I’ve been enjoying Adam Ragusea‘s videos on YouTube for a couple of years, now, and recently saw his two part video, Growing Bread (Part I, Planting to Harvest, and Part II, Harvest to Oven), wherein he grew a small plot of wheat in his garden, then harvested it, threshed it, winnowed it, ground it into flour and baked it.

Along the way, he discussed the history of wheat, much of which was drawn from Dr. Catherine Zabinski’s Amber Waves, The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, and included clips of an interview with Dr. Zabinski. It was fascinating, and interesting enough that I decided to buy the book. I just finished the book, and I’m glad I read it.

In the book, which she bills as a “biography” of wheat, Dr. Zabinski covers the history of the plant, starting way way back with the start of photosynthesis, to the development of cell walls, which allowed plants to have structure, to how our ancestors found a particular grass growing in the Middle East, and realized that its seeds were edible. From there she talks about the numerous “environmental sieves” — natural and human selection — that shaped wheat into the megacrop it is today.

For example, the earliest wild wheats, called einkorn, had seed tassles that tended to shatter when ripe, scattering the seeds on the ground where they would plant themselves. Along the way, there was a mutation that caused the seed heads not to shatter. This is not so good for the plant, as the seeds don’t hit the ground, but it also made the seeds easier to harvest, so the humans of that era tended to pick those seeds, and replant them, propagating that trait.

She also gets into the genetics of wheat. The bread wheat we grow today is the result of two natural hybridization events. In the first, wild einkorn hybridized with goatgrass, creating a variety of wheat called emmer. And then later, emmer hybridized again with goatgrass, creating a plant that produced seeds that were bigger and had softer husks, which were more easily removed — essentially, easier to prepare as food. From this natural hybridization, humans selected again and again — picking varieties that grew better under cultivation, or produced bigger fruit, or, as humans carried it all over the world, selected varieties that grew better under local conditions.

Dr. Zabinski discusses all of this, both from a cultural standpoint of how humans spread the crop and domesticated it, and from a biochemical standpoint, explaining in fairly easy to understand language how DNA works, how genetics work, how mutations occur, and how mutations and having a large genome to draw on, courtesy of the extra chromosomes the hybridization events that created bread wheat, allows for the necessary genetic variety that allows evolution to refashion the plant in ways that make it a viable crop in a variety of different environments.

From there she discusses how agriculture shaped human civilization — up until recently, it took a lot of work to harvest a crop, and governments and social structures grew up to mediate that need for labor and the distribution of food, and winds up with the developments of the twentieth century: mechanized agriculture, and the rise of plant breeders specifically trying to develop varieties with specific features, such as disease resistance, or shorter stems to reduce the risk of the plants flopping over, making them harder to harvest. This was the so-called Green Revolution, and she makes the point that part of the impetus for the Green Revolution was to combat the Red Revolution of Communism. She does discuss some of the downsides of the Green Revolution — the dangers of a plant monoculture lacking the genetic variety to cope with changes in the environment, and the ecological damage that agricultural practice can inflict, but she’s an optimist, and ends the book with a description of efforts to create a perennial variety of wheat by crossing it with wheatgrass; the advantage of a perennial vs an annual crop is that it’s less environmentally damaging.

Through it all, the book is clear, engaging, and easy to understand. I was a little concerned that it would be a dry, academic text, but it isn’t. She steers clear of jargon, and when she does introduce specialized terms, explains them well, and keeps her story moving. I read it on my iPhone and it’s the first book I’ve read start to finish in months.

I had a particularly bad commute into work this morning. I’ve been getting used to driving the stick, but heavy traffic is just not fun, and I got stopped on an uphill ramp getting onto the Pike, and started rolling backwards when it was time to move again. By the time I got to the top of the overpass, I could smell the clutch burning, and when I got stopped again on an uphill at the Newton Corner offramp, I nearly had a panic attack. And then I got to the office, looked at my phone, and found out that our buyers wanted to close early, this Friday. Great, the one day I can’t take care of little things, and I need to attend to closing out accounts.

One of the things I needed to take care of was closing the account for the oil and getting a read of the amount of oil we’re leaving behind, so I called Fawcett Energy, our oil company. (Aside — they’ve been great to work with over the years). They told me they don’t send someone out to read the oil tank, and that I needed to stop by the house and read the gauge myself.

Gradually, I settled down, but as the day progressed, I started feeling waves of sadness. This would be my last time in this house.

This house has been in the family since it was built in 1940. My mother grew up there, and after my grandfather was widowed and remarried, my parents moved back there. Up until last September, it was the only home I’d ever had in all my remembered life.

That house has been the scene of numerous family get-togethers, Christmas Eves, cookouts, and birthday parties. I spent hours in the gardens, planting, weeding and digging over the soil, I had my darkroom there, getting me interested in photography. I’ve always taken pride that it’s been in the family that long.

When it came time to make a decision about where to live after Mum died, I vacillated. Part of me wanted to stay there. But it just wasn’t the same without her, and I was rattling around in an empty house. More significantly, the house needs a lot of repairs. My grandfather had added on to the dining room in the fifties, but that was about it. It needs a lot of attention, more than I can give it at my stage of life. So I started looking, but it wasn’t until I started looking at condos that I could see myself living somewhere else. My brother Tom actually found this place for me, and I moved in September.

Up until today, I’ve been surprisingly OK with leaving the house behind. This place is a lot newer and in much better shape. But something about the finality of passing papers hit me today, and as I pulled into the driveway for the last time, I started crying.

There was mail in the mailbox — mostly junk mail, but one piece addressed to the new owners. I got the key out of the lockbox and went in, leaving the mail on the counter. I walked around the house, and went into my old bedroom one last time. I looked at the dining room bay that my grandfather had built, and looked at the warm dining room floor that I’d helped my father sand when I was in 8th grade. And I cried some more.

I went downstairs, got a picture of the oil gauge, and took one more look at the workbench. And then it was time to leave.

After stopping to pick up groceries (and buy myself a treat), I got home, here. I walked into the kitchen, with its (semi) modern appliances and current construction, I reassured myself: I’d made the right decision.

The new owners are a young couple, looking to start a family. Hopefully, they have the time ahead of them to bring the old house up to date, and make it their home. I wish them all the best.