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Artisanal baker Eli Rogosa. Photo by Amy Toensing

The December issue of Smithsonian magazine features a story about heirloom wheat and the people who grow and bake with it. Eli Rogosa, director of the Heritage Wheat Conservancy and an artisanal baker, talks about her work in the field and in the kitchen. At the end she shares her recipe for a heritage bread.

Q: Why did you decide to devote your time to heritage varieties of wheat?

A: The silent crisis of the loss of genetic diversity of one of the world’s staple food crops is very serious—and very exciting, because there are still a lot of varieties that are in gene banks.

Q: What is your most memorable experience baking?

A: I’m working with a species of grain called einkorn, which is getting a lot of publicity these days because it’s safe for those with gluten allergies. Einkorn was originally domesticated in the Tigris/Euphrates/ancient Mesopotamian region, which today is Iraq. So I went down to the local Iraqi bakery recently and I said, “Would you like to try this bread in your bakery?” They were really excited, so I brought them some einkorn flour and they baked traditional Iraqi flatbread. They just couldn’t believe it. They said, “This is real bread, this is what it’s supposed to taste like.” The traditional methods that they bake with were the ways that einkorn was baked with for millennia. Now I think there’s five halal stores in the city where I was, Portland Maine. They just want to buy einkorn, so it’s in all the stores.

Q: Are there differences between working with flour milled from heritage wheats and standard supermarket flour?

A: It’s a whole different ballgame to buy from a local wheat grower rather than to buy from the store. The modern wheats are completely uniform. If you buy something from the supermarket, you know exactly what to expect. But if you buy a local variety from a local grower, it’s going to reflect the fertility, the variety, the weather. That explains why breads from different countries are so different.

Q: Can you substitute flour made from heritage grains for supermarket flour?

A: You can substitute. You probably might need a little less water, a little more salt because it’s lower gluten. But I just bake bread normally. I bake bread in the morning for my husband. Instead of doing a lot of kneading, I make my dough the night before and just let it sit and it gets a little bit fermented, like a light sourdough. So I think time is a factor if you make your dough the night before and then bake it the next day. It’s really easy.

Q: How much experimentation does it take before you get a bread recipe just right?

A: I don’t use recipes. I’m a creative baker—it’s easy to bake. I’ve read all the books, but I didn’t learn baking from books; I learned it from illiterate grandmas in Third World countries. Baking is like a natural process. You feel when it works right and follow the dough, and it’s very liberating when you bake by feel and consistency of the dough and not measuring. You have to play around to feel comfortable and familiar with what works.

Q: What advice would you offer to someone interested in growing heritage wheats in his or her own back yard?

A: Find a local source for heritage wheat seeds, or contact me at growseed.org, and I’ll send you samples. It’s easy. Wheats are a grass. It’s the easiest crop I’ve grown on our farm. I grow only winter wheat, which means I plant it in September and harvest in July. I find that the winter wheats are better adapted, and in the spring they just shoot up and they compete with weeds, so your weeding pressure is really decreased.

Recipe for einkorn sprout bread, by Eli Gogosa

(Makes two loaves)

STEP 1: ADVANCE PREPARATION

Five days before baking, mix 1 tablespoon (T) non-chlorinated water (spring water, distilled water, well water or rain water, NOT tap water) with 1 T einkorn flour in a bowl. (Both einkorn flour and einkorn grain are available at natural foods stores or from growseed.org. Optional: Add 1 T cultured butter milk to encourage fermentation.) Cover but don’t refrigerate. Each following day, mix in another 1 T einkorn flour and 1 T non-chlorinated water.  Keep the bowl at room temperature until the mixture has started to bubble. This is sourdough starter. Two days before baking, soak 1 cup einkorn grain in the non-chlorinated water overnight in a covered bowl. The next day pour off the water. Rinse daily and keep covered. The grains might start sprouting rootlets.

STEP 2: MAKING THE BREAD DOUGH

In a food processor, blender or hand-crank food mill, blend the soaked grains briefly so they are the consistency of chunky oatmeal. Mix the starter, 1 cup blended grain and 4 cups einkorn flour, 1 teaspoon (t) sea salt and 1 3/4 cups warm water. (If you are concerned that you may not have sufficient starter, add 1 t yeast. Optional: For sweeter, festive bread, add some chopped dates and walnuts to taste and 1/2 cup maple syrup in place of 1/2 cup water.) Add more flour if the dough is too sticky or more water if too dry. Knead the dough until it forms a ball that springs back when you poke it. Shape the dough into two loaves—flatbreads, boules or standard bread-pan loaves. Refrigerate overnight in bread pans or on a baking sheet greased with olive oil and dusted with einkorn flour.

STEP 3: BAKING

The next day, let the two loaves warm to room temperature for 1/2 hour. Dust the surfaces of the loaves with einkorn flour. Slash if desired. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Turn down the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the loaves at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until the tops of the crusts are golden brown. Turn the oven off, but keep the loaves inside for another 1/2 hour before taking them out.

These artifacts are thought to have been offerings from the earliest farming communities that lived in this area. Chemical analysis of charred food residues preserved inside a number of vessels shows they were used for processing freshwater fish, which supplemented their fledgling agricultural economy. Image courtesy of Anders Fischer.

When humans made the switch from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, it was a revolutionary transition. Archaeologists have linked the change to population growth and a wider variety in diet. Traditionally, archaeologists saw this as a relatively instantaneous changeover, with societies adopting livestock and cereal cultivation as well as the use of ceramic containers to process and store foodstuffs. But using pots as an indicator of when this shift took place is problematic, especially given evidence that even foraging societies used vessels. Now a new study of pots paints a different picture of this pivotal point in human history and suggests that the shift to farming was not as rapid as previously thought.

Researchers from the University of York and the University of Bradford focused their attentions on potsherds from inland and coastal settlements around the Baltic. Farming has been practiced there since about 4,000 B.C. Human remains from before this point in time show a diet heavy in marine life, while later remains indicate a diet heavy in land-based foods. So if anything, it’s also a region that could support the rapid change view. In an analysis of lipids (fats and other molecules) on 133 potsherds, the researchers found that even after the practice of domesticating plants and animals was well in place, people still continued to forage for food in nearby waterways. So even though the know-how was there, the cultural shift to relying on farmed foodstuffs was much more gradual.

A male Atlantic salmon. Image courtesy of Flickr user U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region

Salmon farming has received its share of criticism for being detrimental to the environment. Many salmon are raised in net pens, which allow fish waste, chemicals and farming byproducts to spread into the wild. There’s also the threat of pathogens that could thrive in crowded pens and escape to harm natural fish populations. One disease, infectious salmon anemia, was once thought to be a problem exclusive to farmed Atlantic salmon. A new study by a group of researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia has found that this influenza-like virus is infecting naturally ocurring salmon populations.

Infectious salmon anemia was first observed 1984 and occurs most often in overcrowded, filthy salmon pens. As the name suggests, the virus causes anemia, the condition in which a body doesn’t have enough healthy red blood cells to deliver oxygen to its tissues. Infected fish may exhibit symptoms—such as pale gills and loss of appetite—or they may outwardly seem perfectly fine. While the disease doesn’t pose any risks to humans, it can wipe out upwards of 70 percent of a farmed salmon population.

This is the first time the disease has been found in wild fish off the coast of North America. After observing a decline in the salmon population off the British Columbia coast, researchers collected 48 specimens for study and discovering two juvenile fish infected with the disease. While there is currently no evidence to definitively link fish farming to the presence of salmon anemia in wild populations, there could be devastating ramifications, not just for the fishing industry, but for the wildlife that depends on salmon for food. “It’s a disease emergency,” James Winton, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s fish health section, told the Associated Press. “We’re concerned. Should it be introduced, it might be able to adapt to Pacific salmon.”

Brown rice. Image courtesy of Flickr user ayayan.s

This year’s Nobel Prize winners were honored for, among other things, discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace; their work on women’s rights and peace-building in Liberia; and advances in the understanding of immunity. But in years past, a number of winners have been recognized for food-related achievements—making food safer, more available or just increasing our knowledge of it. Here are five notable cases:

1904: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Better known for his research with canines to explain conditioned responses—training dogs to salivate when they heard a sound they had come to associate with food—Pavlov won the Nobel for his earlier work on the digestive systems of mammals. Before he devised a way of observing the digestive organs of animals, there was only a limited understanding of how the stomach digests food.

1929: Christiaan Eijkman, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Eijkman and his co-awardee, Sir Frederick Hopkins, were honored for discovering of the importance of vitamins in health and disease prevention. In the 1890s, Eijkman, of the Netherlands, studied the disease beriberi in the then–Dutch colony of Java, where he made the connection between a diet lacking rice bran (the bran had been removed to make the rice last longer) and high rates of beriberi. This was an important milestone in the eventual formation of the concept of vitamins, though the word itself wasn’t coined until 1911.

1945: Lord John Boyd Orr, Nobel Peace Prize
Orr, of Scotland, devoted much of his life to improving world nutrition and to the equitable distribution of food. After helping shape Britain’s wartime food policy, Orr became director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a World Food Board in 1947. Two years later, by which time he had retired to a lucrative business career, his efforts were recognized by the Nobel committee.

1970: Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize
Possibly no one on this list had as great an effect on so many people as Borlaug, the American considered the father of the “Green Revolution” for his development of methods that vastly improved yields and disease-resistance in crops. Although some of his methods were later criticized for having a negative environmental impact, they greatly increased food security in poor countries such as India and Pakistan. The debate over how to balance environmental concerns with the food needs of a growing world population continues today.

Farming and new media are not mutually exclusive. Image courtesy of Flickr user IRRI Images

Conscientious eaters want to know all about where their food came from, how it was grown and who grew it. Part of the appeal of farmers’ markets is getting face time with those who spend their days with their hands in the dirt. Suddenly, consumers want to have a “relationship” with their small-scale farmers, ranchers and cheese makers — people who once toiled in obscurity. (This is still usually the case in the larger agricultural industry, where the vast majority of our food comes from.)

One unintended consequence is that, now, personality counts. A grower with a winning smile or the gift of the gab may get the sale even when the wares at the next table are just as fresh and succulent-looking. There’s a pair of young, attractive male farmers in my area whose tent always seems to be crowded with female customers.

Now, technology that wasn’t around a decade ago—blogs, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter—is taking the farmer-consumer relationship to another level. It’s how CSA members can find out what’s likely to be in their share soon, get recipes for what to do with bok choy or celeriac, and read cute little stories about how the farm animals are doing. The farmer gets to communicate with current and potential customers, and office-bound readers get to live vicariously through their computer or phone screens.

Ree Drummond, who has parlayed her rural life as the wife of a cattle rancher into a wildly successful site called The Pioneer Woman, gives a glimpse of the possibilities for savvy online self-marketing. She doesn’t quite qualify as a rancher herself—although she often rides along and helps out with the chores, she seems to usually have a camera in hand—but her gorgeous photographs and folksy anecdotes about life on the range are about as good an advertisement as any for making a living off the land.

Most farmer blogs are far simpler (and, some might argue, more authentic). The Dairyman’s Blog, written by a young Alabama dairy farmer, offers “MooTube” videos of life on the farm. Self-described farm wife Jill Heemstra focuses on the funny side of farming at Fence Post Diaries, with blog titles like “You Might Be a Farmer’s Wife If…” (example: “…you use the phrase ‘semen tank’ in casual conversation”).

Blogs and tweets are also providing a new platform for farmers of all stripes to express their views on agriculture and politics. Missouri hog farmer Chris Chinn advocates on her blog for fewer government regulations and conventional farm practices that she feels have gotten a bad rap, while small-scale farmer Gavin Venn tweets as @morethanorganic with his thoughts on animal welfare and genetically modified foods.

Social media has become a stand-in for the kind of conversations farmers have always had in person, about the weather, what’s growing, advice and opinions. The Twitter hashtag #agchat encompasses discussions of parenting on the farm, venting about too much or too little rain, links to agriculture news and just about everything else of interest to the ag-minded.

But tweeting from the tractor has its perils. As Stewart Skinner, a Canadian pig farmer with the Twitter handle @ModernFarmer tweeted recently about his gadget, “The blackberry can’t stand up to the rigors of the barn. RIM needs to come up with a smartphone for farmers.”