LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 2

       NOT YOUR GRAN’S MUFFINS: THE CREATION OF MODERN WHEAT

      He is as good as good bread.

      Miguel de Cervantes,

      Don Quixote

      WHEAT, MORE THAN any other foodstuff (including sugar, fat and salt), is woven into the fabric of the Western food experience, a trend that began even before 1950s US TV show Ozzie met Harriet. It has become such a ubiquitous part of our diet in so many ways that it seems essential to our lifestyle. What would a fry-up be without toast, lunch without sarnies, bacon butty without bread, picnics without hot-dog buns, dip without crackers, hummus without pitta, coffee without a croissant, apple pie without the pastry?

      IF IT’S TUESDAY, IT MUST BE WHEAT

      I once measured the length of the bread aisle at my local supermarket: sixty-eight feet.

      That’s sixty-eight feet of white bread, whole-wheat bread, multi-grain bread, seven-grain bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, sourdough bread, Italian bread, French bread, bread sticks, white bagels, raisin bagels, cheese bagels, garlic bagels, oat bread, flax bread, pitta bread, dinner rolls, Kaiser rolls, poppy seed rolls, hamburger buns, and fourteen varieties of hot dog buns. That’s not even counting the bakery and the additional forty feet of shelves packed with a variety of ‘artisanal’ wheat products.

      And then there’s the snack aisle with forty-something brands of crackers and twenty-seven brands of pretzels. The baking aisle has bread crumbs and croutons. The dairy case has dozens of those tubes you crack open to bake rolls, Danish pastries and croissants.

      Breakfast cereals fill a world unto themselves, usually enjoying a monopoly over an entire supermarket aisle, top to bottom shelf.

      There’s much of an aisle devoted to boxes and bags of pasta and noodles: spaghetti, lasagna, penne, elbows, shells, whole-wheat pasta, green spinach pasta, orange tomato pasta, egg noodles, tiny-grained couscous to seven-inch-wide lasagne sheets.

      How about frozen foods? The freezer has hundreds of noodle, pasta and wheat-containing side dishes to accompany the meat loaf and roast beef au jus.

      In fact, apart from the detergent and soap aisle, there’s barely a shelf that doesn’t contain wheat products. Can you blame Americans if they’ve allowed wheat to dominate their diets? After all, it’s in practically everything.

      Wheat as a crop has succeeded on an unprecedented scale, exceeded only by corn in acreage of farmland planted. It is, by a long stretch, among the most consumed grains on earth, constituting 20 per cent of all calories consumed.

      And wheat has been an undeniable financial success. How many other ways can a manufacturer transform five pence worth of raw material into £2.50 worth of glitzy, consumer-friendly product, topped off with endorsements from the American Heart Association? In most cases, the cost of marketing these products exceeds the cost of the ingredients themselves.

      Foods made partly or entirely of wheat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks have become the rule. Indeed, such a regimen would make the USDA, the Whole Grains Council, the Whole wheat Council, the American Dietetic Association, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association happy, knowing that their message to eat more ‘healthy whole grains’ has gained a wide and eager following.

      So why has this seemingly benign plant that sustained generations of humans suddenly turned on us? For one thing, it is not the same grain our forebears ground into their daily bread. Wheat naturally evolved to only a modest degree over the centuries, but it has changed dramatically in the past fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. Wheat strains have been hybridised, crossbred and introgressed to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi. But most of all, genetic changes have been induced to increase yield per acre. The average yield on a modern North American farm is more than tenfold greater than farms of a century ago. Such enormous strides in yield have required drastic changes in genetic code, including reducing the proud ‘amber waves of grain’ of yesteryear to the rigid, eighteen-inch-tall high-production ‘dwarf’ wheat of today. Such fundamental genetic changes, as you will see, have come at a price.

      Even in the few decades since our American grandmothers survived Prohibition and danced the Big Apple, wheat has undergone countless transformations. As the science of genetics has progressed over the past fifty years, permitting human intervention at a much more rapid rate than nature’s slow, year-by-year breeding influence, the pace of change has increased exponentially. The genetic backbone of your high-tech poppy-seed muffin has achieved its current condition by a process of evolutionary acceleration that makes us look like Homo habilis trapped somewhere in the early Pleistocene.

      FROM NATUFIAN PORRIDGE TO DOUGHNUT HOLES

      ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’

      It’s in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, Moses describes the Promised Land as ‘a land of wheat and barley and vineyards’. Bread is central to religious ritual. Jews celebrate Passover with unleavened matzo to commemorate the flight of the Israelites from Egypt. Christians consume wafers representing the body of Christ. Muslims regard unleavened naan as sacred, insisting it be stored upright and never thrown away in public. In the Bible, bread is a metaphor for bountiful harvest, a time of plenty, freedom from starvation, even a source of salvation.

      Don’t we break bread with friends and family? Isn’t something new and wonderful ‘the best thing since sliced bread’? ‘Taking the bread out of someone’s mouth’ is to deprive that person of a fundamental necessity. Bread is a nearly universal

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