People can grow vegetables and simply eat. But bread is way too complicated.
There is a bakers’ dozen of big steps to go from wheat into bread. And multiple special structures needed too.
Same with beer. Wine makes total sense but how do you even invent ale? How are these common foods everyone knows and uses?
I was thinking “imagine if mediveal people knew how to boil seawater and sell salt” and now I spent 20 extra minutes in the shower.
You have fallen for the myth that salt was rare and expensive in ancient times. Medieval people did know how to make salt out of seawater. There were salt works all over the coasts of Britanny and Normandy during medieval times. Salt was not rare or expensive, except that they did need a lot of it because it was one of their prime preservation ingredients, so they needed barrels and barrels of the stuff, and that could drive prices up. But it was not because they didn’t know how to produce salt in enormous quantities.
Same goes for Roman times. The myth that salt was so rare and precious that it constituted part of the pay for a Roman soldier is wrong. It was because salt was such an important part of the diet and for preservation that it was given this way. They got grain and oil as well.
It’s also because salt is heavy as fuck, so transporting it from coasts and places with salt mines was expensive.
As expensive as any other good weighing the same. They would have transported it mainly on ships, where weight wasn’t really a problem. Salt wasn’t particularly expensive, that is my point. You seem to be suggesting the opposite, ignoring basically everything I just wrote in my comment.
Salt was not expensive for people living near the coast/inland salt mines. It got very expensive for people not living near centers of salt production, where ships don’t help much with transportation. It’s heavier than water by volume, because it’s a rock.
I was adding to your comment, because you skipped over the shipping costs, which made up the majority of the price for people not lucky enough to live near salt production.
It’s like mangoes today. If you live where they grow, they’re cheap as fuck. If you don’t, they’re expensive, but not impossible for most people to purchase.