Читать книгу In Winter's Kitchen - Beth Dooley - Страница 13
ОглавлениеAfter that first Thanksgiving in Minneapolis, the farmers’ market stalls were given over to Christmas trees, and I felt little of the holiday merriment. Afternoons were long and gray, my job hunting proved fruitless, and I was envious of my husband’s work and long hours. One night, after gazing through the kitchen window onto patches of crusty snow, I turned my attention to the table my brother had built and a wooden bread trencher filled with unopened mail. “Get the flour from the pantry, the yeast, and the salt,” I could hear my late grandmother’s voice intone beneath the sweeping tick of our kitchen clock. “Set out the measuring cups, tie back your hair, and for pity’s sake, wash those hands with the brown soap over the sink.”
As the cold laced my windowpanes with crystalline ice, I mixed and kneaded, warmed by the thump-whacking rhythm of making bread. I drifted back to my grandmother’s kitchen, where as a child I would stand on a step stool to reach her speckled Formica countertop and help roll out a thin slab of her holiday bread dough. We’d cut it into small circles with a juice glass to make the “elf rolls” that we baked to a golden brown and slathered with sticky white icing.
That night, as flour dusted my counter, table, and chairs, I made my first loaf of bread in our new kitchen and so laid claim to our home. Since then, on dark, weary, wintry evenings, I seek refuge in this work, conjuring images of my grandmother: her long, knobby fingers and faded purple-flower apron; her yellow kitchen on Claremont Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey. All of this links me to the generations of women who have baked bread through the ages and I come face to face with the moment when bread meant life.
For many of our region’s early settlers, bread was salvation, sometimes the only food on the table after the root cellar had been emptied and spring was months away. Back then, amber waves of wheat shimmering with prosperity drew immigrants to our fertile plains. Even our currency’s bright pennies were minted with the image of sheaves of wheat until 1959.
This iconic crop is a strange little grass. “One of the most complex plants in existence,” said Dr. Abdullah Jaradat, a research agronomist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) at University of Minnesota–Morris. Both scientist and wheat historian, Jaradat is on a mission to revive the early varieties of wheat that made the Upper Midwest the “breadbasket of the world.”
This slight, well-tailored scholar in his late fifties moved to Minnesota from Jordan nearly thirty years ago to research sustainable grain crops so they might grow again across our plains. He’s a passionate cook and accomplished baker, and he told me he has a personal interest in heritage wheat because he has trouble digesting food made with commercial flours. On a tour of the research facility, Jaradat relayed the story of how wheat evolved nearly twelve thousand years ago into the industrially farmed commodity crop, bred for easy harvesting and storage, that’s traded on the grain exchanges of Kansas City, Chicago, and Minneapolis today.
Wheat, derived from wild species, consists of three different subgenomes joined in two events of natural hybridization. Emmer, the progenitor of our modern grain, was first grown in the Fertile Crescent on the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Iran. Around the same time, einkorn wheat grew near the mountainous area of southeastern Turkey.
Amid the expansive fields of commodity corn and soy, Jaradat is growing out trials of the earliest strains of wheat—einkorn, farro, and emmer. He’s also propagating Turkey red and red fife wheat, the varieties first grown here in the 1800s. “I can enjoy baked goods made from heritage grains,” he told me.
“I come from the birthplace of wheat. Ever since wheat’s domestication ten thousand years ago, farmers have developed and improved wheat’s genetic diversity as a ‘landrace,’ the term we use to describe plants that have adapted through natural selection to a region’s particular environment. Wheat does this especially well. It’s a very smart, highly versatile plant,” he said, and continued with the story.
Through harvesting and sowing, farmers helped guide the natural breeding process to produce wheat crops with desirable traits. These early strains of wheat grew in the Karadag Mountains of Turkey around 9600 BC and spread through Greece, Cyprus, India, Egypt, and eventually into Germany and Spain by 5000 BC, finally reaching England and Scandinavia by 3000 BC.
“The best farmers always planted several varieties of wheat so as not to rely on one particular crop should it fail and leave the family without sustenance. It’s something we need to remember and to practice,” Jaradat said. “Relying on one variety of any plant is dangerous. It leaves the farmer vulnerable if the crop is struck with a blight, or pests, or foul weather.” He related how, in the US, a few early colonists tried to grow wheat on the East Coast. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that European settlers really planted wheat crops. The German Mennonites brought the best variety, Turkey red, to Kansas. It’s a high-gluten grain that makes beautiful flour and wonderful bread.
These German Mennonites were conscientious objectors, and they’d sought refuge from serving in their country’s army. Russia’s Catherine the Great had offered them asylum in return for growing wheat for her own soldiers. She provided them with large tracts of fertile land. But by the mid-1800s, the Russian government had begun meddling in the Mennonites’ affairs and pressuring them to turn their fertile parcels over to the rebellious, landless peasants.
A close-knit society, the Mennonites decided collectively to leave Russia to create a settlement in America. They were enticed by homesteading opportunities in the Midwest and encouraged by railroad companies seeking farmers to grow wheat for transport to the markets back east. To avoid having their precious wheat seeds confiscated at the Russian border, the women sewed them into their undergarments and planted them as soon as the immigrants had settled.
Within the next fifty years, Turkey red displaced corn as the Midwest’s primary crop, changing the region’s farm economy and landscape. Turkey red was well suited to its new home. Planted in the fall, it became dormant through the harsh winters and so was resistant to disease and fungus. When the weather warmed in the spring the wheat sprouted and grew into lush crops to harvest before the freeze.
Farm journals of that era detail the beauty of Turkey red’s burnished brown stalks, shimmering in the sun, rippling in the winds, and growing so tall a man could hide deep in the wheat fields. But the wheat’s majestic height, as well as its bounty, presented a challenge at harvest. Until the 1840s, crews of men used long-handled sickles to cut down the wheat, and with their neighbors, bundled and brought in the harvest. Then the mechanical combine or harvester, invented in Scotland, made its way across the ocean to Midwest farms. Though clunky and slow-moving, this machine helped to ease physical labor and expedite the harvest. These machines were expensive to buy and difficult to maintain, so neighboring farmers shared the combines and worked together to bring in everyone’s harvest as a yearly community event.
“Bringing in the sheaves” was sweaty, backbreaking work. Harvesters toiled in the hot, dusty fields as their combine’s loud, grinding gears screeched in their ears. To incent workers through their arduous, twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts, women cooked and presented the men with huge, bountiful meals and snacks.
“We often competed to serve the best spreads,” wrote prairie-life authors Carrie and Felicia Adele Young of their childhoods in North Dakota. The sisters cooked all day for three or four dozen men—breakfast, forenoon or mid-morning lunch, dinner at noon, afternoon lunch, and supper at the end of the workday. Roasts, stews, breads, pies, cookies, cakes: the list of food seemed endless. Girls stayed home from school to help. Usually it took a week to complete. “We knew that a well-fed worker was a hard worker, and the better the food, the more quickly the crew would finish the job.”
Feeding so many helpful neighbors and hired hands was the cost of bringing in the crops. Soon as every farm’s crop was in, the whole community danced. “Not a simple, Saturday-night dance, but a big hoedown where the whole community joined in and danced to the fiddlers late into the night under the huge harvest moon.”
It took those crews several days to cover about 160 acres of wheat, which yielded fifty bushels. As they went from farm to farm, the men worked together and reaped, threshed, and winnowed the grain. By the 1920s, as the fields expanded and demand for wheat continued to grow, migrant workers traveled by train from Oklahoma, through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada. Newspapers from that era reported boxcars packed so tightly men stood shoulder to shoulder en route to the wheat fields. By the early 1930s, American radicalism, in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), spread rapidly so that it became unsafe to ride the freights without a “red card.” Soon laborers began striking for better wages and living conditions. But the farmers responded with vigilante mobs that drove the agitators from the fields at gunpoint. Class warfare broke out in the most “American” regions of rural America.
Following World War II machines became increasingly efficient and eventually evolved to replace human labor. Today, one person, driving an enormous combine that cuts and processes the grain at once, covers fifteen hundred acres in two to three days. Older farmers remember the hoedown dances and community celebrations with fondness, but very few of them miss the much harder, grueling fieldwork.
Bread brings us together—to break bread is to commune—and ties us to centuries of ritual. One summer, when our boys were toddlers, a neighbor and intrepid baker stopped by with a jar of five-year-old sourdough starter. While I’d been reading about how to make sourdough for years, I’d been too chicken-livered to try it on my own. After all, I just squeaked by with a C–in high-school chemistry.
I packed the starter in the coolest spot in our car the afternoon we headed to a rental cottage on Madeline Island for a week’s vacation. The broad expanse of Lake Superior, with its dunes and grass, was the closest thing in Minnesota to the Atlantic beaches where both Kevin and I had spent childhood summers. I wanted a place within driving distance where our children could build sandy memories of their own.
In the cottage’s narrow, dim galley kitchen, while the boys napped, I followed our neighbor’s copious instructions, typed out double spaced. I patiently fed the starter for three days and then created the dough. The loaf it yielded was not the most perfect, with one side heavy and a little too moist, but it was good enough to slice and toast, with a distinct sour tang and toothy tug. And I saved a little of the starter, feeding it at the same time every morning through the week, in a ritual that followed breakfast. Indeed the starter seemed alive, and I named it Maddy. On the kitchen’s cracked linoleum counters I kneaded dough, as the late-afternoon sun glanced off the lake and waves lapped the dock in rhythm with the boys’ easy breathing, and realized moments of stunning grace.
The word focaccia, the Italian flatbread, is derived from the Latin word focus, meaning hearth or fireside, the focus of the family and home. That summer my bread-making brought a focus to our week, during which I also breathed, and rose, and felt myself come more alive. A simple mixture of water and flour fed the bacteria, which became the agent for leavening bread, which then tasted better every time I baked. I reveled in the ancient practice, and was humbled by the realization that we need so little to eat well. Even when fields lie fallow and the snow knee deep, with the larder plundered and just flour and water left, anyone can still make good bread.
That summer, our oldest son, Matt, learned to jump off the dock into Kevin’s arms and relax into a dead man’s float. We caught enough fireflies to light a full mason jar, and dug to China on the beach. But once we’d come back home, in a mad flurry of reentry, I neglected to feed the starter. Within two days it flattened out, and I grieved the end of the season and another of our boys’ summers crossed off the calendar.
My generous neighbor shared another batch of her starter, and so I tried to make bread once more. But those loaves were not nearly as successful, missing the summer sourdough’s distinctly tart taste and chewy crust. Perhaps they needed the sun-kissed magic of the cottage kitchen, the cold and flinty lake, those pink streaks of sunset, the music of the loons, and the nearby sailboat’s clanging halyards that sent us to sleep each starry night.
In our region’s first cookbook, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, published in Minneapolis in 1877, author Estelle Woods Wilcox advised her readers to be choosy when selecting flour. “The quality of the flour will determine the quality of your bread,” she wrote. Back then flour was sold in bulk or directly from the mill in large sacks. Wilcox instructed home cooks to beware of weevils and “be sure it has a fresh ‘wheaten scent,’ before purchasing.”
In those days, flour was ground with enormous grindstones in the town’s community mill. These heavy stones shattered the “middlings,” the tough part of the kernel’s coverings, leaving the flour full of bran and hard bits. It took the baker a great deal of hand sifting to create the treasured white flour. The world’s best flour came from Hungary and was produced with a steel roller that cracked open the wheat kernel without crushing the middlings so they were easier to remove. Because the roller process was slow and inefficient, the flour was limited to small batches, extremely expensive, and enjoyed only by European royalty. Back then, a family’s status was judged by the color of its bread.
In the US, the flour-milling industry was founded by Cadwallader Washburn, the son of a lumber baron in Maine, who recognized the power of the Mississippi River’s falls on a visit following his service in the Civil War. He built his first mill on St. Anthony Falls in present-day Minneapolis, for the Minneapolis Milling Company. It sported the new “Middlings Purifier”—a vibrating sieve that processed whiter flour at record speed and produced a wildly popular product. But success came at a cost; the purifier created hazardous amounts of combustible flour dust that would explode when ignited by a spark from machinery. On May 2, 1878, a thunderous detonation leveled Washburn’s building as well as six neighboring mills, which covered a total of five city blocks.
It turned out the disaster was only a minor setback. The ruins provided Washburn with a blank slate to build a new roller mill using state-of-the-art Hungarian technology. To this end, he dispatched his engineer, an Austrian immigrant, to Budapest. William de la Barre secured a job on the night shift of the city’s newest mill and secretly sketched its machinery. On his return to Minneapolis, he designed the nation’s first roller mill for Washburn-Crosby, which later became General Mills. Washburn’s chief rival, Charles Pillsbury, quickly followed suit with his own roller mills and Minneapolis became home to “The World’s Best Flour—Gold Medal.”
Not everyone was eager to embrace this new “pure” white flour, however. Just as Washburn was building his “monster mill,” Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, was denouncing the roller millers for “putting asunder what God has joined together.” Graham hit his soapbox lecturing against the practice of removing the wheat germ from the flour. To him, wheat was “a natural food that the Creator has designed for man in such a condition as is best adapted to the anatomical structure and physiological powers of the human system.” Graham’s legacy, a small legion of supporters who promoted whole-grain “Graham flour,” gave voice to the idea that traditional American food, homemade and eaten on farms, was the “natural,” best choice.
The minister created the Graham cracker as a health food, fundamental to his Graham diet. The original cracker was a mix of unbleached wheat flour and coarsely ground wheat bran and germ, mildly sweetened with a touch of honey. No doubt Graham would have been appalled by today’s commercial crackers, made of refined, bleached white flour and plenty of refined white sugar.
By the late 1930s scientists had confirmed whole-grain flour’s benefits, supporting Graham’s claims. In response, consumers pressured companies to refortify white flour with niacin, iron, and vitamins B1 and B2. When wheat is milled by grindstone, the vitamins contained in the hard wheat germ along with the fiber remain intact. Whole-wheat flour, unlike white flour, is not bleached or aged with chemicals that also affect vitamin content. And yet, until this point the greatest technological advances made were in the milling and processing of commercial flour. The biggest change in bread was still to come—through a fundamental change in the wheat itself.
Shortly after World War II, Orville Vogel, a USDA scientist at Washington State University, created hybrid wheat by crossing American kernels from Turkey red and other tall varieties of wheat with low, shrubby Japanese wheat kernels provided to him by a US serviceman stationed in that country. This work inspired Dr. Norman Borlaug, a University of Minnesota geneticist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC) near Mexico City, to develop a new wheat plant. Charged with ending world hunger by increasing the yields of agricultural staples, Borlaug created a new variety of wheat that produced huge quantities of large kernels when heavily fertilized. Because this wheat variety grows low to the ground, it does not topple under its seed head’s increased weight and is far easier to harvest by machine.
Borlaug, known as the Father of the Green Revolution, was awarded the President’s Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. The extraordinarily productive wheat he developed now comprises more than 90 percent of the wheat grown worldwide and has essentially replaced most other strains of wheat in the US. According to Dr. Allan Fritz of Kansas State University, 98 percent of US flour is ground from this wheat.
But no safety tests were ever conducted on the new food. Scientists simply assumed that any variations in gluten content and structure or changes in the wheat’s enzymes and proteins would not affect humans. Yet analyses of the proteins in the new wheat hybrid show that 5 percent of the new wheat’s proteins are not present in either parent. It is a different plant altogether. It is a plant that is far needier than its ancestors.
The hybridized strains of modern wheat are sterile and unable to pollinate naturally, and so require chemical agents to reproduce. In addition, they need excessive amounts of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides (such as the extremely toxic sodium azide), and fungicides. Farmers apply hormone-like substances or “plant growth regulators” to control time of germination and strength of stalk.
The harvested wheat is sprayed with chemical “protectants” and its storage bins are doused with insecticides. The grain is then dried at very high temperatures, which diminish its protein, nutritional properties, and baking qualities. Next it is ground at high speeds that destroy vitamin E content and treated with conditioners and preservatives to prevent sticking. Wheat and flour were the first foods the Food and Drug Administration approved for irradiation, using high-speed electron beams to eradicate pests, in 1963. Studies show, however, that irradiated foods may disrupt lymph cells in humans.
Whether whole wheat is healthier than white flour is irrelevant: both are ground from the same strain of hybrid wheat. The changes in this wheat’s gluten structure are now being blamed for the digestive problems of over eighteen million Americans. Wheat is the only grain that contains glutenin and gliadin, the essential molecules that form gluten, an elastic material that gives bread dough its viscosity, thickness, and extensibility—in short, its muscular strength. The word means “glue” in Latin, and in China, gluten is referred to as the “muscle of flour.” When professional bakers talk about the dough’s “strength” they mean the amount of gluten it contains. To help dough rise, the flour’s gluten traps the carbon-dioxide bubbles created through the yeast’s activity. High-gluten dough will yield a lofty loaf with a crispy crust.
This new form of gluten is being blamed for wheat allergies as well as celiac disease. According to Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee internist, the hybridization efforts to confer baking and aesthetic characteristics on flour have generated numerous changes in wheat’s gluten-coding genes. “These genetically transformed glutens are thought responsible for triggering celiac disease and many of the odd health phenomena humans suffer,” Davis has said. After putting himself on a wheat-free diet, Davis lost weight and claims to feel energized. His patients make the same claims. Yet this new wheat may not be the only villain in today’s flour. Chemicals—fungicides, leavening agents, whiteners, texture-enhancing products and the soy they contain—are probably harmful, as well.
It is difficult to separate the dangers of modern wheat from those of commercial bread. The most recent studies suggest that “vital wheat gluten,” or wheat protein added to commercial bread dough to create a loftier and more tender loaf, may also be responsible for the spike in wheat allergies. Nearly twenty million people in the US contend that they experience distress after eating products containing wheat and one-third of American adults say they are trying to eliminate it from their diets.
I am one of those Americans, though stepping away from bread wasn’t easy for me. As a child, while my sister begged for lollipops and my brother stashed potato chips in his room, I tore the insides out of Wonder Bread to eat slathered with butter and sugar. I learned to bake bread from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook and discovered how to braid together rye and wheat dough into fancy loaves to sell to the local gourmet shop. Several years after we arrived in Minneapolis, Gelpe’s Old World Bakery on Hennepin Avenue began selling hand-shaped loaves of artisan bread, better than anything I’d tasted in New York City or San Francisco. Shortly after, I stopped making my own bread and relied on Gelpe’s for my loaves.
The only problem with Gelpe’s was that it was simply too good. I ate more of it than was right for me. After our second son was born, I found myself suffering from chronic fatigue and sought help from a chiropractor. She tested me for food sensitivities. Wheat was the number-one food she suggested I eliminate from my diet.
That night, as I sat in my kitchen, hoping that some steamed sweet potatoes might subdue my craving for a slice of Gelpe’s dense whole-wheat miche, I felt pretty sorry for myself. Bread was more than part of my diet—too many nights, it was my diet. On busy, rushed evenings, racing to sports practices and parents’ meetings or staying up late to make a deadline, I’d relied too often on a bagel or a heel of good rye, slathered with sweet butter and sprinkled with coarse salt. Like a friend who keeps you up late watching bad TV reruns, this habit was one I needed to give up.
Going wheat free opened up a range of good food I already knew I should be eating. I sought and introduced to my children more sweet potatoes, roasted and drizzled with balsamic vinegar; Yukon gold oven fries with aioli; and chili-spiked black beans. I became slightly thinner, but I also became a more interested and interesting cook, with a shelf full of vinegars and delicious oils. When we entertain, we’ll still fill a basket with delicious slices—but the focus of the meal won’t be the bread.
With the creation of our modern wheat, scientists avoided one disaster—they fed the world and made a product that could continue to do so for decades to come—but they did it by tricking nature. According to Jaradat, the work was unnecessary and harmful. He explains, “Wheat can evolve without the use of chemicals; it can adjust naturally to the soil conditions, withstand pests and diseases, and thrive in a variety of locations in countries throughout the world. Before modernization, farmers left the stalk on the ground after harvest. The plant’s roots helped stem erosion and as the plant decomposed it enriched the soil. Today’s fields are stripped and replanted with each new crop. The constant tilling and planting is responsible for the tremendous soil erosion and runoff.
“Today’s wheat is lazy. It’s spoiled, we feed it everything it needs,” he continued. “By tampering with its genetics, we’ve created a food that provides farmers and manufacturers with maximum yield at the lowest cost.” Besides bread, crackers, pasta, etc., this new modified wheat is also processed into a cheap stabilizer used in luncheon meat, hot dogs, salad dressings, and even self-basting turkey.
“But more dangerous than anything else, modern wheat is unsustainable,” Jaradat contends. “We are witnessing the near elimination of diverse strains of wheat, vital to human and environmental health and food security. It requires tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals to grow and process this crop.” Arguing the need to reintroduce heritage strains, Jaradat added, “The recent genetic management of this crop has shifted to the hands of industrial breeders, but with hidden costs. Modern wheat has evolved through a genetic bottleneck of breeding for uniformity and high yield; it’s dwarfed and designed for ease of harvest with goliath combines and dependent on chemical protectants to survive. In contrast, the landrace wheat evolved in low-input fields. These strains are genetically diverse, are better adapted to organic systems, are the robust survivors of adversity, and have greater adaptability to weather extremes. Research suggests that landrace wheat strains are more digestible for gluten sensitivities, too.
“Diversity is essential to our food security, especially as the climate becomes unstable and as pests and weeds evolve to withstand the chemicals used to control them,” Jaradat said. Because commercial wheat dominates the market, it’s difficult for farmers to find heritage grains. Jaradat encourages farmers to save the seeds of their grains to share with the Heritage Grain Conservancy community seed bank. “We are continuing on-farm seed saving for evolutionary conservation of these wheat landraces,” Jaradat said. “This research has direct application to farmers. We don’t want to work in isolated labs. We need the cooperation of farmers to increase the genetic diversity for stable crops.”
“Seed saving is my most radical activity to date,” Bryce Stephens, of Jennings, Kansas, said over the grinding gears of machinery when he answered the phone. Working with the Heritage Grain Conservancy, Stephens plants the same varieties of wheat that the Mennonite women carried to Kansas in the hems of their skirts, Turkey red. It’s bronze, whiskered, and grows a majestic six feet tall across Stephens’s one thousand acres of the high plains the Cheyenne call toxto, “place of freedom.”
Stephens’s passion for this wheat pulsates through the receiver, which he was cradling against his shoulder the day I called, while installing a part under his tractor. A self-described two hundred and fifty pounds and six feet tall, this Vietnam vet turned antiwar protester is booming and loquacious. He was involved in the American Indian Movement’s armed conflict at Wounded Knee in 1973, and is quietly proud of the FBI’s prolonged interest in him.
A participant in a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto’s GMO patent-infringement claims moving through the courts in Washington, DC, Stephens is working to keep Monsanto from creating genetically modified wheat. So far, resistance among Canadian and US growers, plant scientists, and activists has been high enough to stave the development off. That is, until the spring of 2013, when, on an unnamed farm in Oregon, a farmer discovered an unrecognizable plant in his wheat field. The USDA labs confirmed this was a strain of wheat created by Monsanto in early 2000, tested in authorized fields. No one could say where this GMO wheat had come from. At stake is the $8 billion wheat export business; over sixty countries refuse to purchase GMO products.
If it is approved by our government and introduced in our fields, GMO wheat will enter rotations with corn, canola, and soybeans, which all require massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. US government studies have documented that GMO crops require 30 percent more chemicals than non-GMO crops. While by weight, the world’s farmers produce more corn than wheat, most of that crop ends up feeding animals or in the gas tanks of cars as ethanol. As a food, wheat remains the biggest crop. The Plains states produce about 10 percent of the world’s wheat.
“Wheat kernels have been saved by farmers to plant and trade since the beginning of civilization. Why should a corporation own what farmers have been relying on and sharing for centuries?” Stephens asked. “I’m interested in maintaining the integrity of these seeds so that all organic farmers have access.” His daughter, Demetria, grabbed the phone and added, “It just seems natural to me that we would save our seed year after year. We’ve never felt the need to purchase seed.”
Turkey red wheat, planted by a handful of growers like Stephens, is in an “identity-preserved” program critical to the wheat-revival effort supported by researchers and conservationists like Jaradat. During a recent drought, Turkey red outperformed modern varieties thanks to its strong, deep root structure. Its tall height helps it compete with weeds, making fertilizers and herbicides unnecessary. In growing this grain where it has not been grown in living memory, farmers like Bryce Stephens and Father Mark Stang, of Long Prairie, Minnesota, are propagating landraces, the focus of Jaradat’s research, plants that develop and adapt to their environment naturally. In contrast to agribusiness-bred plants, landraces draw on a rich gene pool to become resilient despite the threats of drastic weather events, unstable climate, diseases, and pests.
Father Mark often weaves lessons from his fields into his Sunday sermons at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Church. Easygoing and in his mid-forties, he is as comfortable in jeans and flannel as he is in his clerical collar. Father Mark grew up farming with his father on land that supported a family of nine kids. “My granddad planted it in the 1940s, but by the time I was a boy, my dad grew only the shrubby kind. But Turkey red goes without chemicals, and plants that can fend for themselves naturally fascinate me. Why not celebrate what God has provided us?”
Several years ago, Matt, then in his late twenties, moved to Durango, Colorado, seeking mountains, sun, crisp air, and fresh snow. After going to college on the East Coast, our oldest son had traveled through Europe and worked in Boston. But whenever he came back to Minneapolis, he’d proclaim his love for this place, biking along the Mississippi, canoeing in the Boundary Waters, and camping on Lake Superior’s shores. He’s found some of those pleasures, and more, in Colorado: he has planted a garden, has found love, likes his work teaching high school, and volunteers as a medic and firefighter.
The other day, Matt called, requesting a family recipe for gingersnaps. When my father was diagnosed with lung disease, he’d brighten and proclaim, “You are the best medicine,” every time I made the trip east to visit. In the afternoon hours when he napped, my mother and I, not wanting to leave the house, baked gingersnaps to keep busy, fill the house with the smells of ginger and spice, and temporarily reconnect with Minnesota.
In researching a magazine story about Christmas cookies, I interviewed Hilda Kringstad, a Norwegian immigrant living in Minneapolis, whose pepperkaker were always the first to sell out in the local church bake sale. “I always grind my own cardamom and nutmeg,” she said. “I learned to bake with my mother and grandmother, and though they spoke an older dialect which I didn’t understand, there was for me an air of mystery and excitement in this work that included me, and that I could immediately comprehend.”
The question of commercial viability is the biggest argument corporations use to discredit the work on heritage grains by plant researchers, medical doctors, and small, independent organic farmers. Corporate farmers are heavily invested in the equipment required to grow vast crops of short, productive commercial wheat. Is it unrealistic to expect them to change their practices overnight to plant more sustainable, healthier crops?
“Yes,” argues Dr. Don Wyse, a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota. “The responsibility of a land-grant institution is to address the key issues of our time. We should be working to solve the environmental crisis caused by conventional farming practices,” he told me when we met for coffee near the U of M’s research plots on the St. Paul campus.
“If we really expect conventional farmers to grow food that does not destroy the planet and that is good for us on a large scale, we have to provide them with a profitable alternative to these unhealthy and environmentally damaging crops,” he continued. “Farmers are running a business. They are concerned with profit and loss; they need to make a living.” The afternoon we met, Wyse was easy to spot—he entered the shop carrying a round, squat loaf of dark bread. It was warm and freshly baked with flour he’d ground from the wheat grown in the U’s trial plot. The slice he cut for me was dense, chewy, a bit dry, but very flavorful. Wyse’s long gray hair was pulled back from his receding forehead into a tight ponytail and his broad shoulders stretched his neoprene U of M training shirt. He spends his days in the test plots or hiking through the world’s most remote regions, seeking wild plants that might become sustainable crops.
“We must put our intellectual and financial resources into figuring ways to grow real food on a commercial scale,” he said. For the past twenty-five years, Wyse has been working with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, to develop perennial commercial crops of wheat, sunflowers, and flax. He calls the initiative “High-Efficiency Agriculture.” Once planted, these crops will return naturally year after year. “Wheat is a grass, after all, and grass is perennial,” Wyse reminded me. These crops do not require tilling and planting, the major causes of soil erosion. They grow prolifically without doses of harmful chemicals. “Perennial wheat is a sustainable crop,” Wyse said. “Its root system becomes more robust through the years so that it can withstand floods and drought. These plants hold a lot of promise as real food, animal fodder, and biofuel.”
Is the flour from heritage and perennial wheat significantly better than that from commercial wheat, which at first seems far easier to plant, grow, harvest, and mill? Are the efficiencies created by our industrial system worth what it will take to change them? What is the price of plant diversity and food security; what is the price of our health? Most important, what is the price of flavor?
I sought an answer from Jeff Ford, founder of Cress Spring Bakery in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, near Madison. Ford has been profiled in the New York Times for his award-winning breads, made from the heritage grains he buys from neighboring farmers and grinds himself—einkorn, emmer and Turkey red. They are leavened naturally, not with industrial yeast, and baked in an enormous wood-burning oven built by the legendary mason Alan Scott.
Cress Spring is located off narrow County Road F, which winds through the piney hills in south central Wisconsin. It’s not easy to find. The location eluded Google Maps, and after several wrong turns, I pulled into the long and bumpy driveway, scattering geese and chickens away from the car and drawing out a few curious piglets that trotted to the edge of their pen. As I stepped out of my car, I was hit full on with the glorious, toasty, slightly sour scent of freshly baked bread.
I pushed open the door to a sunlit room lined with wire shelves of wicker baskets cuddling rising dough. On others, rows of dark oblong loaves and fat raisin-studded rolls, just out of the oven, were cooling.
Ford is tall and slender. His wispy gray curls, secured with a ponytail, were sprung around a yellow bandanna. Wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Serene and soft-spoken, he got his professional start in a Madison bakery as an accountant and then left nearly thirty-five years ago to build Cress Spring on communal farmland, constructing his bakery around the wall-sized oven. Wendell Berry-inspired and Rumi-quoting, Ford chops his own wood for the oven and buys all the ingredients for his breads and pastries from his neighbors and fellow farmer’s-market vendors.
Twice a week, on baking days, Ford grinds the grains to maximize nutrition and ensure freshness. The natural fermentation method he uses to create the starter that leavens the loaves makes them especially easy to digest. In comparison to yeasted dough that puffs up quickly and flavorlessly, Ford’s bread requires nearly twenty-four hours for its slow rise. The process imparts a sweet, complex acidity and changes the grain to make its nutrients more accessible to our bodies. Because the bread is made of such simple ingredients, it tends to last longer, too. The kamut-raisin and mixed-grain loaves I brought back to Minneapolis stayed fresh in a brown paper bag for about a week. Ford said that plastic traps in moisture and turns the bread moldy. “Bread needs to breathe,” he said.
Many of Cress Spring’s most devout customers come with wheat allergies and have found they can digest the kamut, spelt, and rye breads. Ford agrees with Jaradat and others that America’s wheat issues start on the farm. “The varieties of wheat are bred by industrial production to stand up to machines are all monoculture, chemicalized, and lack any nutritional value,” he said. “We feed people this stuff that their bodies are not designed or adapted to eat. Of course they’re sensitive to it, and it’s not good for them and causes problems.”
Over the years, Ford has intentionally reduced Cress Spring’s business to a more manageable scale, dropping wholesale sales to make more profitable home deliveries in his muddy blue truck. At the Madison Farmers’ Market, he always sells out of four hundred loaves. “Saturdays at the market, people tell me they love what we do and hand me money all day. At this point, it’s not work; it’s my social life,” he quips. Sure, these whole-grain, organic, locally sourced, naturally fermented, and gluten-sensitive loaves are nutritious, environmentally responsible, and supportive of the local economy. But the reason they sell out each week? Spring Cress loaves are burnished gold, their edges slightly burned; they are wheaten and fragrant, tooth tugging and tender, indescribably good.
Turkey red wheat is ground by Sunrise Flour Mill, in North Branch, Minnesota, and sold at the Mill City Farmers’ Market in Minneapolis. Darrold Glanville, Sunrise’s founder, opened a sack and spilled a few Turkey red kernels into my palm. Shiny, rich mahogany brown, they squirmed through my fingers and skittered to the floor as though alive. “When wheat is ground fresh, there’s a different quality to the flour,” he said. “It has distinct flavor and makes a very responsive dough. You’ll see when you make bread, how evenly the dough rises then springs up in the oven. Bakers call that ‘bounce’ and the loaves develop beautiful, firm crusts.”
“Fresh” is not a quality I associate with the five-pound bags of all-purpose white flour on grocery-store shelves. Darrold, a retired corporate executive, became interested in heritage grains when he realized that commercial bread was causing him digestive troubles. “I found a source for Turkey red wheat and began milling my own flour, giving it to friends, and eventually selling it in small batches. Pretty soon, the demand was so great, it grew into a business.” He opened a bag of his all-purpose flour. A pale golden color, it released an aroma of warm toast. “Not many farmers are willing to grow this wheat, so it’s hard for me to source and it’s expensive,” he said.
“Wheat is a seasonal food, like blueberries. The region, the variety, and the growing conditions, as well as freshness, all affect flavor and performance,” Glanville continued. “I can hardly keep up with the orders from home bakers, commercial bakeries and cafés, and restaurants.” Amazing—just like my favorite apples, or spring’s first peas, the taste of wheat will vary through the year. I’ve always thought of flour as a staple, a cheap commodity, and though I’d made bread for years, it wasn’t until I met Glanville and kneaded Sunrise flour into a springy dough that bounced to life in the oven that I understood the difference. Jeff Ford’s award-winning loaves are fashioned from the most humble ingredients—water, flour, and salt. Yet their true worth extends well beyond his remote bakery in rural Wisconsin.
Wheat is grown on more acreage than any other commercial crop in the world and continues to be the most important grain source for humans. Its production leads all crops, including rice, maize, and potatoes. Given its role in our diets and its place in our history, isn’t wheat worth our attention, time, technology, and resources to grow it well? We have the intelligence, if not the wisdom, to grow beautiful, bountiful wheat. How do we teach people the value of this reality?
Make them good bread.
