@holly @wallhackio fwiw I did google it, and the general thing is:

Mixing water + crushed up flour isn't really a stretch. For hundreds of years people made flat bread.

Yeast getting into it was probably an accident; yeast can just exist in the air outside, it's a living creature, and people probably figured out "if I make bread here, it rises and then it tastes better"

And then it was hundreds of years after that, like the 1800s, that scientists actually discovered and classified yeast

@The_T @wallhackio shout outs to scientists

@holly @wallhackio also vaguely unrelated but I own a bread maker and I genuinely still feel a little weird buying yeast like "I'm just buying a living creature, it's still alive"

@The_T @holly yeast is alive?

what is it trying to do?

@wallhackio @holly it eats sugar and releases carbon dioxide, which makes dough rise

@wallhackio @holly I wanted to clarify this, so slightly more complex:

yeast eats any carbohydrates, so it could make dough rise with just flour, it would just take longer. But people add sugar, honey, etc. both for taste and to make it rise faster.

Yeast releases CO2 and ethanol (alcohol). When baking bread, the ethanol evaporates.

Yeast is also used for making beer; in that instance, they want to keep the ethanol in, but build a system to release the CO2 instead.

@The_T does yeast have hobbies

@wallhackio yeah, eating carbohydrates

@The_T wow that's one of my hobbies too

@The_T @wallhackio i mean plants are alive too at one point and you eat those

@holly @wallhackio I make sure plants are dead before I eat them.

@The_T @wallhackio well the yeast is dead by the time the bread is baked so you don't have to worry about that

@holly @wallhackio oh god... all their blood, on my hands...

@The_T @holly @wallhackio I don't think fungi contain any blood

@The_T @wallhackio wait until you hear about where meat comes from

@holly @wallhackio the grocery store?