Bread - of one sort or another - has been baked in Switzerland for millennia. The oldest known loaf dates back to about 3530 BC, earlier than any other in Europe. It was found at Twann on Lake Biel in 1976. The people known as the lake dwellers, who built houses on stilts on the edges of lakes or perhaps even out over the water, cooked flat bread on hot stones, covering it with ashes. More than 3,000 years BC they knew how to ferment their dough, and they made their bread of wheat or millet.

In early mediaeval times, monasteries were great bakers of bread. The bread oven of the monastery of St Gallen is said to have been able to bake 1,000 loaves at once. It seems the monastery bakers produced a great variety as well. Some was leavened, some unleavened, they used different kinds of flour, and they made different shapes, including rings and crescents. Later, as cities developed, professional bakers took over, establishing guilds with strict rules to ensure the quality of bread - and the safety of the bread ovens, which could easily spark a fire in largely wooden mediaeval cities. Bakers or millers who cheated their customers were not entirely unknown however; one punishment was to hang them in a basket over a pit of manure, in such a way that they could only free themselves by jumping into the stinking mess in front of the jeering crowd.

Pure white wheat flour, made only from the inner part of the grain, produced the most desirable and expensive type of bread. (So perhaps it was not surprising that one trick of unscrupulous millers was to eke out their flour with ground chalk or bones...) Slightly less expensive was bread made of what the Swiss still today call "half-white" flour, which contains only small parts of the husk.

The poor had to be content with darker flour containing the outer layers of the kernel. The standard grain was rye, although wheat, millet, oats and spelt - a close relation of wheat - were also used. When harvests were poor, bakers had to turn to other ingredients: chestnuts, acorns, roots and even sawdust, to make the flour go further.

The Swiss made a breakthrough in flour production in the 19th century, when they invented the roller mill to replace stone grinding. The new technique, which broke open the wheat berry, made it easy to separate the wheat germ from the bran. It eventually drove out windmills and watermills far beyond the borders of Switzerland.

When bread was the mainstay of the diet of the poor, far more was consumed per head than it is today. In the 15th century, the average Basler ate a pound of bread per day; documents from the early 16th century show a female servant getting between 700 and 950 grams daily. Consumption in Switzerland in 1998 was just over 52 kilograms per year - some 143 grams a day, and that included biscuits and cakes.

Diet, and fashion, has changed through the ages. From the 18th century, bread began to be included more widely in recipes for regional specialities, like soups and fillings. Fondue, which uses cubes of bread to soak up cheese melted in wine, is the classic Swiss dish, although its precise origins are not known.

In the second half of the 20th century bread consumption slumped, as on the one hand people became richer and better able to afford a more varied diet, and on the other they started to do far less hard physical labour than their ancestors. But bakers reacted by broadening their range. Ingredients that were once looked down on are now prized. The Swiss, in common with most northern Europeans, like dark bread, which their rich forebears would have turned their noses up at. Not only traditional cereal flours are used: bread is available made with ingredients such as potatoes, soya and nuts.

Sawdust hasn't made it back to the Swiss bread counter, however - and if it did, would we see a baker or two dangling over a pit of manure?