That might be a somewhat sensational title but after starting research on whole grains, their nutritional value, and baking with heritage and landrace grains I have found an entire world in which I feel society is completely out of touch with. How often do we actually consider the chain of events in which our food comes to us? Why might landrace grains be better than conventional wheat? How can we become more involved in our food? What impact does our food have on the environment? These are some of the questions that stared me in the face and I can't help but to start sharing this information.
There are three edible parts to whole grains: the bran is the wheat kernel's skin. It contains antioxidants, fiber and B vitamins. The germ is the alive part of the kernel. It's the embryo of the kernel so to speak. It has healthy fats , protein, minerals, and B vitamins too. The endosperm is like the placenta to the germ. It's also the largest part of the kernel. It's filled with starchy carbohydrates and proteins and synthesizes vital energy to the germ. In all purpose flour, the bran and the germ are separated from the endosperm in the milling process. This decreases the nutritional value by a lot. Then you add the bleaching process and extra drying, that flour is dead by the time it comes to the grocery store. Why put it out there? Well, shelf
life. It's not really going to spoil if it's already dead. Whole grain flour still has the fatty germ matter and the fiber filled bran. It has a shelf life of about eight months. What would you rather put in your body?
Now that we know the difference between whole grain and the dead flour let's talk about what they put on the wheat while it's growing. In conventional wheat growing, entire fields, acre after acre, the same kind of wheat is grown. It costs farmers lots of money to dump chemicals onto their crops. There are pesticides sprayed to keep bugs away, herbicides to kill off weeds, then fertilizers to add nutrients to the soil affected by the herbicides. These fertilizers are like a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Once you stop adding them, you've got nothing but lifeless soil. Lifeless soil cannot support healthy root systems in plants leading to soil erosion. Chemicals runoff into our water supply when it rains causing deadly algae blooms and killing wildlife in the waterways. Modern wheat cultivars have a substantially smaller root structure that their ancestors. Landrace grains are quite hearty. Their root structures can grow up to several feet deep. This acts as a filter for carbon. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide, you know, CO2, one of the greenhouse gases. They'll take it down deep into their roots and store it. This is also known as carbon sequestration. Within their massive root structure, other nutrients are absorbed from the soil. The more nutrients a plants is able to grab from the soil, the higher the nutritional value, not to mention flavor! Lots of tiny organisms make a home here as well. When you have healthy soil, you have a balance between earth, air and water. Often a variety of landrace grains will be planted to create biodiversity. In addition, healthy plants (which grow in healthy soil) generally do not need pest management. The weaker plants will be eaten and the more resilient will flourish. Nature is pretty rad like that.
With the imminent threat of climate change and global warming, solutions like increasing carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture practices are easy and make a lot of sense. Landrace grains play a large role in both of these, especially when grain has been a staple in our diet throughout the last 10,000 years. Over the past few decades there has been a resurgence in growing landrace and heritage grains as well as selling flour to consumers to bake their own wonderful goods. The Kusa Seed Society, ancientcerealgrains.org, and Heritage Grain Conservancy, growseed.org, are two places where you can purchase your own seed to grow majestic grains from days of yore. Oldways Whole Grain Council and Palouse Heritage are sites where you can purchase flour and grain berries. I plan on purchasing some Black Emmer, Turkey Red, and Rouge de Bordeaux seeds. Dried wheat berries will store for 25 years. I can't wait to try milling some of these and baking with them. I've even found a hand crank mill. There are lots of places you can find them online.
More than anything, putting ourselves back into the world where we care about things that grow and what we eat, how the things we eat effect the environment, these grains are a fantastic kind of wealth. One of my favorite pieces of literature of all time is "The Prairie" by Carl Sandburg, an excerpt from a larger work called "Cornhuskers". I'll leave you with that and hope it stirs lovely visions of agrarian life and an appreciation for it's wholesomeness.
"I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.
. . .
After the sunburn of the day
handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,
after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
the pearl-gray haystacks
in the gloaming
are cool prayers
to the harvest hands.
In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.
On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.
. . .
I am here when the cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am dust of men.
The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.
You came in wagons, making streets and schools,
Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,
Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw,
You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl,
You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,
I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother
To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago
Marching single file the timber and the plain.
I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.
I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like,
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.
Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,
I who have seen the red births and the red deaths
Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.
Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?
. . .
Rivers cut a path on flat lands.
The mountains stand up.
The salt oceans press in
And push on the coast lines.
The sun, the wind, bring rain
And I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle:
A love-letter pledge to come again.
. . .
Towns on the Soo Line,
Towns on the Big Muddy,
Laugh at each other for cubs
And tease as children.
Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.
Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up.
. . .
Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke—out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise—out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples—
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Out of log houses and stumps—canoes stripped from tree-sides—flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.
A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.
In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.
To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.
. . .
What brothers these in the dark?
What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon?
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river—
The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators—
The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills
And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off
Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:
what brothers these
in the dark
of a thousand years?
. . .
A headlight searches a snowstorm.
A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.
In the morning hours, in the dawn,
The sun puts out the stars of the sky
And the headlight of the Limited train.
The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.
The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.
. . .
Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,
O farmerman.
Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs
Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.
Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.
Hack them with cleavers.
Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.
. . .
A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning.
Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls.
The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.
The farmer’s daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.
. . .
On the left-and right-hand side of the road,
Marching corn—
I saw it knee high weeks ago—now it is head high—tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears.
. . .
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.
. . .
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.
There is no let-up to the wind.
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.
Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o’clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.
The frost loosens corn husks.
The Sun, the rain, the wind
loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers.
They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening
in a smoke-red dust.
. . .
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,
The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib,
The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall,
These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights.
“The shapes that are gone are here,” said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.
. . .
Look at six eggs
In a mockingbird’s nest.
Listen to six mockingbirds
Flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands.
Look at songs
Hidden in eggs.
. . .
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God’s Heaven.
When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.
. . .
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”
O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover comes—your child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back—
There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.
. . .
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
. . .
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
To-morrow is a day."