Americans give us a taste of wheat
Everyday in Taiwan, people enjoy different kinds of wheat products — bread, cake, muffin, cookies, etc. However, few of us know that bread and cake are made from different kinds of flour; even fewer of us know that different kinds of flour are made from different varieties (cultivars) of wheat. Bread flour and cake/pastry flour (soft flour) are made from different wheat varieties — bread flour from hard wheat (wheat with a high gluten content) and soft flour from soft wheat (wheat with a low gluten content). Gluten is storage proteins found in wheat, rye, barley, oat and wheat-related species such as emmer and einkorn. Whether it’s hard or soft, the wheat we consume nowadays are quite different from what people had in Fertile Crescent.
We all know that agriculture started in Fertile Crescent around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago and people grow wheat, barley and peas there. However, the wheat varieties they grew are not bread wheat, the very variety we grow today mostly. They grew emmer (T. turgidum subsp. dicoccum)and einkorn(Triticum urartu). There are many phenotypic differences between emmer, einkorn and bread wheat and all of them can be traced back to their genes. Einkorn is a diploid (having only two sets of chromosomes), emmer is a tetraploid (having four sets of chromosomes) and bread wheat(T. aestivum) is a hexaploid (having six sets of chromosomes).
Precisely speaking, bread wheat is an allohexaploid, meaning it is not just a product of simple chromosome duplication. Two sets of chromosomes come from einkorn, another two sets from Aegilops speltoides and the other two sets from goatgrass (A. tauschii). The introgression of einkorn and A. speltoides happened between 230,000 to 430, 000 years ago, producing emmer (therefore emmer is also an allotetraploid). Bread wheat was produced by introgression between goatgrass and emmer, which took place around 23,000 to 43,000 years ago. The introduction of goatgrass genes makes bread wheat more tolerant to cold and higher yield, therefore emmer and einkorn were readily replaced. Bread wheat reached England and Scandinavia around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and reached China from the outer Caucasus about 4,000 years ago.
Easy to sow and harvest, wheat quickly became the most important staple food for Fertile Crescent. People consume wheat and barley in the form of gruel, grinding the grains with mortar and pestle then boiling them in water. Beer (to be precise, ale) was probably discovered from leftover gruel standing for one or two days. Sumerians already knew how to make beer from einkorn and barley. Baking and brewing house was well-established and bakers were a profession during Egyptian times. Beer and bread were salaries during that time.
One advantage for consuming wheat as staple food is its high protein content. The protein content of wheat is probably the highest among cereals, which make it an ideal staple food without the need to depend on other food too much.
As a starter for Western culture, people worship wheat. The bread of the Holy Communion can only be made of wheat but no other. Jewish people carried dough with them during Exodus. According to the legend, some of them left Egypt in a hurry, forgetting to add yeast and resulting in the invention of bagels. Believing seeds have mysterious powers, Egyptians use wheat seeds as a pregnancy test: women would urinate on wheat seeds after sowing, then come back several times to check if they germinate or not. They believe pregnant women also have mysterious powers that can make seeds germinate.
The Romans never grew a taste for barley. In order to obtain more land for growing wheat, they attacked Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, Egypt and Spain in order to obtain more land to grow wheat.
The earliest discovery of wheat in China is from Xinjiang about 4,000 years ago. Wheat is also recorded in Shijing (詩經): ‘Thou didst confer on us the wheat and the barley,
Which God appointed for the nourishment of all’ (貽我來牟、帝命率育。) Rotating mortar and pestle was invented during the Warring State Period (475–221BC), allowing the production of wheat flour. Wheat was cultivated in Jiangsu and Zhejiang during Jin Dynasty and was distributed further south during the Five Barbarians and Sixteen Kingdom era. With its high yield and protein content, the production of wheat has surpassed millet during the Tang dynasty. Wheat cultivation was spreaded to Guangdong during the Song dynasty and the production of wheat was only second to rice during the Ming dynasty.
As a temperate crop, wheat can also be grown in Taiwan where the weather is not too warm. Therefore, south of Miaoli, north of Tainan, and Taitung and Hualien in the east are all suitable for growing wheat. At first, the cultivar used in Taiwan was brought by the Chinese from southern China hundreds of years ago. This cultivar is low yield but with excellent drought tolerance. Then it was replaced by Taichung №2 and Taichung №34, the main cultivars used in Taiwan nowadays. Taichung №35, a new soft wheat cultivar, was bred and selected in 2017.
The cultivation area of wheat was more than 7,000 hectares once. It decreased dramatically during Japanese occupation because Japanese government encouraged farmers to grow sugarcane. The construction of Jianan Dazhen made more and more farmers shift from wheat to rice, sugarcane and other cereal crops. As a result, the cultivation area of wheat was only 500 hectare in 1931.
After WWII, the cultivation area of wheat increased to 25,208 hectares in 1960, then it decreased to 304 hectares in 1974 due to the importation of wheat from USAID. It maintained around 1,000 hectares after 1975 via the support from the government, mainly in Taichung and Changhua. In 1995–1996, the cultivation area of wheat went down again because of WTO. Recently, it went back to around 2,000 hectares because of food safety concerns of the general public.
Rice is the main staple food of Taiwanese people before WWII. According to Lian Heng in General History of Taiwan, ‘Taiwan produces rice, so everyone eats rice. From the city and the village, there are three meals a day, with one meal being porridge and two meals being rice.’ In 1950, every Taiwanese eats an average of 202 kilograms of rice and sweet potatoes per year, but the per capita consumption of wheat is only 7.9 kilograms, around three bowls and a half of noodles per month.
After the US Senate passed ‘Agriculture Trade Development and Assistance Act’ in 1954, allowing countries receiving USAID to purchase American agricultural products with aid money, a large amount of wheat was imported. In order to encourage Taiwanese eating more wheat products, American and Taiwanese governments worked together to open courses teaching people how to make bread, cake, cookies etc. Bakeries are opened in cities of Taiwan. They even hire writers writing articles about ‘Americans are tall and strong because they eat bread, which is made of wheat and is much more nutritious than rice.’ One of the writers even wrote ‘Eating rice will make you getting senile and die sooner.’ Affected by these information, Taiwanese started eating more wheat products. Although the introduction of bulgur wheat is a failure, that of the other wheat products is a success. Almost sixty percent of Taiwanese included wheat products (noodles, pasta and bread) as part of their staple food in 1992, which was less than fifteen percent in 1968.
My father was also influenced by those rumors. He insisted that all of us must have bread and milk for breakfast so we can grow bigger and stronger. Bread and milk has been my family’s breakfast choice ever since.
Speaking of rumors, who can forget about “Wheat Belly”? In this book, Dr. Davis warned us about the danger of wheat product consumption. He blamed the gluten as the ultimate source of asthma, obese, heart attack and diabetes. He also claimed that as a result of breeding and selection, bread wheat is unnatural.
The truth is bread wheat is a product of nature. As we mentioned in this article, the introgression between einkorn, A. speltoides and goatgrass happened naturally, long before humans knew how to grow them. The yield of wheat increased again and again because people obtained better knowledge of agriculture (e.g., use of fertilizer) and advancement of plant biotechnology (breeding and selection). Modern day breeding and selection did not make bread wheat a lot different from what it was found in Fertile Crescent.
Although there are people allergic to gluten, isn’t there also people allergic to milk, peanuts or other food? Dr. Davis created an illusion for people who is obese, making them believe that bread wheat is poisonous. The truth is eating a carbohydrate-rich meal will make you fat, no matter what the source of carbohydrate is. Being fat or even obese creates a lot of problems — diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease — and it has nothing to do with gluten.
Looking back to the history of bread wheat in Taiwan, it is interesting to see how gullible people can be. Lots of time we don’t even question whether this information is credible or not, and the dawn of the Internet Era does not improve the situation. To make things worse, we have “experts” feeding us questionable information just for their own benefit. We should keep this story in mind as a reminder that people, no matter government or individual, can feed us wrong information and it’s not always for our own benefit.
