Food historian Mary-Anne Boermans traces gingerbread from its arrival in Europe in the 10th century, when ginger was used as a remedy. Ginger was expensive to import, so cooks built cheaper versions with honey, breadcrumbs and other spices. Early modern recipes in the Wellcome Collection's household books use many spices, including caraway, mace, cloves, cinnamon, fennel and coriander. Gingerbread was also given medicinal claims, such as easing coughs and stomach trouble. Elizabeth I gave visitors gingerbread likenesses of themselves, a custom linked to modern gingerbread figures. The piece compares these old recipes with the modern biscuit, house and cake forms.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.