An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them

520 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by ecares
(smithsonianmag.com)

171 Comments

adrian_b

3 hours ago

Unfortunately the article does not identify precisely the "miracle" wheat.

"Triticum turgidum" is ambiguous, because this wheat species has many different subspecies, with very different characteristics.

There are 2 important subspecies of "Triticum turgidum", emmer wheat, which was 1 of the 3 cereals domesticated at the beginning of the Neolithic (barley, einkorn wheat and emmer wheat), and durum wheat (a.k.a. pasta wheat or macaroni wheat), which was produced from emmer wheat by a genetic mutation, several thousand years after domestication.

From the article, it is not clear if the discussed wheat is just some cultivar of emmer wheat or it belongs to a more exotic subspecies of "Triticum turgidum".

Any references from the Bible are unlikely to describe anything else but some variety of emmer wheat.

While most wheat-based food is nowadays produced from either hexaploid bread wheat or tetraploid durum wheat, there are on the market various niche products (e.g. some kinds of biscuits) made from spelt wheat, emmer wheat or einkorn wheat (though the product labels frequently confuse the hexaploid spelt wheat with the tetraploid emmer wheat).

comrade1234

13 hours ago

Many farmers here in Switzerland grow urdinkel - ancient spelt. In the USA most farmers grew it also until around the 1920s but then a new wheat came out that was easier to process. Spelt has thicker hulls and wears down the mill faster so the mills switched to the new wheat and the farmers all had to switch too.

Based on the name I think ur (ancient) Dinkel (spelt) is even older than regular spelt but I'm not sure. All I know is that it makes great crackers but terrible pasta and ok bread but not great.

kuerbel

6 hours ago

The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen. Unlike other spelt varieties, it was never crossed with wheat. It was also not bred for dough stability, which is why it must be baked in a special way, for example, using a water roux. The glutenin-to-gliadin ratio is different, resulting in a highly extensible but weaker gluten network.

It is really different from usual spelt, which was crossed with wheat and has shorter straws.

Edit: maybe this is interesting to some so I'll write a short paragraph about older varieties. There is also Einkorn and Emmer. Einkorn is considered the ultimate ancestor of all modern wheat varieties. It has been grown 10k years ago and is diploid with only two chromosome sets. Then there is Emmer, which is also ancient and appeared shortly after Einkorn. It is tetraploid and yields two corns per spikelet. If you want to eat like an Egyptian Pharao you can eat bread made out of Emmer ;-)

Rye is entirely different. It is very hardy and frost resistant and can't be baked without sourdough because of the amylase.

adrian_b

3 hours ago

No, Einkorn is not the ancestor of all cultivated wheat varieties, unless you extend the history of wheat a very long time before domestication, when that becomes somewhat true, because the wild ancestor of emmer wheat was produced by genome duplication from a wild ancestor of einkorn wheat.

At the start of the Neolithic, besides barley, 2 species of wheat were domesticated separately and they evolved through domestication into einkorn wheat and emmer wheat.

Einkorn wheat has always remained a minor crop, while either barley or emmer was the major crop, depending on soil and climate. For instance in the early Ancient Greece barley was the most important, while in the early Roman Republic emmer was the more important. Later, emmer ("far" in Latin) was mostly replaced by durum wheat ("triticum" in Latin), and even later durum wheat was mostly replaced by the hexaploid bread wheat ("siligo" in Latin).

Besides the original emmer and einkorn, other wheat subspecies have appeared many thousands of years later after domestication, either through mutations, like the tetraploid durum wheat (pasta wheat) or through hybridization, like the hexaploid bread wheat (and also the hexaploid spelt wheat).

kuerbel

2 hours ago

I was speaking in more casual terms. Botanically you are 100% correct and the way I wrote it implies that modern wheat evolved directly from domesticated Einkorn over time. Which is not correct.

grumbelbart

5 hours ago

> The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen.

Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.

kuerbel

4 hours ago

They elongate too quickly so the walls of the straws are weaker if given too much nitrogen at the wrong time. They fall over easily. You want them to grow more slowly with stronger straws.

liesandfalsehoo

an hour ago

They do that when they have enough lead. They made up that lead is a toxin, then they found out they can't grow crops without it either, which necessiated this "green revolution". There was an excess of food during the depression.

steve_taylor

37 minutes ago

Who's "they"? Feel free to sprinkle some lead on your Corn Flakes.

AyyEye

15 minutes ago

Their username is lies and falsehoods. Brand new account. Don't feed the trolls.

bregma

2 hours ago

Because fields of wheat that grew too fast and too tall and fell over after a rain and rotted in the wet field is called a "famine".

jo909

3 hours ago

They would grow even higher with fertilizer and then fall over in a storm. Well it increases the chance or percentage lost to that, it always happens to some degree even with modern varieties.

a_bonobo

3 hours ago

Which is funny enough, one of the main attributes Borlaug used in the green revolution: crossing Japanese dwarf wheat with modern bread wheat varieties to make the resulting wheat shorter.

cseq

2 hours ago

The whole idea behind that was that (within reason) the more N you can pump into the crop, the more it will yield, but also the taller it will grow. Wheat is essentially an inverted pendulum when ripe, with about 60% of the above-ground biomass perched at the top.

The main thrust of modern crop breeding has been to create crops that you can successfully get to harvest under high-nutrition environments, without it literally falling over or succumbing to disease due to the turgid, fleshy growth. Even then, if you're applying more than maybe 150kgN/ha, you will be relying on plant growth regulators that inhibit auxin/gibberellin response to keep the plant under control.

liesandfalsehoo

2 hours ago

It isn't nitrogen, it's lead. Lead is needed in regulatory proteins, like calmodulin. Plants grow very quickly without it, then fall over.

cseq

an hour ago

At micromolar concentrations this may be true. There is plenty of Pb to go around in the soil and in the air from private aviation for such a minor micronutrient. I also doubt elevating Pb levels in crops is at the top of many public health agendas.

liesandfalsehoo

an hour ago

It should be. It has the same effect on people - they grow too much too fast, but remain immature and fragile both mentally and physically. They do hit puberty very early though.

subscribed

9 minutes ago

Did you just requested "supplementing" children and adolescents with lead?

Looks like you had too much of it yourself :)

thereforegrin

9 minutes ago

do you have any reference to that claim that Pb is positively correlated with growth/height, either in crops or in people?

dr_dshiv

3 hours ago

I think because they collapse under their own weight?

blauditore

4 hours ago

But what is the actual benefit of Urdinkel? Honestly it sounds a bit like a fad to me, along the lines of "older = better".

whatthejesus

4 hours ago

They just described the structure of the thing.

In the article it describes the crops as more drought resistant etc.

As in all things commercialized, the tempting easy path weakens in the long term. Mono crops are easier to grow and then the soil gets depleted beyond all recognition. White bread probably outsells whole wheat in America but it is basically devoid of nutritional value.

“Old” means things were scarce because people had to work by hand and oxen. So a failed crop meant a dead family.

adrian_b

2 hours ago

White bread is not devoid of nutritional value, because it is the cheapest source of proteins known to mankind. Legumes like lentils, beans or peas have a cost per protein content at least 2 to 2.5 times higher than wheat flour. Chicken meat and plant protein isolates have a cost per protein content at least 4 to 5 times higher than wheat flour.

White bread is also one of the cheapest sources of energy, though depending on the geographical location either maize or rice may be slightly cheaper sources of energy, but which provide much less protein.

Among cereal products, wheat bread has the highest protein content, except for oats, but oats are much more expensive per protein content.

If you eat white bread in preference to any other starchy products, like those based on rice, maize or potatoes, this ensures a higher protein intake per a given calories content, which enables a lower consumption of more expensive sources of proteins, like those based on legumes or on meat.

White bread cannot be the only food that one eats, because other kinds of foods must provide other nutrients, but it can provide at a minimum cost major fractions of the daily intake of proteins and energy.

After experimenting with many different healthy diets, I have settled on a variant that I consider optimal, where wheat bread that I bake myself at home typically provides about a third of my daily protein intake, so its nutritional value is quite important (and the fact that it is very tasty is a welcome bonus).

bregma

2 hours ago

Does whole wheat bread made from the same grain not have the same protein, or does removing all that fiber, flavour, and micronutrients somehow enhance the protein content and render it less expensive?

adrian_b

an hour ago

White flour has a slightly higher protein content (e.g. I bake bread from flour with 13% protein), but the important difference is that it is much cheaper, e.g. at least twice cheaper than whole wheat flour.

The reason for the price difference is unlikely to be due to a more expensive processing technology, but mostly from the economies of large scale processing, because the production of white flour is much greater.

Whole wheat flour has slightly higher amounts of the more valuable nutrients, but due to its high price it is an inefficient way to get those nutrients. A both cheaper and healthier diet can include white bread and larger amounts of other vegetables that are better sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals than whole wheat flour. (E.g. the food that I cook usually includes ingredients like lentils, carrots, parsnips, onions or garlic, broccoli or cauliflower, bell peppers, parsley or dill etc. Spending less on those in order to make more expensive whole wheat bread would provide much less desirable nutrients, so it would be a bad allocation of funds.)

liesandfalsehoo

2 hours ago

The wheat we eat was bred specifically to grow without nutrients.

adrian_b

42 minutes ago

Nutrients are divided into micronutrients, most of which are needed in quantities much smaller than 1 gram per day, i.e. vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and a few amino-acid derivatives, and macronutrients, which form the bulk of what you eat, i.e. carbohydrates, protein and fat.

What you mean is that modern wheat was selected for high production per area, which can be attained only when the seeds contain smaller amounts of micronutrients, so that their limited availability will not inhibit growth.

On the other hand, all plant seeds, including wheat seeds, in their dry form consist almost only of nutrients, unlike the other plant parts, which usually have very little nutrient content.

So wheat seeds and also the white flour made of them are very rich in nutrients, but only in 2 kinds of nutrients, starch and protein.

Animals, including humans, need a great number of essential nutrients in order to survive, around 50 different chemical substances.

White bread provides energy and protein that has a good amino-acid profile, except for low amounts of the amino acid lysine.

For complementary proteins and for the very small amounts of micronutrients that are required for a complete food, one must eat something else.

There exists no natural food that has a perfect composition that would allow humans to live eating only that (except mother milk for small babies).

So anyone must eat a combination of different kinds of foods. People who are rich might choose to eat some paleo diet or some keto diet and it is possible to conceive such diets that are healthy.

However most of the humans must allocate a limited budget for food, and within these constraints there are large areas in various places of the Earth, including Europe, where any healthy diet of optimum cost must include a non-negligible fraction of wheat.

For those who unfortunately suffer of celiac disease, a higher cost of food is unavoidable.

im3w1l

2 hours ago

While the macro discussion is very interesting you are completely leaving out any mention of micros.

Melatonic

5 hours ago

So the second two but not the first is technically "wheat" along with Rye ?

kuerbel

4 hours ago

Spelt, Einkorn and Emmer are all from the Genus Triticum, which is called wheat. Rye is secale and not called wheat. They are all from the tribe Triticeae. Barley also belongs to the same tribe.

Oat however is from the tribe Aveneae.

locallost

5 hours ago

I tried both Emmer and Einkorn, but don't remember anything special about the end result. One of the flours/doughs was pretty yellow, but that's about it. It was a while ago and I only tried about a kg of each so my memory is fuzzy.

adrian_b

2 hours ago

After the appearance of durum wheat, and then of the bread wheat, the products made from emmer and einkorn (and later also from spelt) have always been more expensive, without having any decisive advantages.

Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.

So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.

As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.

locallost

an hour ago

I wrote a bit more, but deleted as I felt it was getting too long. I now see that what's left is missing some context. I also wrote that e.g spelt dough is in contrast very easy to recognize when you make it. It's very smooth and soft, it behaves differently, maybe even gooey. As for Emmer and Einkorn, I don't remember much other than the color for one of these.

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

madaxe_again

4 hours ago

Here in the far northeast of Portugal, too. Also, lots of rye, buckwheat, and all sorts of crazy cultivars of other stuff - they grow lettuce here that bolts a meter tall without any loss of flavour, and jersey walking sticks, yellow (on the inside too) watermelons with huge seeds - all sorts - because they still grow the same village/family seed stocks their medieval ancestors did, and a lot of stuff is hyper-adapted to the local climate.

Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.

Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.

huhtenberg

3 hours ago

Gigantic grapes sound awesome, so did a quick check. Assuming 5–6 cm in diameter, this appears to far exceed the size of any known grape variety.

3884848484

3 hours ago

Funny that I grew up in rural north portugal and never heard of any of this bs

madaxe_again

3 hours ago

Dunno what to tell you man, apart from maybe it depends on just how rural. Where we are, NE trás os montes, everywhere was a really long way from everywhere until the 20th century, as the terrain is a nightmare of deep river valleys and few bridges. Like, from our village, you can see the nearest village - it’s only 3km as the crow flies - but it’s 30km and 40 minutes by paved road. 10km by heavily worn track and a medieval bridge.

bregma

an hour ago

Funny, I was just there last week. Without getting to know locals all I saw was olive trees and almond trees and some grapes and oranges, many hectares of abandoned farms, and wonderful villages built on the seeming near-vertical sides of hills with small gardens with lots of cabbages (it was October, so that tends to be what's left). I'm sure lots was hidden from my passing eyes.

The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.

Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.

So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?

madaxe_again

an hour ago

€3.5m! You can’t have been too near to us, as most everything here is cheap. There’s a watermill with 40ha of pistachios about 5km from us, €320k last I checked. It ain’t selling, even at that price.

Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.

I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.

daneel_w

12 hours ago

I personally like spelt in bread. It provides a lot of aroma, especially for doughs that are overnight-leavened in low temperature.

mentalgear

4 hours ago

I think there is also good evidence that dough in general which is given 24 hrs to rest - like what was traditional pre-industrial - is much better digestible for most people then the additive-loaded dough which only needs hours to minutes, which is a stark time -> quality tradeoff.

smhg

12 hours ago

Terrible pasta? I solely buy spelt (dinkel) pasta of I can choose.

Maybe you mean it gets more sticky if you cook it too long? But al dente I think it's amazing. It has a nutty taste that works very well with tomatoes if you ask me.

_s_a_m_

11 hours ago

Dinkelpasta..is...a..acquired taste.. lol

hobo123

7 hours ago

Maybe you had full grain pasta? That is indeed... questionable, doesn't matter if spelt or wheat.

garrickvanburen

10 hours ago

raw spelt is fantastic in beer. Malted spelt is indistinguishable.

goobatrooba

40 minutes ago

While the lede is a bit buried, I understand that while this is a rediscovery for this era, it is in fact a widely disseminated strain of wheat, so not really a huge novelty, but rather an important reminder of all the diversity still available out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triticum_turgidum

k4r1

3 hours ago

It's been a trend in Denmark for many years to find and grow old seeds. I'm not sure if they ship overseas, but I'm sure if you ask them nicely there is a good chance.

Aurion, a mill with a web shop: https://www.aurion.dk/

Kornetshus, a knowledge center on seeds: https://kornetshus.dk/

Both are highly recommended.

NightPageReader

2 hours ago

Thank you, been baking bread using spelt, I now may try something else :)

codesnik

6 hours ago

Before circa middle 20th century all wheat was very tall. This minor fact somehow significantly changes picture of the past for me.

morgoo

an hour ago

I feel the same about gros michel bananas

avadodin

4 hours ago

The best time to think about your great-grandfather is when you're 3yo and he's still alive.

The second best time is when you recover his stash of seeds.

pcblues

2 hours ago

What an interesting story. I look at the old testament and see a survival guide for a society in a difficult neighbourhood and environment. Separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is not so easy.

Clearly this site is a breeding ground for experts, so the genetics of the wheat will be explained in other posts.

timr

10 hours ago

> It also had more arginine, an amino acid that children need to grow.

My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.

Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.

eternauta3k

7 hours ago

Hopefully it's just my lazy reading/thinking, but this part of the article feels like scientism to me. Picking out some random micronutrients this strain has more of, praising that it has less gluten. It's just using "science" to justify whatever they already wanted to do.

unsloppable

3 hours ago

I was waiting for them to explain what any of the real benefits were.

someothherguyy

9 hours ago

i don't have a PhD like you, but aren't some amino acids essential in young mammals and conditionally essential in adult mammals?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...

timr

8 hours ago

Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this is an extremely limited claim (i.e. unborn babies / neonatal supplementation, or children with genetic defects), and not something you can even remotely generalize to "children" as a whole. The way we teach this in biochem 101 is "arginine is conditionally essential", with the "conditional" being "periods of stress or sickness".

In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

morsch

6 hours ago

So what you are saying is they forgot the word "small" in "arginine is an amino acid small children need to grow".

tgv

5 hours ago

More like: we all need arginine, but our body makes it, so we don't need to supplement it. Wikipedia writes this:

Preterm infants are unable to synthesize arginine internally, making the amino acid nutritionally essential for them. Most healthy people do not need to supplement with arginine because it is a component of all protein-containing foods and can be synthesized in the body from glutamine via citrulline.

cma

5 hours ago

I have no idea if he is right about what he claimed, but can small really stand in for prematurely born or carrying relevant rare genetic mutation?

adrian_b

3 hours ago

Arginine is a "conditionally essential" amino-acid, i.e. there are circumstances when the internal production is insufficient, so it must exist in food.

The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.

timr

3 hours ago

The times when internal production is insufficient are basically neonatal and diseases. Humans, in general, do not need to supplement arginine.

p1anecrazy

6 hours ago

Thanks for explaining this, reading this in the article made me concerned as a parent.

tgv

4 hours ago

Don't worry too much. If you follow basic food recommendations, even those given out 60 years ago, your child can grow up fine. Even if you only follow it just half the time. Basically, all those articles have to be taken with a grain of salt. What kills you is: smoking, drinking, tanning, long periods of only junk food. And those seem to affect you mainly after age 25. Children are remarkably sturdy.

tmaly

13 hours ago

This is interesting for people with gluten allergies, maybe there is a way they could one day consume the ancient wheat.

ltbarcly3

12 hours ago

Gluten allergies are relatively rare and extreme. People with Celiac have a major, sometimes life threatening reaction to gluten.

People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not. They are either experiencing a nocebo effect or have gas from other components of wheat rather than gluten. Actual non Celiac reactions to gluten are minor if they exist at all. So when someone says they are gluten sensitive it is overwhelmingly likely they either have Celiac and even a very very tiny amount of gluten will cause them horrible consequences, or they are incorrect and they are not sensitive to gluten at all.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27523634/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29102613/

phyzome

8 hours ago

More on the "other components" issue -- a lot of people have issues with some of the fermentable carbohydrates (e.g. fructans) in wheat, which also happen to be present in the other gluten-containing grains. "Have gas" is a bit of an understatement. For some people this can lead to cramps, vomiting, and other fairly severe digestive problems.

So people on the low-FODMAPs diet end up using "gluten free" as a convenient shorthand for "doesn't contain these particular grains".

zarzavat

10 hours ago

To be fair, the people with psychogenic gluten intolerance have massively increased the availability and variety of gluten-free foods for people with real Celiac disease. They seem to be doing more good than harm on balance.

donjoe

4 hours ago

The "relatively rare" in numbers: so far, it's been assumed that about 1% of the population is celiac.

Italy recently started screening kids nation wide. Initial results are showing that of 4.4% of kids are affected. [1]

Celiac disease is massively under-diagnosed and GPs knowledge about the disease is limited. Also, celiac disease might cause issues which are not directly gut related: one might end up with a B12 or iron deficiency, one might get migraines, fatigue, gluten induced ataxia and many many more.

[1] https://celiac.org/2025/09/24/how-research-is-shaping-italys...

swiftcoder

4 hours ago

Celiac has a very high incidence in northern Spain as well - they attribute it to having a very similar Celtic genetic profile as the Irish.

hobo123

7 hours ago

Probably also caused by other aspects of American wheat (many "sensitive" people notice they can eat bread in Europe just fine), such as higher glyphosate content, fortification with nasty stuff like vitamin A, possibly others.

ksec

5 hours ago

I remember reading something about it on BBC, how over processed American Wheat ( or food in general ) leads to those symptoms and they can eat European products and bread just fine.

hobo123

2 hours ago

Yes. Whatever "over processed" means.

zahlman

5 hours ago

>nasty stuff like vitamin A

Pardon?

hobo123

2 hours ago

People get far too much of it (IIRC there even was a Polish study that kids already have a way too high intake), large parts of the population in most Western countries are liver toxic avoiding to analysis of accident victims, it significantly increases your osteoporosis risk, many people (anecdotally, including me) experience lots of health improvements after reducing their intake, and so on.

ThePestoParagon

12 hours ago

20 years ago I was "that guy" who went "uhm, actually, you almost certainly don't have celiac". Alas, my efforts did not stop the trend, and today the nocebo effect for gluten has become a multi-billion dollar racket.

zihotki

9 hours ago

And you know, the life of celiacs has improved a lot since then. Thanks to gluten sensitive people I, as a person with celiacs, can find some gluten free food in shops and even gluten free restaraunts in many big cities. Standard restaurants are not an option for me due to high chance of cross-contamination. I'm very thankful for this trend!

perpetualpear

5 hours ago

These studies are far less certain than you are. Also, gluten sensitivity is not just gas.

Miner49er

3 hours ago

Not really. Still has gluten - just less.

There are already things like gluten free wheat starch if you want wheat without gluten, but you still have to work around not having the gluten. Like the article alluded to, it is needed for breads to rise.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

12 hours ago

From what I understand, most "ancient" grains had far less gluten; it's the modern variants that have caused the widespread gluten issues we see today.

That's obviously an oversimplification.

cuvert

2 hours ago

I don't know if the new varieties caused the gluten intolerance problems, but, no, the ancient varieties have less "quality" gluten. It means that the ratio between glutenin and gliadin is skewed in a way that the gluten can't trap the gas to give it big volume.

[1]https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/10/11/1763

[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6769531/

I use every week these ancient grains because they give a different flavor to the bread (and not only in bread). I also, sometimes, replace 20-30% of wheat with oat, buckwheat, quinoa, barley flours etc.

Dylan16807

6 hours ago

What gluten issues do you have in mind here?

Vague digestion issues, maybe that has an effect.

For celiac there's not much evidence that the difference would change whether someone develops it, and once they do develop it even minuscule amounts are very bad for them.

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

awesome_dude

10 hours ago

American Red wheat is, as far as I know, the "hardest" wheat on the planet - breadmakers use it to "fortify" flours from Europe that do not have enough gluten (... forming amino acids).

Whilst having a high amount of gluten forming amino acids might sound good in prinicple, in fact breads do not rise as well when too much is present (the gluten is too strong, fighting the expansion of the dough from the leavening agent).

Cakes require flours to have less gluten forming amino acids again.

I'm not sure about pastry though, a bottom pastry for a pie I would guess needs to be quite strong, but I have no idea if there is an upper limit.

The point here is, flours can be as strong as they like, but too much is actually bad for breadmakers - meaning - gluten levels in the diet aren't changing that much.

Edit: I forgot to mention, some parts of China have a pure gluten dish - where they hydrate the gluten forming amino acids, then "wash" the starch out, leaving only the gluten, which they then cook and eat - so 100% Gluten

zargon

7 hours ago

Seitan is a pretty common food among plant-based eaters.

r0l1

3 hours ago

This reminds me of the Urzeitcode phenomenon: the idea that dormant or forgotten seeds can produce unexpectedly unusual plant characteristics when exposed to different conditions.

mattoxic

11 hours ago

Damn, I was hoping for Triffids

netfortius

5 hours ago

In one of the pictures they show "barley coffee". During the communism, in some countries of Eastern Europe you could only find in the stores this type of coffee, as the real one required hard currency to import.

cavoirom

3 hours ago

oh the "berley coffee", I'm Vietnamese and these stories was taught in school back then.

caretrs

13 hours ago

Wouldn't this cause ecosystem issues if seeds from 100 years ago get planted in the same area?

aDyslecticCrow

12 hours ago

Planting 600 acres of a single genetically identical grass and blasting them with insecticide and herbicide... kinda already does as much damage one could possibly try to do.

A slighly taller variety of grass hardly matters.

timcobb

13 hours ago

No these require human cultivation to survive.

lysace

8 hours ago

Fun exercise in this article: do an alt-f search for the word "ancient".

teleforce

10 hours ago

> All of the wheat types Grossi had previously seen grew only one such ear. But the tall wheat grew a full seven ears, always in the same pattern: a long one with six shorties bunched up around it like little fingers. Even the kernels themselves were bigger than those of average wheat. And unlike the typical pale-yellow wheat kernels, they came in a rainbow of colors—yellow, black, red, white and even green, sometimes all on the same stem. Grossi, a grain farmer his whole life, had never seen anything like it. “I thought it was a freak of nature,” he says. He couldn’t find a mention of it in agricultural books.

Thanks for sharing the story about this ancient wheat but I recall reading about this highly productive type of grains not in agriculture books but in holy books.

Fun facts, this type of miracle grain is mentioned in Abrahamic religions holy books namely Bible (Old Testament) and Quran.

In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:261), "The example of those who spend their wealth in the cause of Allah is that of a grain that sprouts into seven ears, each bearing one hundred grains. And Allah multiplies ˹the reward even more˺ to whoever He wills. For Allah is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing."

In the Book of Genesis (Genesis 41:5), "He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk."

This exact multiplication of deeds described in the Quran demonstrates the 700-to-1 ratio represents the actual biological maximum yield for that specific ancient wheat variety under optimal conditions.

All this while I thought the description is metaphorical allegory, but it seems originated from real grains of wheat phenomenon.

The scriptures specifically mentioned "sanabila" a type of grain with multiple ears branching out from a single stalk unlike rice paddy that's grow ears differently.

Another fun facts, in Arabic the word "sabil" meaning providing freely flowing water to travellers, and sanabila share the same root word, most probably derived from this very verse, because charity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is sadaqa.

Please note the only Quran in Chapter of Al- Baqarah (Female Cow) mentioned the analogy of multiplications for doing good deeds [1].

The other verses, one verse inside Bible in Chapter Genesis and two verses inside Quran in Chapter Yusuf (Joseph) refer to Egypt Pharaoh's or King's dream, respectively. This led to the introduction of the brilliant economic policy that saved Egypt kingdom from the severe famine that effect other sorrounding kingdoms at the time as per Yusuf's advice based on the correct interpretation of the King's dream [2],[3],[4]. Yusuf later become one of the appointed ministers of Egypt from the very humble beginning of a slave boy, and brought along other Jews to start migrating to Egypt.

Apparently Quran is more accurate since during prophet Yusuf time Egyptian rulers are called King not Pharaoh yet. Only later stage of Egyption Kingdom during Musa (Moses) time, Quran correctly refer to Pharaoh (meaning owner or king of great house) not King.

[1] Quran, Al-Baqarah 2:261:

https://quran.com/en/al-baqarah/261

[2] Bible, Genesis 41:5:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2041%3A...

[3] Quran, Yusuf, 12:43:

https://quran.com/en/yusuf/43

[4] Quran, Yusuf, 12:46:

https://quran.com/en/yusuf/46

devindotcom

10 hours ago

you didn't read past the second paragraph then?

teleforce

10 hours ago

Thanks, I probably skipped the subsequent paragraphs while browsing and reading due to multiple ads intersperse in between the articles. Anyway great finding of the ancient wheat species, and the mention of this miracle seven grains ears in Quran are more profound with several occurances in different contexts and analogies.

goobatrooba

44 minutes ago

The previous correspondent hinted at it but it seems you didn't pick up on this: the article literally says in the next paragraphs that the farmer read about it in the Bible.

netsharc

13 hours ago

[flagged]

EA-3167

12 hours ago

As the article clearly states it was the farmer himself who made the initial ID of the grain based on a bible passage he heard at church. It’s not a quote the Smithsonian added for the hell of it.

If a straightforward account of a story offends your sensibilities, rather than complaining, simply move on.

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

skmurphy

14 hours ago

[flagged]

loufe

13 hours ago

I know I tend to like some takeaway "summary" comments on HN, but this one just feels like snippets from an LLM reading the article. What's the thinking? The original text isn't particularly long or dense, and this isn't commentary.

skmurphy

13 hours ago

It's hand curated verbatim extracts designed to encourage HN members to read the full article. The clickbait title does not provide accurate context for the article which details events from 1990.

Reasonable people may differ and your mileage may vary. What were your key takeaways from the article?

I left out the points about shortcomings of Bourlag's wheat and the value of genetic diversity in a population. But my focus was to encourage people to read an article I found significant.

On a side note I don't use AI to craft HN comments beyond sometimes using Grammarly to check them for basic errors.

dawnerd

11 hours ago

Ironically that sounds like something an llm would say in a reply. Not saying you did or anything just kinda funny how it reads.

rgarrett88

10 hours ago

They sure are designed to sound like people

Brian_K_White

8 hours ago

But no particular person.

Like that line in Barbie, ... actually not a life guard, my job is just "beach".

CalRobert

5 hours ago

I appreciated it. The article was too verbose in my view

vineyardmike

8 hours ago

What’s the thinking on pointing out everything that could maybe but probably not be “AI Slop”?

I wasn’t going to click on the click-bait headline without understanding the topic better, so the length of the original was unknown and irrelevant to me. The above comment tersely explains it enough to satisfy my prerequisite.

The comment, “slop” or not, was useful. When slop fills comments with junk and fake commentary, it’s far more annoying and detrimental than a basic summary. Slop-policing is exhausting to read - just downvote or flag trash instead of adding more noise that takes away from the actual content.

pferde

4 hours ago

My, my, how low we have sunk. It used to be "I won't jump into the comment section without first reading the article", now it's "I won't read the article without first reading (and possibly engaging in) the comment section". Shame.

Also, how is this headline click-bait? If anything, it's anti-clickbait, dull, matter-of-factly, and not really that inviting.

tejohnso

10 hours ago

A lot of submissions have comments about how the article is "AI slop" or that a comment comes from an LLM. What is the point of repeatedly pointing this out? One person's AI slop is another person's useful and intriguing submission. In this case someone points out a comment is LLM generated and it turns out it isn't. So what if it was? It was a useful comment either way, and your ability to correctly identify LLM generated content is not perfect, and is likely to become less accurate over time.

wahnfrieden

9 hours ago

Community is oriented around policing each others content (upvote downvote flag vouch). The behaviors spill over into the other lever (reply)

fc417fc802

7 hours ago

Well yes, the entire point of a link aggregator is to surface content of value to the readers so that necessitates passing judgement on it. It seems that most of us don't come here for slop so that receives negative responses. Everything working as intended I guess.

barney54

13 hours ago

What do you mean “what’s the thinking?”

skmurphy

13 hours ago

I think the meaning was "why did you write this?"

ahartmetz

13 hours ago

Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators make wheat shorter and prevent it from buckling and falling over. They aren't the most suspect chemicals, but not exactly above all suspicion neither...

benjiro29

13 hours ago

Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators

Or you do what Claudio Grossi did, and you mix the ancient grain with short growing grains that add stability. Sometimes the solution is simpler then just throwing chemicals at the problem.

hommelix

13 hours ago

This is a great practical approach, but when you harvest the crop you get a mix of higher crop and lower crop. It is more difficult to sell some mix than a pure crop with known properties. Technically, it would be possible to build a harvester with two cutters at different heights to separate the crops, but I've never seen one.

benjiro29

13 hours ago

You forgot about the height. It will overshadow the smaller crop, and lack of sunlight on this smaller crop may simply not produce any ears as a result. Just a "balcony farmer" but that is what i have seen with most plants that are overshadowed by dense/taller plants.

lelandfe

13 hours ago

A good story that touches on this is the Wizard and the Prophet, covering Norman Borlaug's efforts to crossbreed wheat that wasn't too tall, was resistant to blight, etc.

corroclaro

9 hours ago

That reminds me, I never got back my copy of that book...

Retric

13 hours ago

That’s true in generation 1, but breeding isn’t a single generation. You repeat things across generations until you find a stable mix.

saalweachter

12 hours ago

You just raise the head.

You harvest the top crop, the one you want, cutting above the lower height, then go back through and make a second pass with the head lower.

You'll lose some of the lower crop, crushed under the wheels, but it was there as bonus anyway.

ahartmetz

13 hours ago

It seems like the genes that cause long stalks also have other benefits, otherwise they'd have been bred out a long time ago. At least that is what I figure.

aDyslecticCrow

12 hours ago

Short grains are modern;

- allow modern machines to harvest it more easily

- move slighly more of the plants energy into the seed

- prevent wind damage. (small farms bordered with trees was more typical historically)

On the historical side;

- The long stalks allow the crop to be bundled and dried without the seed touching the ground.

- It makes the stalks themselves useful as a building material in walls, roofs, isolation, bedding.

- It makes for a good grip as the seeds are pulled form the stalks with an historical thresher.

In short, we didn't start breeding grains to be short until modern post industrial farming techniques. Short grain does provide better yield on industrial mono-crop farming. But would have been seen as worse historically.

kinj28

10 hours ago

Problem with modern grains 1) gluten 2) weed killers/ pesticides 3) lack of nutritional value

My father and many other people in my family increased to neutral millets and started giving up wheat as much as they can.

Those problems are worth solving for or roll back to grossini seeds and use his creative technique to not let it withered by wind and let’s you have better nutritional value

quixoticelixer-

9 hours ago

Old grains still have plenty of gluten, and aren't immune to weeds or pests and have more or less the same nutritional value.

Filligree

9 hours ago

Did older grains have more gluten? I might try to search them out just for that reason.

rebuilder

7 hours ago

Probably less gluten, I believe high protein content is one of the things modern varieties have been bred for. It improves baking qualities.

quixoticelixer-

12 hours ago

Lodging is still a big problem even with modern varieties and growth regulators and even pre-modern wheat plants were probably shorter than they were originally.

skmurphy

13 hours ago

They confer advantage over many weeds according to the article.

pseudohadamard

11 hours ago

Friends of mine found some unknown seeds in a rental they'd just moved into and planted it. When they saw what sprouted they decided they should probably burn the evidence, slowly, one bud at a time.

ButlerianJihad

12 hours ago

Tall wheat fields are a significant plot device in Klara and the Sun. Not to mention the various woody fibers involved in Wicker.

Yes, I spent an interesting week hanging out at the cinema!

thedrexster

10 hours ago

various woody fibers, indeed, sir!

ltbarcly3

12 hours ago

These are all just unsubstantiated claims from someone promoting a product. The reason the entire world switched to dwarf varieties is that full height wheat falls over in heavy storms and this can lead to a loss of entire harvests and major famines.

This grain, while interesting, is far far less productive than modern varieties and less efficient to grow. It's valuable for genetic diversity and rediscovering it is wonderful and valuable, but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty.

margalabargala

7 hours ago

> but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty

This is clearly not true, considering it has already been successful as a niche specialty product. So you're obviously wrong.

You could become right by weakening your claim. The wheat will remain a niche specialty product, and will not overtake other wheats in the mass market.

Specialty products made on a smaller scale can be plenty valuable and successful. They are not "novelty" products.

quixoticelixer-

12 hours ago

It's not really just a storm risk. The higher yeilding your wheat the higher risk of lodging, so growing tall wheat in poorer conditions is fine, but the higher the grain weight the higher the risk of lodging.

hobo123

7 hours ago

The article mentions other benefits, such as many Italian farmers lost their harvest in the drought of 2024, while many traditional grains fared better in the dry climate and could be harvested.

mech422

12 hours ago

I think I saw this movie... :-P

SoftTalker

11 hours ago

Yes I was thinking either Jack and the Beanstalk or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

the-golden-one

14 hours ago

Clickbait title

PeterHolzwarth

14 hours ago

Is it? It seems to describe exactly what happened: a farmer finds a sack of grain in his attic left by his great grandfather and plants them for the hell of it. Interesting things result.

gnabgib

13 hours ago

You're likely basing this on the (better) updated title.. the original included "almost biblical" in the title. Shame mods didn't document the change.

ecares

9 hours ago

I actually could not use the full article's title at submission time as it was too long, so I shortened it to its current version, not sure if mods used the full article's title at some point.

PeterHolzwarth

10 hours ago

Ah thanks, I didn't see that original title.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS

12 hours ago

The "almost Biblical" line comes from the fact that - before he knew what variety it was - he read about a similar wheat mentioned in the Bible.

That phrase is actually in the article.

gnabgib

12 hours ago

Sure does. And his grandfather surely wasn't in the bible or even 2000 years close to it.. so.. that's one hell of a use of almost.

"Black Plague almost annihilated FIFA 2026 final" is closer historical range than this usage.

Description of ancient grains, meanwhile, reach back into Egyptian and other empires that precede the bible.

PeterHolzwarth

10 hours ago

Hey the-golden-one, I downvoted you because your comment didn't make any sense to me. Other commenters point out that you were responding to an earlier title. Sorry! Time has passed, and I am no longer able to unvote.

gnabgib

9 hours ago

This is pretty classy.

zkmon

6 hours ago

The damage by the "progress" is multifold and pervasive. GM foods, with a goal of high yields, lost all nutritional value and gave the world insipid food and killed the natural foods forever. Supply chains and food regulations meant extreme processing of already killed food. What's left is bacteria-less, nutrition-less, sugary pulp that digests easily, increasing the consumption and economy.

If I think of any food and taste from the 70's, I feel suffocated now. It's disgusting to see all processed, sugar-loaded, gene-modified, beautiful foods in the stores.

The economy planners gave you cars, roads, food stores, supply chains and took away your time to grow your own food. You are just forced to take 5x amount of food in your car and consume it like biological pump with inputs and outputs. You became fat and ill and the economy tells you to believe it as a norm and call it growth. They even show in TV how all this is normal so that you don't feel bad about it.

You are turned into a country full of workers with everything streamlined to make you focus on the work. Your short working years are good enough. It has machinery to dump you in nursing home and not let your younger family care for you. Small kids? You got care centers. Don't waste your time in caring for others or yourself. Just get into the commute circus.

defrost

6 hours ago

To be completely honest

> GM foods, with a goal of high yields, lost all nutritional value

sounds like unmitigated total bullshit.

If GM grains have zero "nutritional value" then why do tests show otherwise and why do people not die when they spend a year eating GM grain ?

Ag scientists measure nutritional value for all crops, GM and not GM, - how is possible they haven't noticed "zero nutritional value" results for GM grains?

https://www.incitecpivotfertilisers.com.au/resources/agronom...

Further:

   these data support the conclusion that GM events are nutritionally similar to conventional varieties of wheat, corn, and tomato on the market today.
~ Assessment of the nutritional values of genetically modified wheat, corn, and tomato crops (2008) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18781763/ etc.

vconnor

6 hours ago

Consider the possibility that there are nutritional values that are NOT being measured. We should accept that science is not… omniscient.

autoexec

2 hours ago

> We should accept that science is not… omniscient.

I've seen that kind of thing expressed before and it bugs me because there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient. Science is based on the best evidence we currently have, the models that are most useful to us, and all of it is subject to change as soon as newer better evidence/models are discovered which contradicts or improves on what we currently have. There are countless unknowns in science and that should surprise no one.

If you told me there were no elephants in your bedroom and I countered with "Consider the possibility that there are four microscopic elephants in your bedroom you did NOT notice. We should accept that you are not… omniscient." you probably wouldn't be convinced that you should stop saying there there are no elephants in your bedroom. It might be more accurate to say that you don't think that there are elephants and that you can never be certain, but since it's obvious that you never can be certain it's not a very useful point. It's perfectly fine to just say that your bedroom is elephant free. The "as far as I know right now" is implied and understood.

vconnor

19 minutes ago

> there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Quote: [The term has been adopted] as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)"

Scientism is very much in vogue, especially in the "rationalist" community which is often tangent with the HN populace. It's "science, the religion."

defrost

5 minutes ago

It's highly improbable that any in the SF lunatic fringe works the annual harvests as Agricultural scientists measuring nutrition.

Again, is there any evidence that actual people are actually suffering a nutritional deficiency solely on the basis of eating GM Vs non GM equivalents?

defrost

6 hours ago

Okay, I've considered that.

Again, why do people on exclusive GM grain diets not die due to zero nutritional value then?

vconnor

6 hours ago

There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet. Here’s more food for thought.

Living or dying is a bit coarse a metric, don’t you think?

defrost

6 hours ago

Talk sense, please.

> There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet.

This literally has nothing to do with GM corn V non GM corn nutrition levels.

Living V dying is a spectrum with various grades of malnutrition in between - is there _any_ actual evidence of less nutrition from 100 tonne of GM grain v 100 tonne of the same grain sans the GM mod that increases weed killer resistance?

Recall the claim above is that GM grains have zero ( 0 , nada , nothing ) nutritional value.