+ years. I think I hadn't realized how much baking was done outside the home, and how worried people were about bakers exploiting their position.