The only problem with Gelpe’s was that it was simply too good. I ate more of it than was right for me. After our second son was born, I found myself suffering from chronic fatigue and sought help from a chiropractor. She tested me for food sensitivities. Wheat was the number-one food she suggested I eliminate from my diet.
That night, as I sat in my kitchen, hoping that some steamed sweet potatoes might subdue my craving for a slice of Gelpe’s dense whole-wheat miche, I felt pretty sorry for myself. Bread was more than part of my diet—too many nights, it was my diet. On busy, rushed evenings, racing to sports practices and parents’ meetings or staying up late to make a deadline, I’d relied too often on a bagel or a heel of good rye, slathered with sweet butter and sprinkled with coarse salt. Like a friend who keeps you up late watching bad TV reruns, this habit was one I needed to give up.
Going wheat free opened up a range of good food I already knew I should be eating. I sought and introduced to my children more sweet potatoes, roasted and drizzled with balsamic vinegar; Yukon gold oven fries with aioli; and chili-spiked black beans. I became slightly thinner, but I also became a more interested and interesting cook, with a shelf full of vinegars and delicious oils. When we entertain, we’ll still fill a basket with delicious slices—but the focus of the meal won’t be the bread.
With the creation of our modern wheat, scientists avoided one disaster—they fed the world and made a product that could continue to do so for decades to come—but they did it by tricking nature. According to Jaradat, the work was unnecessary and harmful. He explains, “Wheat can evolve without the use of chemicals; it can adjust naturally to the soil conditions, withstand pests and diseases, and thrive in a variety of locations in countries throughout the world. Before modernization, farmers left the stalk on the ground after harvest. The plant’s roots helped stem erosion and as the plant decomposed it enriched the soil. Today’s fields are stripped and replanted with each new crop. The constant tilling and planting is responsible for the tremendous soil erosion and runoff.
“Today’s wheat is lazy. It’s spoiled, we feed it everything it needs,” he continued. “By tampering with its genetics, we’ve created a food that provides farmers and manufacturers with maximum yield at the lowest cost.” Besides bread, crackers, pasta, etc., this new modified wheat is also processed into a cheap stabilizer used in luncheon meat, hot dogs, salad dressings, and even self-basting turkey.
“But more dangerous than anything else, modern wheat is unsustainable,” Jaradat contends. “We are witnessing the near elimination of diverse strains of wheat, vital to human and environmental health and food security. It requires tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals to grow and process this crop.” Arguing the need to reintroduce heritage strains, Jaradat added, “The recent genetic management of this crop has shifted to the hands of industrial breeders, but with hidden costs. Modern wheat has evolved through a genetic bottleneck of breeding for uniformity and high yield; it’s dwarfed and designed for ease of harvest with goliath combines and dependent on chemical protectants to survive. In contrast, the landrace wheat evolved in low-input fields. These strains are genetically diverse, are better adapted to organic systems, are the robust survivors of adversity, and have greater adaptability to weather extremes. Research suggests that landrace wheat strains are more digestible for gluten sensitivities, too.
“Diversity is essential to our food security, especially as the climate becomes unstable and as pests and weeds evolve to withstand the chemicals used to control them,” Jaradat said. Because commercial wheat dominates the market, it’s difficult for farmers to find heritage grains. Jaradat encourages farmers to save the seeds of their grains to share with the Heritage Grain Conservancy community seed bank. “We are continuing on-farm seed saving for evolutionary conservation of these wheat landraces,” Jaradat said. “This research has direct application to farmers. We don’t want to work in isolated labs. We need the cooperation of farmers to increase the genetic diversity for stable crops.”
“Seed saving is my most radical activity to date,” Bryce Stephens, of Jennings, Kansas, said over the grinding gears of machinery when he answered the phone. Working with the Heritage Grain Conservancy, Stephens plants the same varieties of wheat that the Mennonite women carried to Kansas in the hems of their skirts, Turkey red. It’s bronze, whiskered, and grows a majestic six feet tall across Stephens’s one thousand acres of the high plains the Cheyenne call toxto, “place of freedom.”
Stephens’s passion for this wheat pulsates through the receiver, which he was cradling against his shoulder the day I called, while installing a part under his tractor. A self-described two hundred and fifty pounds and six feet tall, this Vietnam vet turned antiwar protester is booming and loquacious. He was involved in the American Indian Movement’s armed conflict at Wounded Knee in 1973, and is quietly proud of the FBI’s prolonged interest in him.
A participant in a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto’s GMO patent-infringement claims moving through the courts in Washington, DC, Stephens is working to keep Monsanto from creating genetically modified wheat. So far, resistance among Canadian and US growers, plant scientists, and activists has been high enough to stave the development off. That is, until the spring of 2013, when, on an unnamed farm in Oregon, a farmer discovered an unrecognizable plant in his wheat field. The USDA labs confirmed this was a strain of wheat created by Monsanto in early 2000, tested in authorized fields. No one could say where this GMO wheat had come from. At stake is the $8 billion wheat export business; over sixty countries refuse to purchase GMO products.
If it is approved by our government and introduced in our fields, GMO wheat will enter rotations with corn, canola, and soybeans, which all require massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. US government studies have documented that GMO crops require 30 percent more chemicals than non-GMO crops. While by weight, the world’s farmers produce more corn than wheat, most of that crop ends up feeding animals or in the gas tanks of cars as ethanol. As a food, wheat remains the biggest crop. The Plains states produce about 10 percent of the world’s wheat.
“Wheat kernels have been saved by farmers to plant and trade since the beginning of civilization. Why should a corporation own what farmers have been relying on and sharing for centuries?” Stephens asked. “I’m interested in maintaining the integrity of these seeds so that all organic farmers have access.” His daughter, Demetria, grabbed the phone and added, “It just seems natural to me that we would save our seed year after year. We’ve never felt the need to purchase seed.”
Turkey red wheat, planted by a handful of growers like Stephens, is in an “identity-preserved” program critical to the wheat-revival effort supported by researchers and conservationists like Jaradat. During a recent drought, Turkey red outperformed modern varieties thanks to its strong, deep root structure. Its tall height helps it compete with weeds, making fertilizers and herbicides unnecessary. In growing this grain where it has not been grown in living memory, farmers like Bryce Stephens and Father Mark Stang, of Long Prairie, Minnesota, are propagating landraces, the focus of Jaradat’s research, plants that develop and adapt to their environment naturally. In contrast to agribusiness-bred plants, landraces draw on a rich gene pool to become resilient despite the threats of drastic weather events, unstable climate, diseases, and pests.
Father Mark often weaves lessons from his fields into his Sunday sermons at St. Mary of Mt. Carmel Church. Easygoing and in his mid-forties, he is as comfortable in jeans and flannel as he is in his clerical collar. Father Mark grew up farming with his father on land that supported a family of nine kids. “My granddad planted it in the 1940s, but by the