Intelligent Plants: What's A Vegetarian To Do?

May, 2017

In a recent New Yorker article, Michael Pollan details major new scientific research suggesting that plants are far more sentient than most of us think. .Pollan writes:

The tips of plant roots, in addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, various toxins, microbes, and chemical signals from neighboring plants. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it. Roots can tell whether nearby roots are self or other and, if other, kin or stranger.[1]

            What does that mean for vegetarians? If that grain of wheat, or a potato, or the celery stalk, are all ripped from intelligent living beings, able to sense chemicals, sounds, and light, and react accordingly, should we be eating them? Should we eat only fruits, nuts, and seeds ­ things that the plant wants to have separated from itself, to further its species? 

What about fermentation? Should we allow other creatures -- bacteria, yeasts, and fungi, to partially digest our fruits and nuts before we eat them, as suggested by Sandor Katz and others? When we eat the pickles, chocolate, coffee, yogurt, bread, and the like, we are consuming whole clouds and colonies of these helpful creatures, some dead, some alive.

            But then ­ fruit. Should we even eat that? Eve ate of the fruit of the tree. Why was it a fruit, and not the leaf, or flower? Does this mean that fruit contains knowledge, like the pills that are distributed by the Highly Magnified and Thoroughly Educated Woggle-Bug in L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz?

            Of course, much of the human race is omnivorous, eating meat and dairy products, along with fruits and vegetables. As long as it’s not their next door neighbor, whether their food item is sentient or not generally doesn't factor into the decision to eat it. For some vegetarians and religious groups, however, the intelligence of the creatures or plants that became food is an important issue. For them, the new research might raise questions about the ethics of eating the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables daily.

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[1]  Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker, December 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant. 

“When food is scarce and acacias are overbrowsed,” Pollan writes, “the trees produce sufficient amounts of toxin to kill the [antelopes].”. A plant that can produce its own weapons to kill an attacker sounds intelligent to me. Even better, “Several species, including corn and lima beans, emit a chemical distress call when attacked by caterpillars. Parasitic wasps some distance away lock in on that scent, follow it to the afflicted plant, and proceed to slowly destroy the caterpillars.”[1]

            Plants use chemicals to communicate with each other, to defend themselves, and to attract creatures that will pollinate their flowers. An example is caffeine, which attracts bees but is toxic in larger doses to herbivores. Some plants deploy high doses of caffeine in seedlings, leaves, and stems as toxins to discourage creatures that might eat them. Citrus plants, including lemons, grapefruits and oranges take the opposite approach, storing caffeine in their flowers, where it draws honeybees. Like truckers favoring certain roadside diners, the bees remember those flowers for the caffeine boost, and return for subsequent doses.

            Another example of apparently intelligent behavior is the ability of mushrooms to create little winds that help spread their spores. Oyster and shiitake mushrooms release water vapour that cools the air around them, creating convection currents. This in turn generates miniature winds that lift their spores into the air.[2] Dr. Emilie Dressaire, professor of experimental fluid mechanics at Trinity College in Connecticut and co-author of the study, characterized the mushrooms as “ingenious engineers.” 

What about wheat – what is it up against?

These days, people often write about wheat’s evil qualities. Is wheat attacking us, poisoning us with phytochemicals and gluten so we will stop eating it as some writers seem to be saying? But today's wheats exist only because of human breeding. They could not live in the wild. Their seeds are too tightly encased in the hulls and can’t be spread by wind or other means. For wheat to poison the only species that can assure its continued existence would be suicidal.

For its short-term survival, wheat doesn’t depend entirely on humans. It has a few of its own weapons. Faced with a variety of menaces ­ in particular the larvae of Hessian flies ­ wheat produces lectin to protect itself. The lectin poisons the insects after the larvae dine on it. Wheat defends itself against aphids as well. Wheat seedlings that haven’t been chewed on by Hessian flies and other creatures attract aphids. But when the aphids show up, the seedlings give off chemical odors that repel them.

            Those aphids eating the wheat don’t give up so easily. They continue to eat it even while it is doing its best to drive them away. British scientists genetically modified wheat to repel the persistent aphids. Huw Jones, who co-authored a report on the genetically-modified wheat, said that the experiment didn’t work. “The real world is much more complicated that then laboratory,”[3] he said. To make matters worse, the government had to pay for security to protect the experimental fields from activists objecting to GMO research– about $2.9 million, three times the cost of the actual research. Others scientists are trying to change what happens in the aphids' digestive systems so that they die from eating wheat. They hope to find other mechanisms that will shift the natural balance in favor of the farmer. Aphids gotta eat too, son, but hopefully something else.

            Wheat doesn't just have to fight against insects and other creatures from the animal kingdom. Field bindweed is a pretty vine with a small white flower that is cousin to the morning glories and sweet potatoes.[4] It sends chemicals through its roots to inhibit the growth of nearby wheat.[5]  Winter wheat that grows earlier in the spring than other crops may hog the water and sunlight that the bindweed needs, and destroy its competitor. Farmers could plant winter wheat to free their fields of bindweed, then grow other crops on the cleansed land. 

The microbiome -- wheat and microbes serve each other

          At the cooperative end of the spectrum, wheat survives within in a complicated network of microbes. To survive, the microbes need the wheat that they are growing on as much as the wheat needs them. Some types of fungi grow on wheat roots from which they draw nutrients. In exchange, the fungi send out filaments to draw moisture that surrounds the wheat roots, acting as tiny irrigation systems. The wheat uses nutrients and minerals from soil set free by other neighboring microbes.

            One experiment showed how changing the wheat’s microbiome ­ its community of microbes ­ could allow wheat to grow in high heat and drought. Scientists sterilized wheat seeds to remove their existing microbiomes. They coated the seeds with microbiomes found on grasses that live near Yellowstone hot springs at temperatures of 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Wrapped in its new microbiome, the wheat thrived in the heat, and used 50% less water.[6] The lead researcher on this study, Dr. Regina Redman is co-owner of a company that suggested that working with microbiomes could eliminate the need for the genetic engineering that many people find objectionable. When she’s not engaging the microbiome, Dr Redman has hosted a cooking show in the Seattle area, scuba dives, travels to the Poles, and engages in 1,000 –mile bike rides.

            What about the effect of music on plants? Remember when we played Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix to our philodendrons in the 1970s? Does wheat respond to stimuli like this? Maybe it likes the lines from the musical ­ “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, Where the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet, When the wind comes right behind the rain.” The jury is out. Most of the research has not been done with randomly selected plant populations under strict scientific protocols, and it has not been replicated. The Canadian engineer, Eugene Canby  reported in the mid-1960s that wheat seeds exposed to Bach’s Violin Sonata produced 66% more grain.[7] Other researchers found that plants seemed to like classical music, and perhaps jazz and country. Many plants appeared to be averse to rock music in the various unscientific studies reported, so Jimi Hendrix is not advised.

            It does begin to look as if wheat, like other plants, can act with purpose to protect itself, and can shape conditions to improve its lot in life. Italian plant physiologist Stefano Mancuso, “a slight bearded Calabrian” from the University of Florence[8] says that because plants can’t run away and are likely to get eaten, they evolved modular structures, and “intelligence” or abilities to respond that are spread throughout their “bodies.” He compares this distributed intelligence to the Internet, which relies on billions of basic modules (individual devices) for its survival and health.[9] Mancuso says that “plants evolved to be eaten. It is part of their survival strategy.”[10]

Michael Pollan points out the controversy that surrounds Mancuso’s views and those of other plant physiologists. Some botanists dismiss Mancuso’s research and his interpretations of it as “foolish distractions” and products of “the nuthouse.”[11]  Pollan characterizes Mancuso as a poet-philosopher of the field, saying that proving the intelligence of plants might make people more humble about their place in the world. [12]

            One ethnobotanist wondered why people would want to attribute animal characteristics to plants: “They can eat light. Isn’t that enough?” he asked.[13] Although some scientists are working on ways to allow mammals to photosynthesize, others point out that mammals are constructed in ways that don’t readily lend themselves to supplying all of their nutritional needs with light.[14] And some ask, why bother? .“We have effectively outsourced the process of photosynthesis on a massive scale”[15] by creating agriculture. Wheat’s evolutionary strategies include photosynthesis, a variety of “intelligent” behaviors, cooperative relationships with microbes, and the ability to persuade humans to grow it for its gluten and nourishment.

 

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[1] Michael Pollan,     New Yorker, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant.

[2]  Allegra Staples, “How the Ingenious Mushroom Creates Its Own Micro-climate.” Dogo News, December 2013, https://www.dogonews.com/2013/12/2/how-the-ingenious-mushroom-creates-its-own-microclimate/page/3

[3] Jones, Huw, et al, “Designer Wheat Fails Anti-Aphid Field Test,” Scientific Reports, June 2015. https://phys.org/news/2015-06-wheat-anti-aphid-field.html.

[4]  Farmers don’t like bindweed. They consider Convolvulus arvensis to be one of the most noxious plants around. Horses that eat it get sick, it carries viruses that infect other plants, and it has a dozen different ways of invading and choking off other plants, both above and below ground. From a human standpoint, though, it has value. It may inhibit tumor growth, and may have other uses in medicine. http://naturalsociety.com/bindweed-extract-virulent-cancer-tumors/; https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/convolvulis-arvensis.

[5] The process is called “amensalism.” It is the same process that allows penicillin and streptomycin to inhibit the growth of bacteria.

[6]  Jeff Leach, “Microbiome Swapping: It’s All the Rage,” Human Food Project, August, 2012. http://humanfoodproject.com/microbiome-swapping-its-all-the-rage/

[7] Mazlan, “The Effect of Music on Plant Growth,” DenGarden, May 2017. https://dengarden.com/gardening/the-effect-of-music-on-plant-growth.

[8] Michael Pollan, The New Yorker.

[9] Jeremy Hance, “Are Plants Intelligent? New Book Says Yes.” The Guardian, August 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/aug/04/plants-intelligent-sentient-book-brilliant-green-internet.

[10] Pollan.

[11] Michael Pollan, Id.

[12] Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant The New Yorker, December 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant.

[13] Michael Pollan, Id.

[14] Ed Yong, “Will We Ever Photosynthesize Like Plants?” BBC Future, September 2012. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120906-will-humans-ever-photosynthesise

[15] Ed Yong.

 

From Kangaroo grass to wheat: Europe arrives in Australia

                      Wild emu at the edge of the New South Wales Outback (TWC).

Gifts of bread

Aboriginal stories credit Captain James Cook with bringing bread to Australia.  The stories tell about all of things that the mythical "Cook" brought: clothes, axes, animals, and bread and flour. Even though few tribes encountered  him in person, they still have Cook tales. The Rembarrnga people of Arnhem Land, where he never ventured, tell of the "real" Captain Cook, their ancestor law-man from millions of years ago. When that Captain Cook is killed, the story teller says that people tried to make him another way, and many "Captain Cooks" (i.e., white settlers) arrived.

              Captain Cook statue in Sydney, Australia (March 4, 2018) (TWC)

Cook's first expedition on the Endeavor in 1770 spent nearly two months in Queensland repairing the ship after it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.  Percy Mumbulla (an Aboriginal living in New South Wales) tells how Cook arrived at an island there in a large ship.  He gave Mumbulla's ancestors clothes and hard biscuits. After he left, the ancestors threw the gifts into the sea.  In his journals, Cook confirmed Mumbulla's report, saying that the Aboriginals saw the gifts as things "they had no manner of use for."

Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway of Queensland tell a second story of Cook's arrival bearing bread:  "Captain Cook and his group seemed to stand up out of the sea with the white skin of ancestral spirits, returning to their descendants. Captain Cook arrived first offering a pipe and tobacco to smoke (which was dismissed as a 'burning thing... stuck in his mouth'), then boiling a billy of tea (which was dismissed as scalding 'dirty water'), next baking flour on the coals (which was rejected as smelling 'stale' and thrown away untasted), finally boiling beef  (which smelled well, and tasted okay, once the salty skin was wiped off). Captain Cook and group then left, sailing away to the north, leaving Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway's predecessors "beating the ground with their fists, fearfully sorry to see the spirits of their ancestors depart in this way."

Growing wheat

The English soon returned to Australia in force. In 1788, England now bereft of American colonies to which it could ship criminals, landed a boatload of convicts at Botany Bay (Sydney).  Within a few months of their arrival, the prisoners turned farmers began to grow wheat. It took  several years of hunger while they learned how to farm, found decent soil, and tried planting new varieties of grain, but by 1799, the colony cultivated 6,000 acres of wheat.

                          A harvested field in New South Wales, February 2018 (TWC).

 As was the case around the world,  wheat culture in Australia evolved significantly during the 19th century. Early Australian farmers trying to clear ground and plant wheat lacked any sort of sophisticated equipment. Until the first plows arrived in 1797, the convicts and settlers used hoes and spades. The farmable areas near the coasts of the continent were forested, and often hilly. After cutting the trees, farmers hitched teams of oxen to wooden plows. An innovative farmer by the name of Mullens drove spikes into a V-shaped log, which his horse dragged along the plowed soil. The cultivator loosened the dirt and dropped the seeds in behind it. Iron plows didn't arrive until the 1850s.

A few years later, the Australian government paid Richard Bruyer Smith 500 pounds sterling for his invention of the "stump-jump" plow. Smith's plow went along as usual until it came to a stump or rock, at which point a hinge mechanism allowed the share and mould board to lift over the obstacle and come down on the other side. A new Australian wheat variety, "Federation," greatly increased production after 1903 when it was first marketed. New seeds, new machines, and the networks of railroads that were largely in place by the 1880s made wheat farming possible on a large scale.

                        Wheat sheaves, around 1884 - 1917, Sydney, Australia.



Cooking and eating wheat

     During the second half of the 1800s, English in Australia might well have turned to Eliza Acton's The English Bread Book for their bread recipes.

The English and other settlers adapted to their new environs. Occasionally they ate indigenous foods prepared in the same ways that the Aboriginals were accustomed to use them. Far more often than not, they substituted local foods in their own recipes because they couldn't get the ingredients that they usually ate. They cooked parrots instead of pigeons into soups, and prepared kangaroo meat as if it was beef or mutton.  Mrs. Lance Rawson's Antipodean Cookbook from 1895 gave recipes for flying fox (tastes like pork), bandicoots, and iguanas (tastes like chicken),  preparing them all using English techniques and seasonings.

                  Flying fox, Sydney Centennial Parklands, 2/10/2018 [TWC]

The indigenous peoples also adapted. They continued to prepare their traditional foods, often using English ingredients -- flour, sugar, the new meats such as mutton, beef, and pork -- to make their traditional dishes. More often, they substituted English foods for their own. The English foods tasted better to them, were far easier to get, and were recommended (or at times, required) by the English who ruled over them. Some English paid indigenous people who were working for them in English foods, including flour.

That's one part of the story.  In addition, it's also true that the English brought domesticated animals such as sheep and cattle and sent them out to graze  on the Aboriginal lands. Some of the grazed areas had been fields of murnong (yam-daisy tubers) that the Aboriginals managed by judicious use of fire to keep down pests and fertilize the soil. The English took over the grain fields and grass lands that the Aboriginals cultivated and used them for their own crops. Because many of the Aboriginal populations were decimated by Old World diseases, or by deliberate killings, they didn't have the ability to resist, or to continue to cultivate their own foods. English foods were all that were available in many places.

Damper

                   Classic damper, cooked in campfire ashes (which would be brushed off   before eating) [From 2012, in Yandeyarra, Wendy Wood)]

One new shared food was the flatbread called damper. People have made flatbreads with ground seeds and tubers  and water for thousands of years. They have cooked them buried in ashes or over hot coals. The English brought hard tack, a basic form of dried flatbread, to Australia. Once there, they created damper from the same ingredients that they used in hardtack, but prepared  it differently. William Bond, a baker in Sydney's Pitt Street, gets credit for baking the bread in the oven's ashes, "damping" them around the dough.

A 1946 recipe emphasized the kneading process for damper, which is strikingly different from hardtack. "Take 1 lb of flour, water and a pinch of salt. Mix it into a stiff dough and knead for at least one hour, not continuously, but the longer it is kneaded the better the damper. Press with the hands into a flat cake and cook it in at least a foot of hot ashes" (Bill Beatty, in the Sydney Morning Herald). Hard tack or ship's biscuit is not kneaded, merely mixed until the dough holds together, then flattened very thin, and baked for a long time at a low temperature until it dries out completely.

The Aboriginals claimed damper as their own as well. Before the English arrived, they made flatbreads by grinding Spinifex seeds, miller, Kangaroo grass, Bunya nuts, cattail tubers, and other local plants. mixing them with water, and baking the dough in ashes of a campfire. Today, as is shown in the next post, ground seeds and nuts are often mixed with wheat flour to take advantage of the fact that it has gluten and thus will rise when leavened.  In a bit of reverse cultural appropriation, the English version of damper is sometimes credited to the Aboriginals, as in this snack characterized as "Damper and Dip: An Aboriginal Tradition."

Australian damper with kangaroo (buffalo can be used instead) curry dip, Maria Rodale

The next post describes wheat in Australia's present, from damper to ramen to Aussie pies. The first post in the series is Who Invented Bread? at this link.

Alaska-grown whole wheat bread soon to be offered at Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop

Carlyle Watt, head baker at Fire Island demonstrating how to make foccaccia.

       Fire Island Bakeshop is adding new breads to its repertoire, made with wheat from Ben VanderWeele's farms in the Knik Valley. I wrote about VanderWeele's Farm's wheat last July.

Ben VanderWeele shows off a stalk of green wheat in July, 2015, about six weeks before harvest.

       Carlyle Watt, head baker at Fire Island, said that the new breads will go on to the menu in March, 2016, baked twice a week.  The VanderWeele wheat has about 10% to 12% gluten, perfect for Fire Island's whole wheat sourdough loaf. He also plans to use the Alaskan wheat in other breads, experimenting each week with new possibilities until he achieves a texture and taste that he likes.

Ben VanderWeele with a  handful of his 2014 crop of wheat.

      We talked about several aspects of wheat farming, and how they shaped Fire Island's choice to buy local. I asked about "organic" versus "natural, " knowing from my conversation with Ben VanderWeele last July that his wheat is not organic. Ben said at that time that Alaskan farmers have very few diseases in the soil, or natural pests, because agriculture is so new to the state. Although most of the Valley farmers supplement the minerals in the dirt with fertilizers, few use pesticides.

       Carlyle's view is that although he would prefer organic, VanderWeele wheat has a low "carbon footprint," no pesticides, supports the local economy, and helps create more sustainable food supplies for Alaska. He said that Fire Island weighs all of those factors and more in deciding how to most ethically choose their flours and other ingredients. Eventually, he thinks that tasting the freshness and unique flavors of the Alaskan wheat will increase the market, and in the long run make it more feasible for local farmers to grow organic foods.

Ben VanderWeele talking about growing wheat in Alaska.

     Carlyle showed me the bakery's table-top mill that they use to grind the wheat, as well as for other grains -- wheat's cousins, emmer, einkorn, and spelt, and for rye. We talked about the difference between fresh-milled flour, and flour that's been "aged" by sitting for a couple of weeks before being used for baking. Fire Island uses both types, for different purposes -- the aged flour is better for pastries and some types of breads because it gives an open and airy "crumb" (the interior texture of the bread). The VanderWeele wheat will be fresh-milled and used immediately to capture flavors that otherwise change as the flour ages. The bread's texture will be a little denser, but complex in taste.

Fire Island's table mill for wheat and other grains.

     The mill grinds two to three pounds of whole grains at a time, and takes a couple of minutes to turn them into flour. It gives a choice of grinds, from fine, for pastry, to a grind that maintains more of the bran. Carlyle said that if the grain is at room temperature when it goes into the mill, the flour comes out heated to about 100 degrees. To keep the flour from overheating, which changes the flavors, the bakery stores its grains out of doors in the winter and refrigerates them in the summer.

These are Fire Island's Rustic Wheat loaves; the new breads with local wheat will be similar.

      We discussed the sourdough starters, and how they interact with the different grains. Carlyle said that sourdoughs, also known as natural yeast starters, are individual. A batch of yeast starter fed on rye flour has a distinctly more intense smell (Carlyle describes this as "funky" which in the baking business tend to mean something earthy and dark) than one fed on whole wheat, or on white (wheat) flour. Of the three, the white flour starter is often almost sweet in scent, while the whole wheat and rye are sour and can be intense. Fire Island's sourdough whole wheat breads will be made with the whole wheat starter, to highlight the flavors. He added that Fire Island has a number of customers who are sensitive to commercial yeasts, but who are fine with the sourdoughs made with the natural yeasts.

Carlyle weighing chunks of dough to assure that each bread loaf is the same so that they bake evenly.

Ben VanderWeele's wheat near harvest time, September 5, 2015, with the Chugach Mountains in the background.

      Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop has two shops now, at 1343 G Street, near downtown Anchorage, and at 2530 East 16th Avenue, just off Lake Otis and DeBarr. They are open Wednesday through Sunday, 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; closed Monday and Tuesday.

Knik Valley Wheat: Haibun

                                   Wheat flowering, Ben VanderWeele's farm, July 21, 2015.

                                                                                               

bread in hand                                                 

farmer resting from sowing

wheat for next year’s loaf                                                      

           

                                                                                               

            Knik Valley wheat fields – they are harvested by farmers from the Midwest, from the Netherlands, from temperate climates, who brought their seeds to plant in the subarctic shadow of Pioneer Peak. The Denaina Athabascan/Ahtna Indians who came a thousand years ago after the Yupik/Chupik people called the area Benteh (many lakes). They fished and hunted around Eklutna, Niteh, and their other villages for eight hundred years before the Russian Orthodox missionaries came looking for souls in 1840, and the American and European adventurers came seeking gold thirty years later. The Indians knew nothing of grains or bread until the Russians brought them Holy Communion and the Sourdoughs brought them fry-bread.

Saint Herman of Alaska, the first Russian Orthodox priest to stay in the state; he settled off Kodiak Island.

            The soil into which the Knik Valley wheat sinks its shallow roots is eolian – wind-blown, loess – dust particles from the rocks ground away by the glaciers. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the Mesozoic Era began, bringing dinosaurs, ferns, forests, the grassy ancestors of wheat, and the first mammals. Pangaea was breaking up. Late in the Mesozoic the tectonic plates were carrying the continents to their present places on the earth, pushing ocean floors up against the continental plates to build the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Alaska Range, and the Chugach mountains that frame the Knik River Valley. The earth is still restless today, pushing the mountains higher and reshaping the valleys.

            In those hundreds of millions of years, seas rose and fell, covering much of North America. The sea creatures died, settled into the dirt and detritus that collected underwater, and slowly packed together into rocks. When the ocean floor began crunching against the continental plates, the beds of bodies and sediments pushed up and shaped the mountains, mixed in with rocks spewed out from the hearts of volcanoes. In science-speak, “The Mesozoic lithologies, primarily marine sediments and volcanics, have been intensely metamorphosed, folded, and faulted and have been intruded by small to moderate-size igneous [rocks from the volcanoes] bodies.”  

                                          Knik Glacier.

               

            Then the glaciers arrived, covering and uncovering, and re-covering the river valleys, wearing the rocks into soils made of silt and sand. Shallow-rooted white spruce, large cottonwood trees, and balsam poplar forested the flat lands in the river valleys, with shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses on the slopes. The farmers who came in the early 1900s stripped the land of its trees, and sowed wheat into long straight rows stretching from their roads to the feet of the mountains. 

Ben VanderWeele's wheat, August 2, 2015, Knik Valley with Chugach Mountains in the distance. 

            Today winds blow off the Knik and Matanuska glaciers, lifting the soil made of ancient ocean lives from the bare fields in late winter and laying it down on forests to the south and west. The farmers must fertilize what’s left, and irrigate in the spring and summer to make up for the sparse rain. Sixteen inches in a good year, it falls in August and September when the grain should be drying for harvest. Even the nineteen hours of sunlight in June and July doesn’t warm the air enough to make up for the cooling winds off the glaciers and the nearby ocean. It’s not ideal for wheat, but the stubborn farmers grow it nonetheless.

BenVanderWeele's wheat -- the rows in the middle ground (wild grasses in the foreground). Snow on the Chugach Range. September 5, 2015.

heavy brown wheat heads

too wet to harvest this week

snow on the Chugach

today’s Communion

wheat rows in slanting light

of September dusk

                                   

                                        Ben VanderWeele in his wheat fields, July 21, 2015.




Ben VanderWeele photos by TW Carns.

Alaska State Fair, Saturday afternoon

                                                     

crowds running to cars

Ferris wheel turning beyond

gold wheat bent by rain

            The Ferris wheel is halfway to the top when the rain starts. I’m strapped into one of the chairs by myself, dangling, swinging, sulking as the wheel halts, listening to my stomach growl. I was too busy arguing with Dad about something dumb to eat lunch. Down below the carnies are letting people out, but we are just getting started. We’ll be here a long time. I’ll shrivel and float away from starvation probably.

            My hair is dripping down into my eyes, and I’m trying to keep my phone dry beneath my blue jacket. Some girls were screaming, but they must have worn out. The tinny organ carnival music rises up against the rain, up from the bright lights of the corndog vendors and ice cream stands. On the paths, people run to the exhibit halls and to their cars to get dry. Wimps. I am loving the rain. Not, but I can pretend I’m tough until the smell of fried dough drifts up all around me.

            The chair lingers at the top and I look out at our wheat fields on the other side of the road. The ripe golden heads bend beneath the wind’s strokes, beneath its voice, swaying in the lashings of rain. I watch them bowing in the afternoon gloom, wondering if we can finish the harvest. Dad sold most of it to a distillery and it would be cool to have some of the vodka.

            Dozens of quilts hang in the exhibit halls below. My mom’s is there, my aunt’s, Jannie who cuts my hair. Everyone around here quilts. They like the ones with a thousand little pieces that fit together like puzzles, like lives on a farm never fit together. I like the quilts with stories in them, the ones with the Knik River and Pioneer Peak, with the ravens and auroras. People are sentimental about their quilt patterns. Right now I’m thinking about the one with appliques of salmon on it that won the big purple Grand Champion ribbon.

            I can see the barn where the farmers and 4-H kids take their giant pumpkins and cabbages to be admired. My pet zucchini grew fat this year – twenty-five pounds, but all crookedy. No reason to even enter it. The summer was too hot for zukes, but perfect for the wheat. If it doesn’t go all soft, I’ll carve a vampire zucchini for Halloween.

            The rain lessens as the wheel lurches to the bottom. The Saturday afternoon crowd drifts back into the Midway, and the carnies beg them to toss the ball, throw the dart, bet on the racing rats (they’re really gerbils). The sun breaks through the clouds. Dad will be happy when he can run the combine through the wheat, happy when it’s already vodka, happy when he can worry about what kind to plant next year. Then he’ll forget about me.

            I head straight for the fried butter stand, already tasting that crispy brown batter, and feeling the hot butter running down my chin. Then I’ll head over to the big barn to watch the 4-H turkeys being auctioned off.     

too hot for huge squash

and no prize wheat at this Fair           

but fine crop of quilts

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.