In the US, the flour-milling industry was founded by Cadwallader Washburn, the son of a lumber baron in Maine, who recognized the power of the Mississippi River’s falls on a visit following his service in the Civil War. He built his first mill on St. Anthony Falls in present-day Minneapolis, for the Minneapolis Milling Company. It sported the new “Middlings Purifier”—a vibrating sieve that processed whiter flour at record speed and produced a wildly popular product. But success came at a cost; the purifier created hazardous amounts of combustible flour dust that would explode when ignited by a spark from machinery. On May 2, 1878, a thunderous detonation leveled Washburn’s building as well as six neighboring mills, which covered a total of five city blocks.
It turned out the disaster was only a minor setback. The ruins provided Washburn with a blank slate to build a new roller mill using state-of-the-art Hungarian technology. To this end, he dispatched his engineer, an Austrian immigrant, to Budapest. William de la Barre secured a job on the night shift of the city’s newest mill and secretly sketched its machinery. On his return to Minneapolis, he designed the nation’s first roller mill for Washburn-Crosby, which later became General Mills. Washburn’s chief rival, Charles Pillsbury, quickly followed suit with his own roller mills and Minneapolis became home to “The World’s Best Flour—Gold Medal.”
Not everyone was eager to embrace this new “pure” white flour, however. Just as Washburn was building his “monster mill,” Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, was denouncing the roller millers for “putting asunder what God has joined together.” Graham hit his soapbox lecturing against the practice of removing the wheat germ from the flour. To him, wheat was “a natural food that the Creator has designed for man in such a condition as is best adapted to the anatomical structure and physiological powers of the human system.” Graham’s legacy, a small legion of supporters who promoted whole-grain “Graham flour,” gave voice to the idea that traditional American food, homemade and eaten on farms, was the “natural,” best choice.
The minister created the Graham cracker as a health food, fundamental to his Graham diet. The original cracker was a mix of unbleached wheat flour and coarsely ground wheat bran and germ, mildly sweetened with a touch of honey. No doubt Graham would have been appalled by today’s commercial crackers, made of refined, bleached white flour and plenty of refined white sugar.
By the late 1930s scientists had confirmed whole-grain flour’s benefits, supporting Graham’s claims. In response, consumers pressured companies to refortify white flour with niacin, iron, and vitamins B1 and B2. When wheat is milled by grindstone, the vitamins contained in the hard wheat germ along with the fiber remain intact. Whole-wheat flour, unlike white flour, is not bleached or aged with chemicals that also affect vitamin content. And yet, until this point the greatest technological advances made were in the milling and processing of commercial flour. The biggest change in bread was still to come—through a fundamental change in the wheat itself.
Shortly after World War II, Orville Vogel, a USDA scientist at Washington State University, created hybrid wheat by crossing American kernels from Turkey red and other tall varieties of wheat with low, shrubby Japanese wheat kernels provided to him by a US serviceman stationed in that country. This work inspired Dr. Norman Borlaug, a University of Minnesota geneticist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC) near Mexico City, to develop a new wheat plant. Charged with ending world hunger by increasing the yields of agricultural staples, Borlaug created a new variety of wheat that produced huge quantities of large kernels when heavily fertilized. Because this wheat variety grows low to the ground, it does not topple under its seed head’s increased weight and is far easier to harvest by machine.
Borlaug, known as the Father of the Green Revolution, was awarded the President’s Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. The extraordinarily productive wheat he developed now comprises more than 90 percent of the wheat grown worldwide and has essentially replaced most other strains of wheat in the US. According to Dr. Allan Fritz of Kansas State University, 98 percent of US flour is ground from this wheat.
But no safety tests were ever conducted on the new food. Scientists simply assumed that any variations in gluten content and structure or changes in the wheat’s enzymes and proteins would not affect humans. Yet analyses of the proteins in the new wheat hybrid show that 5 percent of the new wheat’s proteins are not present in either parent. It is a different plant altogether. It is a plant that is far needier than its ancestors.
The hybridized strains of modern wheat are sterile and unable to pollinate naturally, and so require chemical agents to reproduce. In addition, they need excessive amounts of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides (such as the extremely toxic sodium azide), and fungicides. Farmers apply hormone-like substances or “plant growth regulators” to control time of germination and strength of stalk.
The harvested wheat is sprayed with chemical “protectants” and its storage bins are doused with insecticides. The grain is then dried at very high temperatures, which diminish its protein, nutritional properties, and baking qualities. Next it is ground at high speeds that destroy vitamin E content and treated with conditioners and preservatives to prevent sticking. Wheat and flour were the first foods the Food and Drug Administration approved for irradiation, using high-speed electron beams to eradicate pests, in 1963. Studies show, however, that irradiated foods may disrupt lymph cells in humans.
Whether whole wheat is healthier than white flour is irrelevant: both are ground from the same strain of hybrid wheat. The changes in this wheat’s gluten structure are now being blamed for the digestive problems of over eighteen million Americans. Wheat is the only grain that contains glutenin and gliadin, the essential molecules that form gluten, an elastic material that gives bread dough its viscosity, thickness, and extensibility—in short, its muscular strength. The word means “glue” in Latin, and in China, gluten is referred to as the “muscle of flour.” When professional bakers talk about the dough’s “strength” they mean the amount of gluten it contains. To help dough rise, the flour’s gluten traps the carbon-dioxide bubbles created through the yeast’s activity. High-gluten dough will yield a lofty loaf with a crispy crust.
This new form of gluten is being blamed for wheat allergies as well as celiac disease. According to Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee internist, the hybridization efforts to confer baking and aesthetic characteristics on flour have generated numerous changes in wheat’s gluten-coding genes. “These genetically transformed glutens are thought responsible for triggering celiac disease and many of the odd health phenomena humans suffer,” Davis has said. After putting himself on a wheat-free diet, Davis lost weight and claims to feel energized. His patients make the same claims. Yet this new wheat may not be the only villain in today’s flour. Chemicals—fungicides, leavening agents, whiteners, texture-enhancing products and the soy they contain—are probably harmful, as well.
It is difficult to separate the dangers of modern wheat from those of commercial bread. The most recent studies suggest that “vital wheat gluten,” or wheat protein added to commercial bread dough to create a loftier and more tender loaf, may also be responsible for the spike in wheat allergies. Nearly twenty million people in the US contend that they experience distress after eating products containing wheat and one-third of American adults say they are trying to eliminate it from their diets.
I am one of those Americans, though stepping away from bread