Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is an essayist, editor and journalist. He led for almost ten years a series at the Nouvel Observateur, and has published twenty books. He is now and editor and continues his own research.


His investigation into bread and its symbolism began by obtaining a diploma in baking (2007) after training at l’Ecole de Boulangerie et Pâtisserie de Paris, a tour of the Mediterranean in some countries where there are "bread eaters”(Egypt, Greece, Italy, etc.), and discussed with some representatives of the wheat industry and bakery. In 2007, he took the lead of a Universal dictionary of bread with the ambition to gather all the entries that bread has generated since its appearance at the edge of the eastern Mediterranean in the late Neolithic period (inclusive of agronomy, theology, genetics, botany, anthropology, history, milling, bakery, economics, arts, and more).