On Heritage Wheat

Every domesticated plant has a history. Wheat is the longest of these conversations. By 1900, the United States grew several hundred named wheat varieties, each adapted to a particular soil, climate, or use. By 2000, the great majority were extinct or commercially dormant. The American wheat economy had consolidated around a handful of high-yielding, machine-harvestable varieties bred for industrial agriculture. The diversity that had defined wheat for ten thousand years was, in roughly four generations, almost entirely erased.

The varieties that dominate modern American agriculture were chosen primarily for traits other than flavor: yield per acre, disease resistance, short stems that resisted wind, and uniformity for high-speed mills. These varieties were extraordinary agricultural achievements, and they fed populations the older varieties could not have. They were also, in flavor terms, demonstrably plainer.

Beginning in the 1990s, a network of farmers, plant breeders, seed savers, and bakers began reviving the older varieties. The work was painstaking. Most existed only in seed banks, in small quantities. Bringing a variety back required years of small-scale grow-outs, partnerships with farmers willing to plant lower-yielding wheat, and partnerships with millers and bakers willing to work with grain that did not behave like commodity wheat.

The names read like a litany: Turkey Red, brought to Kansas by Mennonite immigrants from Russia in 1873; Sonora, brought to the Americas by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century; and Red Fife, a Canadian heritage variety from the 1840s. Each has a flavor profile distinct from modern commodity wheat. Turkey Red is rich and slightly sweet. Sonora is mild and lightly nutty. Red Fife is bold and bready. Bread can have varietal flavor, the way wine has varietal flavor, but only if the wheat itself is varietal.

There are honest objections: many heritage varieties are difficult to work with. Some have lower protein, weaker dough, or inconsistent gluten. The Mark of Provenance does not require heritage wheat. It requires only that the flour be traceable, the variety nameable, and the freshness honest. A modern variety grown by a named farmer can fully satisfy the Mark. What heritage wheat does, more powerfully than perhaps anything else, is restore the conversation. A bag of Turkey Red flour from a named farm and a named mill is, in itself, an argument that wheat is a real thing, grown by a real person, in a real place, with a real history.