Growing and using

Why would anyone grow crops from ancient times?

One of our consultants received, as an early Christmas present, several bags of flour.  They present something of a challenge to him, since most came from plants different from the wheat we’re all used to.  They will require different handling to produce appetizing bread (or other products).  He is already familiar with rye; it’s the spelt and the others that will need a bit of research and experimentation.

They raise the question: why deviate from familiar wheat flour?  Over the centuries that crop has been optimized to give the best results, even in the hands of non-professionals.  The immediate answer has two parts: taste and nutrition.  Taking the second part first, different plants of course can be expected to contain different nutrients, and sticking with a single one may mean you’re missing out on something important.  Probably a bigger driver of sales, though, is the fact that different flours add different tastes to the product.  (If done right, these are desirable tastes.)  We won’t go as far as one bread cookbook from the last century, which questions whether the standard white bread loaf could be considered a food at all, since it was so lacking in both taste and nutrition.  But variety is attractive.

Doing a bit of research before he begins his own experimentation, our consultant stumbled upon an account of crop-growing as experimental archaeology.  (Let us hasten to add that our do-it-yourself urges never extend to growing our own food; we are well aware of how much work is involved.)  It recounted how the first crop of einkorn didn’t seem even to sprout at first, but eventually did well without much attention.  And the deer and rabbits didn’t seem to like nibbling on it.  Those are really important points to the farmer-by-hand.  On the other hand, einkorn and spelt are much more difficult to thresh than standard wheat.  We can easily understand why anyone would want to minimize such back-breaking labor.

The einkorn also survived a drought that ruined other crops.  That highlights an aspect of other, more familiar grains: rye, oats and barley will thrive under harsher or at least different conditions than bread wheat, which explains something of their historical connection with northern Europe.

So if we look at the whole process, growing the crops to use in our bread becomes just as important as the subsequent processing.  And with the climate changing, it would be well to be flexible about one’s ingredients.  Current bread wheat works remarkably well and has no competitors in several respects; but optimization is only one step away from extinction.