In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (23 page)

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” position, 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.

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W
hile 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.

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.

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.”