But how does this lab-induced biodiversity compare with landraces that evolved in farmers’ fields, over millennia? Nearly all the seeds on which breeders depend are now held in “doomsday” seed vaults designed to protect the world’s store of genetic material, or more accurately, the food supply. The most infamous site, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, sits below four hundred feet of solid rock on a frozen Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle. CIMMYT alone holds one tenth of the world’s crops and has more than 168,000 different varieties of wheat, barley, rye, and wild grasses, which are the foundation material—the germplasm—from which to breed new plants.
Even scientists worry this invaluable seed stock isn’t quite the same as maintaining biodiversity in nature, because biodiversity can’t simply be reduced to a library collection. The very word biodiversity means not only genetic variation but variation in the landscape and among species. So if you breed a new wheat plant and then seed it in a monoculture, across an entire nation, you’re essentially undermining the kind of biodiversity you’re trying to recreate. And this is occurring globally, as the latest and most popular wheat varieties are released and then planted across wide swaths of land. The practice by farmers of selecting seeds for microclimates—as Earl Clark did with Blackhull wheat, or as farmers did with their landraces—falls dormant. The natural selections and happenstance adaptations that occur in the field go by the wayside.
Meanwhile, wild grasses—another source of biodiversity—are vanishing. “More and more land is used for farming in order to grow commercial crops to feed the increasing human population. Extensive herding has led to overgrazing and erosion. The last primary habitats of wild stands will soon be destroyed. We are close to losing a valuable source of genetic diversity that could help plant breeders to provide food for future generations,” a team of archeologists wrote in 2010. This worry isn’t just theoretical. In 2013, wheat researchers identified a gene in ancient Turkish einkorn wheat that conferred resistance to a devastating fungal rust disease, known scientifically as Ug99, that has wiped out wheat in East Africa and Iran and threatened to spread globally. Another resistant gene was found in wild goat grass. Once identified, those genes could be bred into new wheat varieties, creating resistance to this new scourge.
This is just the latest example of how relic and wild wheat species provide the genetic keys to preserving wheat. In other words, the future of one fifth of the world’s food supply may reside precisely in the genes of wild grasses or the least productive landrace wheat varieties, with the worst bread-making qualities, which is why these grasses have been ignored, even trampled upon, for a century or more, at humanity’s peril.
• • •
The lack of diversity doesn’t just have implications for farming or the food supply. It may be related to gluten toxicity as well. While the broad array of “gluten sensitivity” issues has only recently been defined by physicians, let alone understood, celiac disease, which affects about 1 percent of the population, has been the focus of sustained research.
For those people with the disease, gluten acts as a trigger, causing the immune system to misfire and attack itself. The targets frequently are the microscopic folds, or villi, of the intestinal wall, which once damaged can no longer absorb nutrients into the body. Classic symptoms include diarrhea, intestinal pain, and signs of malnutrition. Atypical signs, such as tiredness, depression, osteoporosis, migraine headaches, muscle or joint pain, anemia, delayed growth, and even schizophrenia, are also associated with the disease.
Although celiac disease was first described by a Greek physician in the first century, gluten was only identified as the culprit in the mid-twentieth century. More recently scientists have located the most troublesome proteins, which reside in the gliadin segment of gluten. If you put your baker’s hat back on, you’ll recall that gliadin proteins are crucial for dough’s extensibility—that is, its ability to stretch out without snapping back like a rubber band. Gliadin contains a specific segment of proteins—or chain of amino acids—that prompts an immune response in about half of all people with celiac disease. Gliadin’s sister protein, glutenin, which adds strength or elasticity to dough, isn’t an innocent bystander, for it, too, can prompt an immune reaction, but it occurs less frequently.
Because wheat has been the subject of intensive selection and breeding, geneticist Hetty van den Broeck, at the Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands, wondered whether modern wheat differed from older varieties in a way that would prompt more expressions of celiac disease. Did the toxic gliadin protein fragment—known as an “epitope”—appear more frequently in modern wheat than in ancient landraces? A paper by a team of Norwegian researchers in 2005 had sparked this line of inquiry, as it identified einkorn and durum wheat that lacked this specific disease-triggering epitope. But they hadn’t looked extensively at modern and landrace wheat varieties.
“Before we started the analysis we didn’t have a clue how prevalent the celiac disease epitopes would be in modern and old varieties,” van den Broeck told me. So she tested thirty-six modern European varieties and compared them with fifty landrace and ancient wheats, from regions as distant as the Middle East and Ethiopia—admittedly a small sample considering the tens of thousands of wheat varieties, but still large enough to get a meaningful result. What she found was that the toxic fragment was far more prevalent in the modern varieties. “This suggests that modern wheat breeding practices may have led to an increased exposure to celiac disease epitopes,” she and her coauthors wrote in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Genetics in 2010.
While she didn’t locate any wheat varieties that lacked the toxic sequence, there were varieties where the epitope was minimally present, even among a few modern wheat lines. Van den Broeck suggested that if breeders focused on these less toxic varieties, they could eventually produce less toxic flour for people genetically susceptible to celiac disease. “Breeding was always done for baking quality, or yield and pest resistance, but there’s never been breeding done for the presence of CD epitopes,” she told me.
This is admittedly a challenging task, because gliadin proteins are essential to bread making. Think about it: if you’re breeding wheat and stumble on a variety that produces an especially light loaf, then you’re going to make sure other wheat varieties share the same characteristics. So breeders are sure to crossbreed this trait into the hybrid wheat they develop. Given this selection criterion, it isn’t too surprising that modern wheat shares a basket of similar traits. But van den Broeck’s findings suggest that less toxic wheat varieties may one day be available, in part because scientists now know where this prevalent toxic gluten fragment arose from: it came from the gliadin proteins transferred thousands of years ago from wild goat grass, when it mated with emmer wheat.
This suggests that wheat species that lack these genes—einkorn wheat, for example—would lack these toxic gliadin fragments, too. But that turns out to be ambiguous. While some studies have found that einkorn wheat can be tolerated by patients with celiac disease, other studies have found toxic protein fragments in the grain. “Einkorn does have epitopes, just less of them,” van den Broeck explained. “It’s not as if you can just get rid of one protein and the story is over. That is what makes it complicated to find a wheat variety suitable to all patients.”
But that hasn’t stopped geneticists from trying. Recent papers have pointed to some early success at “silencing” the toxic fragments through genetic manipulation. These modified grains yielded only a minor response from immune cells involved in celiac disease, but this research is at a very early stage, and the work is fraught with complications, since so many proteins are involved and so many wheat varieties exist. “It’s not something you can do on a Friday afternoon,” van den Broeck said. The question she’s pursuing is whether the less toxic lines can be hybridized into modern wheat, lowering exposure to the disease-causing proteins. Perhaps then the switch for celiac disease would remain in the “off” posi
tion, at least for some people susceptible to the disease.
Translating this rather arcane line of genomic cereal science into a choice for bread or flour is exceedingly difficult. Ancient varieties of wheat are highly diverse, so even if you could locate some landrace wheat—that is, untouched by the breeding efforts of the Green Revolution—it’s a crapshoot whether you’d find a variety that reduces the likelihood of a gluten reaction. While einkorn wheat has been tested on people with celiac disease, it hasn’t been widely studied. I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence from bakers about gluten-sensitive customers raving about the digestibility of this spelt bread or that ancient wheat variety, when fermented with sourdough. But these are anecdotes. These toxic gluten fragments have been studied only in relation to celiac disease, not with the much wider range of “gluten sensitivity” disorders, which might operate in a very different way in the human body. The precise way that gluten interacts with these other vague disorders is still largely unknown.
From van den Broeck’s work, however, it is clear that landrace and ancient wheats had more diversity, at least when it comes to these protein fragments. In the premodern era, the staple diet was more diverse as well. When harvests were bountiful, people might gorge on wheat. But the next year, they were eating barley, rye, chickpea, or chestnut flour and trying to avoid famine. In one valley, wheat might have been higher in protein. Over in the next valley, it might have been lower. One year, the wheat might have yielded strong gluten. The next, it might have been damaged by summer rains, unleashing protease enzymes that compromised these gluten proteins. The upshot: one’s lifetime exposure to these wheat proteins was probably as inconsistent as the food supply. That’s not the case today, at least in places in the world where we have a bountiful supply of food. Diversity wasn’t reduced only on the farm but in cereal foods as well. As van den Broeck’s work shows, the breeding of more uniform wheat cultivars had implications for the modern diet—and perhaps for disease as well.
• • •
While I was muddling through this research on wheat breeding, I stumbled across the work of Eli Rogosa, a self-styled guerrilla seed breeder in western Massachusetts, who was growing ancient landrace wheat, such as einkorn. I filed it away as a curiosity, but as I talked with farmers, breeders, and millers, her name kept coming up. Some described her as passionate, even mystical, but whatever the case, she was clearly driven by a mission to restore wheat diversity and was growing a vast number of landrace wheats on her small farm and then selling the seeds to farmers. I thought that was fascinating, given everything I was reading about biodiversity, for here was a rare case of a farmer working outside the specialized world of seed breeding and pursuing the work on her own.
Eli Rogosa holding one of her heritage wheat varieties
Rogosa isn’t trained as a botanist or geneticist, so she’s an outsider, but this gives her a perspective that others inside this close-knit world might not have. In a world of largely privatized breeding, Rogosa seems like a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, nurturing wheat varieties that have nearly vanished from agriculture and then spreading them around.
When we finally spoke, she gave me a brief rundown of her work. She had collected nearly extinct einkorn wheat from Druze farmers in the Golan Heights; visited with farmers in France, Italy, Germany, and Greece; passed through the former states of eastern Europe, and been to the Caucasus in the Georgian Republic, helped along by research grants from the European Community and various gene banks. Her quest was to collect rare landrace wheats from farmers who still cultivated them.
“They are almost apologetic about planting these wheats,” she told me. “They’ll say, ‘We’re growing modern wheat, but this is what my grandfather gave me.’ And then they show me a little spot off on the corner of a field where they keep the landrace,” she said.
When I visited her one fall day in 2011, torrential rains had just drenched the Northeast, causing a creek to crest its banks and wash out the road to her farm in western Massachusetts. The Northeast hadn’t seen devastating flooding in decades. Rogosa had made it through the storms, and the fields where she had recently planted wheat were moist but not flooded. But as I looked over her small, modest farm, I wondered, “This is where the future of biodiversity lies?”
In her clapboard home, a cast-iron woodstove in the living room burned bright. Around the sofa, where her partner, C. R. Lawn, the founder of a Maine seed cooperative, Fedco, sat, were sheaves of wheat, tied neatly together, with the seed heads splaying out. The wheat was also stacked on wooden chairs, strung up on walls, piled in corners, and hanging from the ceiling. Some had fat bursting seed heads, while others had thin rows of seeds. Some were golden in hue, others dark brown, with long beards, or needlelike hairs, protruding from the ear. If there was any doubt about the vast array of wheat, one need only pay a visit to Rogosa’s living room to see a sample. She had made this her life’s work, but in the process, it had taken over the place where she lived. Aside from the bundles of wheat, she had boxes filled with seed from the world over. She later explained that wheat had a kind of otherworldly appeal. She talked about the “energy” and “life force” in the plants. Anyone who has ever planted a seed and watched it sprout might feel that way, though for Rogosa, with her frizzy hair, wire-rim glasses, and loosely fitted farmer’s attire, the plants seemed to express something essential that had been lost. Now she was trying to bring it back. “I’m Jewish, I’m into history,” she explained with a laugh.
Sheaves of wheat in Eli Rogosa’s home
Her work had actually begun in Israel, where she had lived for fifteen years, working with Arabs and Israeli Palestinians on organic farming and sewage treatment projects. While there, she began looking for local flour to bake with and realized that nearly everything for sale was imported from the United States. Alarmed, she visited an Israeli gene bank to find out where local wheat was grown. She found out there wasn’t much, which was curious because she knew this was the area where wheat originated. “I ended up writing a proposal and I became the coordinator of this collaborative to restore ancient wheat in Israel,” she said. Through the water and farming projects, she had met Palestinian, Arab, and Jewish Ethiopian farmers who had saved their seed. These were the landraces she collected for the Israeli gene bank. “They saw it as conservation,” Rogosa said, but she saw the work as something more.
Back home, she began growing these ancient wheat varieties and found they were especially tolerant of extreme weather, and thrived without irrigation. These landraces were selected by farmers long before synthetic fertilizers and pesticides came into use, so were also better suited for organic agriculture. Rogosa spaced the plants far wider than usual, at twelve inches, rather than the tight spacing of intensive modern farming, relying in part on techniques described in nineteenth-century farm manuals. “You get these huge plants, up to six feet tall, with a lot of tillers,” she said, referring to the side shoots on which seed ears also develop. “They need room to grow.” When they were spaced closer together, the plants were more compact, with fewer tillers, which meant fewer seeds to select. She also mated these ancient varieties, trying to adapt them to the Northeast. “That’s one of my varieties over there,” she said, pointing to a thick sheaf of wheat hanging on her kitchen wall, its huge seed heads drooping over. These large plants had deep root systems, which could tap water sources in drought. Modern wheat has shallow root systems well suited to irrigation, but without a source of water, they might perish. “Unless we have flexibility and resilience, which comes from diversity in our gene pools,” she said, “we don’t have capacity to adapt.”
Seed samples and catalog on Eli Rogosa’s desk
As she said this, she was dropping seeds into small plastic envelopes that she planned to distribute at a farm conference in Maine. She encouraged me to take some home and plant them in my community garden plot in Washington. She riffled through her collection of boxes on a desk, choosing seeds that she thought might do well in the
mid-Atlantic. She gave me seeds grown by biodynamic German farmers; another selection from Ukraine; a French variety, known as Rouge Bordeaux, and another from France known as Mélange; and Canaan Rouge, a Maine variety bred from the Rouge Bordeaux and adapted to the Northeast. I thought she would charge me, since these small packets are quite pricey on her Web site. But she refused. “I’m happy to share my seeds with you,” she said. “We’re all looking for artisan bread, but the artisan grains are this enormous missing link that no one person can renew and restore.” She hoped I would join the movement.
• • •
So on a warm fall morning in late October, I visited my garden, located just south of a freeway in Washington, D.C., about a mile from the U.S. Capitol, and sowed the landrace winter wheat that Rogosa had provided. I might have been the only one growing wheat in the nation’s capital. I seeded two twenty-five-foot rows of Canaan Rouge. Then I planted two more rows of the French varieties she passed on to me, the Rouge Bordeaux and Mélange. I spaced the seed about six inches apart, which is quite wide, but Rogosa assured me that wider spacing would mean more vigorous growth. I returned every week as the weather turned cooler, and was disappointed. Only a handful of seeds had managed to germinate. Was it a problem with the seed or were animals eating it? Over the years we’d had a visible urban rat population in the park, plus it was filled with birds.
In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey Page 17