The International Politics of Wheat -- a first glance

Wheat sheaf, La Grassa Pasta, Anchorage, Alaska.

One of the reasons that wheat can be endlessly interesting is that it is one of the world's three or four major food crops, and is constantly affected by events that seem very far removed. I came across an interesting set of side notes about wheat today that illustrated this well.  An article about the Svalbard international seed bank from the Washington Post re-published just recently in the Alaska Dispatch News mentioned that  for the first time some boxes of seeds were being withdrawn :

"But just seven years after the vault's steel doors first opened, admitting contributions from seed banks around the world into the frozen sanctuary, 130 of the boxes are being recalled.

They belong to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, which until two years ago stored thousands of seeds in a vault in Aleppo, Syria, according to Reuters. The ICARDA center, like so many other important institutions in the civil war-ravaged nation, was displaced by the conflict, and, in the process, 325 boxes of duplicate seeds were sent to Svalbard for safekeeping. Now resettled in Beirut, the organization wants some of its samples back."

The ADN/Washington Post article links to a 2007 New Yorker article about the Svalbard seed bank that says, "During the United States-led invasion of Iraq, in March, 2003, the looting of Iraq’s national archeological museum received considerable attention, but almost no one noted that the country’s national seed bank was destroyed. The bank, in the town of Abu Ghraib, contained seeds of ancient varieties of wheat, lentils, chickpeas, and other crops that once grew in Mesopotamia. Fortunately, several Iraqi scientists had placed samples of the country’s most important crops in a cardboard box and sent them to an international seed bank in Aleppo, Syria. There they sit, on a shelf in a cold room, waiting for a time when Iraq is stable enough to store them again."

Experimental wheat being grown at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

So, rather than Iraq becoming stable enough to retrieve its samples and re-store them in Abu Ghraib [or elsewhere], Aleppo became so unstable that its scientists fled to Beirut in Lebanon (with its own not-so-distant history of war). Who knew, in 2007, that Syria, eight years later, would be deeply enmeshed in one of the worst of the civil wars in the Middle East? Luckily, some of the Syrian wheat seeds (but who knows about the Iraqi wheat?) were sent to Svalbard. Now the Syrian scientists apparently believe that it is a long time before they will be able to return to Aleppo, so they want to take back some of the Syrian seeds from Svalbard and begin experimenting with them in Lebanon. 

Do the seeds belong to the scientists who sent them to Svalbard? Or to the research facility in Syria? Or someone else? Keeping track of wheat's political life turns out to be at least as complex as trying to figure out the connections in the lives of the millions of microbes that make up the biome surrounding each grain.

Bob Van Veldhuizen, small grains research specialist ant University of Alaska Fairbanks, holds some of his experimental wheat seeds.




All photos by Teri White Carns, 2015.

Wheat: How it tamed dogs, our best friends

Wheat: How it tamed dogs, our best friends

                                          Photo by Micki Glueckert, April 2013, copyright, all rights reserved.




Wheat gets credit for many aspects of civilization – wars over territory, the creation of cities, the development of religion, and more. New research says that wheat should get credit  for another part of civilization that most of us wouldn’t expect – the domestication of dogs.

A Nature journal article by Swedish researchers described the co-evolution of dogs’ and humans’ digestive systems. Both turned from a meaty diet to one based on grains about 10,000 years ago. Central to the ability to live on wheat, barley, and other grasses was the development of digestive enzymes, specifically amylase, that could process starches. The researchers will be exploring the dietary evolution further, along with changes in dogs’ brains that allowed the canines to befriend people and tolerate living among them.

Both humans and dogs now have genes that permit the creation of more amylase in the pancreas than their ancestors had. The enzyme helps with three key steps in the digestion of starch: breaking down large carbohydrate molecules into smaller pieces; chopping those pieces into sugar molecules; and aiding the absorption of those molecules in the intestine. Humans have additional amylase in their saliva, which lets the digestive process begin in their mouths, encouraging chewing, and making digesting food, especially grains, easier

A Washington Post article reviewed the research, with Raymond Coppinger, emeritus professor of biology and expert on dog evolution from Hampshire College in Massachusetts saying, “Humans had nothing to do with it . . . There was a new niche that was all of a sudden available for somebody to move into. Dogs are selected to scavenge off people.”

Domesticated dogs still thrive on grains, although many dog owners and food purveyors these days promote grain-free meals as more “natural.” Dog treats in particular typically include wheat, oats, barley or rice. Pup-peroni, a brand favored by my sister who breeds and raises Australian Shepherds on her show poultry farm in Michigan, produced the photo at the beginning of this post.