The story of wheat

I have just purchases a grain mill to make my own flour and hence the interest in this fascinating story.

                 The Story of Wheat

In the 'old days' you would take your wheat to a miller, he would grind it and you would take it home and bake delicious nutritious bread. But there was a problem.  Wheat berries would last till the next harvest and well beyond, but once you ground the wheat seeds into flour you had to use it or refrigerate it.  The oil in the germ was spread through the flour, the wheat was no longer alive and over time, it went rancid..... so, in the summer, you ground only enough wheat at one time - for a month at the most.
 

Wheat  was full of essential minerals, vitamins and oils that mainly came from the germ* (80%) plus some nutrients and valuable bulk from the bran. In a minute you will see why I said "was".

 

 

*The germ is the little embryonic plant inside the grain.  It is only about 20% of the weight of the wheat seed (berry) but contains 80% of the nutrients.  It is most easily seen in a dicot like a bean rather than in a monocot like wheat.  Soak a bean in water overnight and then dissect it.  You will see the little embryonic plant between the two sides of the bean.

Since wheat was harvested in the fall with winter coming on, ground flour would last for a bit longer before going rancid as long as you kept it cold Since they didn't have refrigerators, they often had a cupboard in the pantry that was open to the outside with a screen over the 'window'.

The short shelf life of flour didn't please the business men who saw a great chance to make a profit.  They wanted to be able to buy large quantities of wheat from the farmers, mill it into flour and ship it far and wide.  Fortunately for them, but not for us, along came the roller mill.  This flattened the germ and allowed it to be sieved out of the flour and presto changeo, you had a commercial commodity that would last without refrigeration for a very long time.
 

This was the beginning of the end for wheat as the 'staff of life',

For some unfathomable reason, white flour was considered a great luxury so the millers also sieved out the bran which, in a roller mill, hadn't been ground to a powder.  Was this love of white flour possibly promoted by them??.  Out went almost all of the little nutritional value  left in flour and to add insult to injury, they worked out a way to bleach the flour.  All that was left was the bleached endosperm.  The bran and the germ was fed to animals who were better fed than us.

In the third world, many folks once ground their own flour and some still do so wheat was still a vital part of their diet but we in the west have found a way to even muck that up.

In the 1960's along came Norman Borlaug.  He was a plant breeder and got the Nobel prize for his work in the 70's.  He realized that you could increase the yield of the wheat plant considerably by conventional breeding but that the stalk of the wheat plant would have to be shorter so that wind would not flatten the more heavily laden wheat plant.  He bred not only wheat but rice and other grains to produce vastly greater yields.  In some cases he tripled the yield of these vital food sources.  So what's wrong with that?

Yields per wheat plant (and the other grains) were greatly increased but the nutrient content didn't keep pace.  In fact it stayed about the same per wheat plant as before.  Plant breeders call this 'nutrient dilution' and it occurs in many of our food plants.  Because of this, wheat and other grain contained as little as a third of the essential nutrients per kilogram as previous varieties.  Starvation was fended off (at least for a while) but people suffered from nutrient deficiency.  

 

To further add insult to injury, this was a period in which agriculture, based on manuring fields, leaving them fallow, adding organic material and so forth gave way to what we now call conventional agriculture (it is no such thing).  This so called conventional agriculture is based on adding chemical minerals to feed the plants.  This destroyed the soil and led to further decreases in the concentration of nutrients in our plants*.  

*Read What Your Food Ate by D. Montgomery for chapter and verse. 

As a side effect, it is estimated that with the cessation of famine in a number of third world countries, there are now 700m more people in the world than would have been the case without this agricultural revolution.

As Richard Dawkins said in  his book The Greatest Show on Earth,  "If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."

There is a get out of jail card to our increasing population.  If you want to see what it is, click here.  It is not relevant to this discussion.

 

But in the words of Dr Seuss, That is not all, no, that is not all.

Come forward to today.  Wheat berries last a very long time.  The wheat is alive (as you can see by sprouting some) and under good conditions will last for decades.  The farmer can use this to increase his profit.  If he has a silo, he can augur his wheat into the silo and sell,  either when the price is right, or when the grain merchant or miller has space in his silo to take his wheat.  But there is a problem. 

Along with the wheat he will be putting insects and insect eggs which are attached to the grain, into his silo.  So what does he do.  He dribbles a little organophosphate into the grain as it is augured into the silo.  Generally, the Active compound is Pirimiphos-methyl, often going under the brand name Actellic.  (There are many other products with the same active ingredient).

As one farmer told me, the grain merchant, not trusting the farmer, puts in a little more and the miller ditto.  This might have been tongue in cheek or perhaps not.

If you read the rap sheet on Pirimiphos-methyl, it talks about full body protection when using the product and one rap sheet suggested that if you have any choice, use something else.  That is how toxic this product is and it is put regularly into our wheat; a product that is not only the main ingredient of our bread but is in a vast array of other prepared products.  Do you ever get the impression that you know an awful lot of people with cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Info on organophosphates says that besides being carcinogenic, they cause dizziness, nausea, loss of memory, neuralgia (whatever that is) and a raft of other symptoms.

What is sad is that the use of Actellic is completely unnecessary.  Enlightened farmers, and there are precious few of them, pump Carbon Dioxide into their silos from the bottom.  It does the same thing.  Carbon dioxide is one and a half times as dense as air so by introducing it into the bottom of the silo, it pushes out the air.  Any aerobic organism dies.

It gets worse.  Many farmers 'roundup' their grain fields shortly before harvest.  This has two purposes.  First it brings the wheat plants to ripeness all at the same time.  The grain is not killed, only the plant. The second reason is to stop his harvester from plugging up with weeds.  Of course, if it is roundup-ready wheat, it is also 'rounduppppped' while it grows.  (Does New Zealand import roundup ready wheat for milling??).  And, of course the field is usually roundupped before planting.

We now have two carcinogens in our wheat and hence in our food chain.  Note that roundup has not been proven to be carcinogenic to humans.  No ethics committee would agree to the necessary experiment!!! However it has been shown to be carcinogenic in animals.  As the lawyers say, I rest my case.

 

In case you have taken my suggestion and got What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery, you will see what roundup does to soil organisms.

 

July 2022

Just the other day I 'stumbled' on the biocide regime of a wheat farmer growing milling wheat (for flour, not for animal feed)  Here it is in chronological order of what was used during the growing cycle.

 

* Field sprayed with Firebird herbicide @ 500ml/ha

* Trimec @ 3L/ha in spring plus Quantum140ml/ha and Starane @200ml/ha

* Karate insecticide @ 40ml/ha

* Regulate @ 1.75L/ha

* Stellar @ 750ml/ha

* Phoenix @ 1.5l/ha

* Transform @ 40ml/ha

* Proline fungicide @ 600ml/ha with Vimoy Iblon 1.5L/ha

* Amistar and Prosaro head wash fungicide @ 1L/ha

 

So wheat has  been bred to reduce nutrients, machined to further take out what was left, bleached (in the case of white flour) and  poisoned, all in the name of profits for the industrialists.  I wonder how many other products that we eat day in and day out have a similar story.  How many of these additives work synergistically to cause cancers.  For that matter are people really gluten intolerant or are some of them simply showing a reaction to the poisons they are ingesting.