Wheat Plant Quotes

Tell me about the farm," she pleaded as drops of blood began to appear on her hand. "The farm?" "The farm that Finnikin the peasant would have lived on with his bride." "Evanjalin. That was her name. Did I mention that?" She laughed through a sob. "No, you didn't." "They would plant rows upon rows of wheat and barley, and each night they would sit under the stars to admire what they owned. Oh, and they would argue. She believes the money made would be better spent on a horse, and he believes they need a new barn. But then later they would forget all their anger and he would hold her fiercely and never let her go." "And he'd place marigolds in her hair?" she asked. He clasped her hands against his and watched her blood seep through the lines of his skin. "And he would love her until the day he died," he said.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat,

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat; the nettle for a nourishing dainty I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree I have chosen the serpent for a councellor & the dog for a schoolmaster to my children I have blotted out from light & living the dove & the nightingale And I have caused the earthworm to beg from door to door I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning My heavens are brass my earth is iron my moon a clod of clay My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapor of death in night

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.... Is there no other way the world may live?

That didn't last long, of course. "Oh Bartimaeus, could you just irrigate the Fertile Cresent?""Could you just divert the Euphrates HERE and HERE?""Look, while you're at it, do you mind just planting a few million wheat seeds up and down the flood plain? Thanks." Didn't even give me a dibble. By the time I got to Ur I wasn't surging with any of that terrible joy, oh no. My back was KILLING me.

Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.

If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires the guys who crack crude oil down into a dozen different parts who make light globes and sewing machines and shovels and automobiles and airplanes and tanks and guns oh no it will not be us who die. It will be you. It will be you—you who urge us on to battle you who incite us against ourselves you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler you who would have one man who works kill another man who works you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live. Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed … The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful or plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected he was whittling at my skull — no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.

Recently I've been working very hard and quickly; in this way I try to express the desperately fast passage of things in modern life. Yesterday, in the rain, I painted a large landscape with fields as far as the eye can see, viewed from a height, different kinds of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, the rich purple earth between the regular rows of plants, to one side a field of peas white with bloom, a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of tall, ripe, fawn-coloured grass, then some wheat, some poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills at the foot of which a train is passing, leaving an immense trail of white smoke over the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas, on the road a little carriage and some white houses with bright red roofs alongside a road. Fine drizzle streaks the whole with blue or grey lines.

The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesricated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think

The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

This means that white bread contains gluten but not WGA, while whole wheat bread contains the double whammy!

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

When we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. And if we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, we are driven to conclude that this great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent species had been exposed under nature. There is, also, some probability in the view propounded by Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly connected with excess of food. It seems clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to new conditions to cause any great amount of variation; and that, when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues varying for many generations. No case is on record of a variable organism ceasing to vary under cultivation. Our oldest cultivated plants, such as wheat, still yield new varieties: our oldest domesticated animals are still capable of rapid improvement or modification.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy.

The world contains more than 50,000 edible plants, but only three—wheat, rice, and corn—directly or indirectly (through livestock feed) provide 80–90 percent of all the calories that humans consume.

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real. See what happens. Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

What else can one do, when we think of all the things we do not know the reason for, than go look at a field of wheat? The history of those plants is like our own; for aren't we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren't we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in what way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?

Almost everything people did throughout history was fuelled by solar energy that was captured by plants and converted into muscle power. Human history was consequently dominated by two main cycles: the growth cycles of plants and the changing cycles of solar energy (day and night, summer and winter). When sunlight was scarce and when wheat fields were still green, humans had little energy. Granaries were empty, tax collectors were idle, soldiers found it difficult to move and fight, and kings tended to keep the peace. When the sun shone brightly and the wheat ripened, peasants harvested the crops and filled the granaries. Tax collectors hurried to take their share. Soldiers flexed their muscles and sharpened their swords. Kings convened councils and planned their next campaigns. Everyone was fuelled by solar energy – captured and packaged in wheat, rice and potatoes.

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Gin is really nothing more than a flavored vodka whose predominant flavor is juniper, so gin drinkers who say they won’t drink vodka misunderstand the nature of their addiction. The base spirit itself is generally a mixture of barley, rye, and perhaps wheat or corn.

How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Yes, anger king, yes, eat like you’re going to destroy the world, eat like you’re the conqueror of the galaxy. I want to watch you trample the meatpacking plants to the ground, burn down the fields of wheat, annihilate the dairy farms that brought the milk to your doorstep.

I planted my hands on his chest and shoved, as hard as I could. Our land was one of grass and wheat. Tumbles should not hurt. I am making excuses. It was also a land of rocks. His head thudded dully against stone, and I saw the surprised pop of his eyes. The ground around him began to bleed.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

In addition to the potential to cause health problems, lectins can also stimulate weight gain. The reason that wheat became the grain of choice in northern climates is thanks to a uniquely small lectin in wheat, known as wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), which is responsible for wheat’s weight-gaining propensity. You read that correctly. Wheat helped your ancestors gain or maintain weight in ancient times when food was often scarce; back then, a “wheat belly” was a great thing to possess! And guess what? That WGA in the “ancient” forms of wheat is just as present in modern wheat—hence the weight gain.

When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.

But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament, a farmer planting wheat, a vintner tending vines, a miller grinding wheat, a winemaker crushing grapes, a woman baking bread, a man making wine, a trucker hauling bread, a grocer selling wine. Who knows what bread or what wine might end up on the Communion table as the body and blood of Christ. This is where we discover the holy mystery that all labor necessary for human flourishing is sacred. A farmer plowing his field, a worker in a bakery, a trucker hauling goods, a grocer selling wares—all are engaged in work that is just as sacred as the priest or pastor serving Communion on Sunday. The Eucharist pulls back the curtain to reveal a sacramental world.

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most . . . No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice . . . but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different . . . Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips".

Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.

When Radha and I were children, we used to play a game. She would ask, “What is the true color of the world, Didi?” And I would say, “Green.” “Why green?” “Because the trees are green. Grass is green. The new buds on the plants are green. Even the parrots are green. Green is the color of the world.” “But, Didi,” Radha would argue, “the wheat stalks are brown. My body is brown. The field mice are brown. No, the world is brown.” “What about blue?” I would say. “The sky is blue. And it covers the whole world, like a mother who loves and embraces all her children. Radha would fall silent, and I would remember that she had known our mother’s love for even fewer years than I did. So I would take her in my arms and hold her, to make her know what it feels like to be loved. Today I know the truth: The true color of the world is black. Anger is black. Shame and scandal are black. Betrayal is black. Hatred is black. And a roasted, smoking body is Black, Black, Black. The world, after witnessing such cruelty, goes black. The waking up to a changed world is black.

The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.

(The potato’s cold tolerance spurred its embrace by European peasants. Not only did potatoes grow in places where other crops could not, the plant was an ally in smallholders’ ceaseless struggle against the economic and political elite. A farmer’s barnful of wheat, rye, or barley was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding armies; buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.)

In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.

Walking along the streets, you could quickly ascertain the wealth and position of every family by the size and quality of their turf. There is no surer sign that something is wrong at the Joneses’ than a neglected lawn in the front yard. Grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the USA after maize and wheat, and the lawn industry (plants, manure, mowers, sprinklers, gardeners) accounts for billions of dollars every year.

Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.

By Mendel’s time, plant breeding had progressed to a point where every region boasted dozens of local varieties of peas, not to mention beans, lettuce, strawberries, carrots, wheat, tomatoes, and scores of other crops. People may not have known about genetics, but everyone understood that plants (and animals) could be changed dramatically through selective breeding. A single species of weedy coastal mustard, for example, eventually gave rise to more than half a dozen familiar European vegetables. Farmers interested in tasty leaves turned it into cabbages, collard greens, and kale. Selecting plants with edible side buds and flower shoots produced Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, while nurturing a fattened stem produced kohlrabi. In some cases, improving a crop was as simple as saving the largest seeds, but other situations required real sophistication. Assyrians began meticulously hand-pollinating date palms more than 4,000 years ago, and as early as the Shang Dynasty (1766–1122 BC), Chinese winemakers had perfected a strain of millet that required protection from cross-pollination. Perhaps no culture better expresses the instinctive link between growing plants and studying them than the Mende people of Sierra Leone, whose verb for “experiment” comes from the phrase “trying out new rice.

As we have seen, distributions centered on their means are omnipresent in nature—in plants, animals, and humans—and they are encountered in the sizes of entire organisms or their organs and parts as well as their functions (the brains of impala antelopes; grains of wheat harvested in Turkey; heart rates of elite athletes). In contrast, asymmetric distributions in nature prevail where physical (tectonic, geomorphic, atmospheric) forces dominate.

Most dictionaries define tree as a large, perennial, single-trunked, woody plant. This is misleading, for a palm tree contains no wood. Botanists themselves do not bother to distinguish trees from nontrees. Instead, they divide plants into more precise categories, such as angiosperms (flowering plants) and gymnosperms (nonflowering). Angiosperms comprise two diagnostic types, monocots and dicots. Monocots, including palms, are less complex than dicots. They develop from a single embryonic leaf, have basic flowers and no secondary growth (wood). The rootstock is adventitious, meaning that the underground shoots develop independently; the tree has no radicle, or primary root. The simplicity of monocots enhances their agricultural tility. As crops, they supply us with essential carbohydrates—think bananas, yuccas, and edible grasses (rice, wheat, maize, cane). From a botanist’s point of view, a palm is not so different from a giant stalk of grass.

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Practice resurrection. For me, this means forcing myself to be brave enough to enjoy simple pleasures with my family. I take long walks with Benjamin, pushing the stroller throughout the neighborhood and marveling at the gaudy excess of the bougainvillea. I bake honey wheat bread, listen to folk music, and tend the zucchini plants. I nurse my daughter, which is the most good and rightful thing I've ever done. I breathe. And little by little - baby steps - I invite the real God, the God of love, to banish my fear. How good life is.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.

Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenceless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Where, exactly, did rainbow colored, sugar frosted, air puffed, marshmallow infused cereal come from? Was it raised by cartoon rabbits and harvested by mischievous leprechauns? These products were so distantly removed from the local farms, so thoroughly metamorphosed, that we couldn’t even be sure what the raw ingredients had been... Looking back on these farming families standing in line with their shopping carts, I wonder if the money they received for growing the right ingredients even covered the cost of their shopping bills. Could a farmer who planted fields of wheat and oats now afford a box of cereal made from his own grain?

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.

All my life, I'd been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I'd been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I'd thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life. Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I'd never lived near a forest like this, but when I'd come to one, I'd understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I'd ever trodden, I'd reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.

In the case that upheld the second AAA, Wickard v. Filburn, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him—notwithstanding that the "excess" wheat had been consumed on his own farm. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That's easy, the Court said. If you had not used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that was transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution's clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture. The

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.

More food is good, but agricultural diets can provoke mismatch diseases. One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.26 In contrast, farmers sacrifice quality and diversity for quantity by focusing their efforts on just a few staple crops with high yields. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the calories you consume today derived from rice, corn, wheat, or potatoes. Other crops that have sometimes served as staples for farmers include grains like millet, barley, and rye and starchy roots such as taro and cassava. Staple crops can be grown easily in massive quantities, they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for long periods of time after harvest. One of their chief drawbacks, however, is that they tend to be much less rich in vitamins and minerals than most of the wild plants consumed by hunter-gatherers and other primates.27 Farmers who rely too much on staple crops without supplemental foods such as meat, fruits, and other vegetables (especially legumes) risk nutritional deficiencies. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are susceptible to diseases such as scurvy (from insufficient vitamin C), pellagra (from insufficient vitamin B3), beriberi (from insufficient vitamin B1), goiter (from insufficient iodine), and anemia (from insufficient iron).28 Relying heavily on a few crops—sometimes just one crop—has other serious disadvantages, the biggest being the potential for periodic food shortages and famine. Humans,

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers. Scholars

It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500–200 B.C., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A

The severe frost last February destroyed many branches as well as young trees that had already been full of sap as a result of the warm weather. In addition to this punishment by God, there is another one, namely, an unbelievable number of caterpillar-type worms which do very great damage to our wheat, barley, and oats. They also eat down to the ground the Indian corn sprouts and whatever young plants we have in our gardens. It would be even worse except for the birds, particularly the starlings, which fly over the fields in large numbers and eat the worms. . . . Last month the unusually large number of worms threatened to ruin our crops completely, but it pleased God (for, according to the Second Book of Chronicles 7:13, He commands the locusts to devour the land and, according to Verse 14, He promises to heal it) that a large number of starlings and other small birds came to the fields and gradually ate all the worms. Thanks be to God for His merciful regime!

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

Another set of mismatch diseases that can be caused by farming diets are nutrient deficiencies. Many of the molecules that make grains like rice and wheat nutritious, healthful, and sustaining are the oils, vitamins, and minerals present in the outer bran and germ layers that surround the mostly starchy central part of the seed. Unfortunately, these nutrient-rich parts of the plant also spoil rapidly. Since farmers must store staple foods for months or years, they eventually figured out how to refine cereals by removing the outer layers, transforming rice or wheat from “brown” into “white.” These technologies were not available to the earliest farmers, but once refining became common the process removed a large percentage of the plant’s nutritional value. For instance, a cup of brown and white rice have nearly the same caloric content, but the brown rice has three to six times as much B vitamins, plus other minerals and nutrients such as vitamin E, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. Refined

I find it impossible, therefore, to imagine a growing and maturing church or individual Christian doing without the Psalms. And that is why (to be frank) a fair amount of contemporary Christian music has worried me for some time. The last generation in the Western churches has seen an enormous explosion in “Christian music,” with hundreds of new songs written and sung, often with great devotion and energy. That is wonderful; like all new movements, it will no doubt need to shake down and sift out the wheat from the chaff, but one would much rather have all these new signs of life than the sterile repetition of stale traditions. Until very recently, though, the kind of traditions from which this new music has emerged, traditions that think of themselves as “biblical,” after all, would always have included solid doses of psalmody. If that has changed, the sooner it changes back the better, with, of course, all the resources of fresh musical treatments upon which to draw. To worship without using the Psalms is to risk planting seeds that will never take root.

different plants became selected for quite different or even opposite features. Some plants (like sunflowers) were selected for much bigger seeds, while others (like bananas) were selected for tiny or even nonexistent seeds. Lettuce was selected for luxuriant leaves at the expense of seeds or fruit; wheat and sunflowers, for seeds at the expense of leaves; and squash, for fruit at the expense of leaves. Especially instructive are cases in which a single wild plant species was variously selected for different purposes and thereby gave rise to quite different-looking crops. Beets, grown already in Babylonian times for their leaves (like the modern beet varieties called chards), were then developed for their edible roots and finally (in the 18th century) for their sugar content (sugar beets). Ancestral cabbage plants, possibly grown originally for their oily seeds, underwent even greater diversification as they became variously selected for leaves (modern cabbage and kale), stems (kohlrabi), buds (brussels sprouts), or flower shoots (cauliflower and broccoli).

Of the 200,000 wild plant species, only a few thousand are eaten by humans, and just a few hundred of these have been more or less domesticated. Even of these several hundred crops, most provide minor supplements to our diet and would not by themselves have sufficed to support the rise of civilizations. A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana. Cereal crops alone now account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world’s human populations. With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it’s less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.

The salmon is perfectly cooked. The trace amounts of sugar contained in the wheat flour have combined with the butter in a chemical reaction that's creating a wonderful fragrance. It was all fried together for precisely the right amount of time to create a superb Meunière." "The squid liver was quickly sautéed in a dollop of butter as well, taking a bite of that with the Meunière is sublime! The butter's flavor gently wraps around the salty and pleasantly bitter taste of the liver, giving it a beautifully mellow body." "He added pomegranate seeds and tonburi to the soy sauce marinated roe! Those three completely disparate flavors meld into a seamless whole thanks to butter! Not only does it have an amusing texture, the roe doesn't have its typical greasiness either!" *Tonburi, also called land caviar, is the seeds of the summer cypress plant. It's texture is similar to caviar.* He's used mounds of butter in so many different facets of the dish, but it somehow hasn't made the flavor heavy at all. The secret to that lies in the bed of special sushi rice hidden underneath the seafood! "This sushi rice was made not with vinegar but with orange juice and lemon juice!" "So that's why he was squeezing that mountain of oranges!"

In April 1953, President Eisenhower delivered the first of two major speeches during his presidency that addressed the dangers of military spending. Speaking several weeks after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Ike offered what has become known as his “Chance of Peace” speech, telling American newspaper editors that an arms race with the Soviets would impose domestic burdens on both countries: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people. Ike’s warning about the cost of military spending fell on deaf ears.

(1 = best, 11 = worst) 1. Raw fruits and vegetables (preferably organic) such as apples, grapes, melons, bananas, avocados, romaine lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, kale, tomatoes, etc.; raw honey, stevia (a natural sweetener) 2. Lightly-steamed, low-starch vegetables (all vegetables other than white potatoes, acorn and butternut squash, and pumpkin); pure maple syrup, agave nectar *Note that corn and legumes are starches, not vegetables. 3. Organic raw nuts and seeds (almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, macadamia nuts, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.) 4. Raw stone-pressed or cold-pressed plant oils (especially olive oil, though hemp seed and flax seed oils are also acceptable) 5. Cooked starchy vegetables (sweet potatoes, butternut and acorn squash, pumpkin, etc.) 6. Raw unpasteurized dairy products (particularly from goats and sheep) 7. Whole grains (brown rice, millet, whole wheat, buckwheat, etc.) 8. Pasteurized dairy and animal flesh (preferably limited to organic fish and minimal organic meat and poultry products) 9. All non-whole grain flour products (white bread, white rice, white pasta, white pizza dough, flour tortillas, etc.); sugar (white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, etc.) 10. Cooked animal fats/hydrogenated oils (lard, cooked oils, etc.), mainstream meats, poultry; soy products 11. Chemicals, artificial coloring and sweeteners (aspartame, saccharine, unnatural additives of all kinds)

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. Wheat did not give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of species to survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of preserved food. If the availability of one species was reduced, they could gather and hunt more of other species. Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. Map 2. Locations and dates of agricultural revolutions. The data is contentious, and the map is constantly being redrawn to incorporate the latest archaeological discoveries.1 {Maps by Neil Gower} That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Zucchini Pumpkins Squashes (any kind) Melons (any kind) Eggplant Tomatoes Bell peppers Chili peppers Goji berries Non-Southern European Cow’s Milk Products (these contain casein A-1) Yogurt (including Greek yogurt) Ice cream Frozen yogurt Cheese Ricotta Cottage cheese KefirGrains, Sprouted Grains, Pseudo-Grains, and Grasses Wheat (pressure cooking does not remove lectins from any form of wheat) Einkorn wheat Kamut Oats (cannot pressure cook) Quinoa Rye (cannot pressure cook) Bulgur White rice Brown rice Wild rice Barley (cannot pressure cook) Buckwheat Kashi Spelt

Switching from beef to “white meat” such as pork or chicken could cut health costs by $1 trillion a year, significantly lower GHG emissions, and greatly reduce the pressure to find new agricultural land.13 Plant-based food is now a $4.5 billion business14 and could be an $85 billion industry by 2030.15 Wheat farmers in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom reap more than four times the harvest from the same area of land as farmers in Russia, Spain, and Romania.16 Yields in much of Africa are even lower. Quadrupling food production is probably an unrealistic goal, but a number of pilot projects suggest that doubling yields—even in the face of climate stress—is eminently possible.17 About a third of all the food that is produced globally is lost—to pests or spoilage in the supply chain or as consumer waste. Preventing just a quarter of this loss could feed nearly a billion people a year, save nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, and significantly reduce global GHG emissions.18

My Son taught with parables to fulfill the prophecy in Psalm 78:2—that He would give instruction by examples to reveal truths that were hidden since the world began. Why were these truths hidden? Because the god of this world had deceived Adam and Eve and many who followed, and he had obscured what I originally made known to them. Why would only some people understand Jesus’s parables? Because the stories distinguished a difference between light and darkness, and their meaning would always be hidden to those who dwell in darkness. But to those with “ears to hear,” they could be understood and discerned. Secrets and mysteries are imbedded in His examples from life. And only some would ever comprehend their true meaning. Like His disciples, these are those who want to understand and bear good fruit. Four reactions always result from hearing My Word: Some immediately reject the truth they hear, allowing it to be stolen from them. Others receive the truth, but quickly turn away from it when they experience life’s pressures. Some hear My Word, receive it for a while, but are drawn away from it by the cares of the world, which include wealth, recognition, and power, which choke out any belief in Me. Finally, those who grasp its meaning, love what it represents, and yearn to learn more are the good seed that yield spiritual abundance—in their own lives and others’. They are the “good wheat” sown in a field that will be gathered at the end harvest and given places of honor and favor. Those who are the good seed are often considered the least and lowliest of people in this world. Like the mustard seed, their capabilities and what lies within them are often overlooked. But, like the mustard plant’s very tiny and insignificant beginning, they can grow into large, magnificent trees that protect and harbor many others. Never underestimate what I can do for and through you. People may disqualify you because of your beliefs and Who you represent, just as they did My Son. Just remember, I am training you for a greater purpose. I want you to be able to understand My hidden truths, so that you can enjoy greater treasures later, and so that you will have a seat of honor in My Kingdom!

Humans had once used all manner of technologies to modify plants and animals, back before they understood the risks. A wheat crop that was immune to pesticides and only digestible to ninety percent of people was still likely to poison a vast swath of humanity. Ten percent of a trillion humans was a big number. And using viruses to inject new genes into things might have been brilliant technical engineering, but no squid ever bred with a cow. And the chances of the outcomes being entirely beneficial were low. Thus, the University of Uelkal was an agronomy institute.

You cannot change the power of the wind, but you can set your sail in a way that will compel you to your port much more quickly and accurately. Business success is a process. Converting prospects takes time and the continual practice of planting wheat is always a challenge in a world where taking time and exhibiting patience are passing away. It is always a good day to make a change.

Mom had planted both wheat seeds and sugar cane, taking care to put them in nice, even rows, and stood back to admire her work, dusting off her hands. “It looks pretty good to me!” With that task finished, Mom went into one of the empty houses, to see if she could find anything else to plant. She was disappointed, though. The house was barren- hardly anything in it at all.  She went through each house and discovered that every single one was pretty much stripped bare. No belongings, no decorations, no furniture. Ethan had been wrong about how much stuff there was in the town. Elijah was going to have to stop burning things for warmth!  Mom had been searching through houses for a while with no luck, so she decided to check on the garden. A smile spread across her face when saw the wheat had already grown in! She could get used to ultra-fast-growing plants. With a skip in her step, she went to find the villagers. The double-E’s were outside their house examining their broken front door. It hung off its hinges, and an entire piece the size of a dog was just missing. Elijah threw his arms in the air. “I don't know how to fix a door!” “Me either,” Ethan said while he scratched his head, “but we have to figure it out. If we don't have doors, the zombies will just come right in and eat us.”  “I can help,” Mom said. The mayors jumped, startled.  “Don’t sneak up on us like that!” Elijah said.

Many UPF products contain ingredients from four or five continents. Your lasagne or ice cream may have palm oil from Asia, cocoa from Africa, soy from South America, wheat from the USA, flavouring from Europe and so on. Many of these ingredients will be shipped more than once – from a farm in South America to a processing plant in Europe, then to a secondary processing and packaging plant in another part of Europe, then to consumers, who might be back in South America right next to the farm.

The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!” He

The first sedentary communities were established around ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia when Neolithic hunters began to plant wild grains like wheat and einkorn and barley.

There in the embrace of the sand I felt the throbbing heart of the earth, felt the rhythm of the currents of boiling rock beneath me, and heard in the most hidden place in my ears a strange song of some of itching torment, trying to find a comfortable way to settle down and sleep, while the continents danced back and forth on my skin and oceans froze and fell. And while I heard the song of this largest dance, still I could hear the small melodies of shifting sand and falling stone and settling soil. I heard the agony of rock being cut and torn in a thousand places on the surface of my skin, and I wept at the thousand deaths of stone and soil, of plants that thinly held to life between the stone and the sky. Armies thundered on my skin, death in every heart, with dead trees carved to make tools to build more death. Only the voices of men are louder than the voices of trees, and though a million stalks of wheat whisper terribly together as they die, the death scream of a man's mind is the strongest cry the earth can hear. I felt blood soak into my skin, and I no longer wept; I longed to die, to be free of the incessant crying. I screamed.

It still asks us to be useful when we’re useless to everyone it asks for what we didn’t have and what we will have. one leaves us as bad and another one the same one grabs us as good as if it also were of the life of life plants want to come out into the light and grow along the backs of our necks. they leave empty spots where they sprout from we stay those of us who stayed in a few filled-up graves to give ourselves to it in petty lies and it rips our bellies like the ears of wheat for lack of life we get a fright of it we don’t know how to get out of it blindfolded for the whole body to become an eye of the peach-flavored fear. (in english by Diana Manole)

Enormous genetic changes have occurred in varieties of bread wheat over the past 400 years, affecting the look, the yield and the nutritional make-up of the plants.

Afghan farmers planted just over four hundred thousand acres in poppy, the most ever measured, enough to manufacture just over 90 percent of the world’s annual heroin supply. More than three million Afghans—about 14 percent of the population—by now participated in the drug economy, according to the United Nations. Afghan farmers might earn just over $30 planting an acre of wheat, but more than $500 for poppy. The total export value of opium and derived products like morphine was about $4 billion, or just over half the size of the legal Afghan economy.

RAGNA: All you do not take from the world the world takes from you, all the flowering plants you have denied yourself are full of you, your presence makes the wheat fields uneasy, because of you and likes of you the markets are querulous and mean and overfed. The joints of beef you have not eaten have eaten you. They are glutted with the mouths they have left empty.

The constant clack of train wheels over the steel track was enough to lull anyone to sleep. When I looked up from rereading Papa’s journal, passengers slept with their heads bent back against neighboring bench seats. In such momentary quiet, looking out train windows, I unwound the landscape. Along the plains, taupe fields planted deep with wheat seamed the green forest beyond. Across Kentucky, acres of bluegrass and waxy leaves of green corn touched an azure horizon. In Virginia, the Appalachian valleys blurred gray, as if they still hid widows and orphans wearing mourning cloaks after enduring five years of civil war.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

a combination of all childhood memory / fields of / rice / sugarcane / wheat / barley / cows & buffaloes tilling soil / the red light / of dawn / and tomato plants...

But what have either of them ever done except learn Latin? Have they ever planted a field of wheat? Set up a factory? Dug a canal? They were born, Sharpe, that’s all that ever happened to them, they were born.

In a biological sense, a fruit is the developed ovary of a plant (the vessel that holds the plant's eggs), and examining a fruit gives clues about its past struggles. Before humans, the red flesh of strawberries was a decoy for flyby nibbles from birds. Avocados appealed to elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, which had intestines wide enough for the animals to swallow the fruit and excrete its hefty seed somewhere else. The day gomphotheres went extinct, thankfully no one told avocados. Nine thousand years passed before the Aztecs invented guacamole. As for what constitutes a fruit in 2018, sweetness has little to do with it. Tomatoes are fruits, but so are eggplants, peppers, and olives. Peanuts and almonds and walnuts are fruits. So are parts of the world's six top crops---wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and soy. Oftentimes, things that masquerade as vegetables, like pea pods, are definitely fruits. Which is not to cast shade at vegetables; they are, by definition, almost fruits. To botanists, vegetables are any other edible part of the plant that doesn't contain seeds. Roots, such as carrots, potatoes, and parsnips, are vegetables. Lettuces are seedless, so they're vegetables, too, as is garlic.

You do bad deeds and hope to get back good Though bad deserves bad only in return. God is merciful and kind, but even so, If you plant barley, wheat won't grow. ***** தீயவை செய்கிறாய், நற்பயன் கேட்கிறாய்; தீயவை தீயவே பயக்கும், தெரியாதா? இறைவன் கருணையாளன், கனிவுள்ளவன்; உண்மைதான், எனினும் கேப்பையை விதைத்துவைத்தால் கோதுமை விளையாது, தெரியாதா?

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.

Frequently, if not disturbed by the startling human voice, they make a raid on the rich corn-stalks of the native cultivators, and a dozen of them will in a few minutes make a frightful havoc in a large field of this plant. Consequently, we were not surprised, while delayed at the ferry, to hear the owners of the corn venting loud halloos, like the rosy-cheeked farmer boys in England when scaring the crows away from the young wheat.

In the heart of the land where the rivers flow free, Stands a nation of folks who are brave as can be. With hands on our hearts, under God's watchful eyes, We're singing this song for the home of the brave. We're taking back our country, it's time to stand tall, With faith as our compass, we'll never fall. From the mountains so grand, to the wide-open sea, Under God's grace, where the brave are still free. We've weathered the storms, faced our trials with grace, Now we're turning the page, we're not stuck in one place. With hope in our eyes and prayers in our hands, We're planting new seeds across this great land. So many have fought, and so many have died, To keep the flame of freedom truly alive. In fields far away, under skies so vast, Their courage reminds us, our liberty lasts. Oh, we're not just a memory, we're alive and we're strong, We're the voices united in a powerful song. With God by our side, we'll forge a new way, For the red, white, and blue, we'll proudly display. We're taking back our country, with courage anew, We'll mend every bridge and paint it with truth. From the golden wheat fields to the cities that gleam, Under God's watch, we're chasing the dream. So let's raise up our voices, let the whole world hear, The USA's heart beats strong and sincere. We're taking back our country, making it better each day, For we are the people, under God, the USA.

How to be gluten-free and still nurture your gut So what’s a sensible approach to gluten consumption? Well if you absolutely need to be gluten-free, then I would recommend paying special attention to your whole-grain intake. Since wheat is the dominant form of whole grain in the United States, you need to make sure that you’re adequately supporting your gut microbiome. Thankfully, there are some delicious gluten-free whole grains available for you to routinely consume: quinoa, buckwheat, millet, sorghum, oats, and brown rice. Get them into your belly! On the flip side, if gluten is a part of your diet, which it should be for most of you, I’m not encouraging you to go eat more processed foods. Most gluten-containing foods are processed foods. What I encourage you to eat is more unprocessed or minimally processed wheat, barley, and rye. Look for whole-grain products, like whole-grain bread and pasta when they are called for. But remember not to overdo it. Moderation is just fine.

I am calling this season, The Parable of The Wheat and The Tares

In the early 1900s, Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov discovered a strange phenomenon: weeds in crop fields sometimes begin to look like the crop themselves. Original rye plants, he realized, looked nothing like the plump grain that by then was a staple crop in Russia. It was a scraggly, inedible weed. Rye, he realized, had performed an incredible trick of mimicry. Early wheat farmers, weeding by hand, pulled out and discarded the rye-weed to keep their planted crops healthy. So, to survive, a few rye plants took on a form more similar to wheat. Farmers still extricated the pesky rye, when they could spot it. This selective pressure molded the rye to evolve to trick a farmer’s discerning eye. In this case, only the best impressionists survived. Eventually, the rye became so excellent a mimic that it became a crop itself. “Vavilovian mimicry” is now a basic fact of agriculture.* Oats are a product of the same process; they also got their start mimicking wheat. In rice paddies, the weed known as barnyard grass is indistinguishable from the rice at the seedling stage. Recent genetic analysis found that this weed began to change its architecture to match the rice about a thousand years ago, when rice cultivation in Asia was well underway. In lentil fields, common vetch is a ubiquitous weed that masterfully redesigned its previously spherical seeds to be the same flat, round disc shape as lentils themselves. In that case, the plant needed not to trick a farmer’s eye but rather make itself impossible to eliminate from the mechanical threshing process. Winnowing machines simply could not tell the difference between a vetch and a lentil. Weed genomicist Scott McElroy argues that modern herbicide-resistant plants are actually just engaging in Vavilovian mimicry at the biochemical level; they are mimicking the crop plants that have been conveniently engineered to tolerate the herbicide.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman founded an organization called OWK. He and Ostap made leaflets with their own hands, with the help of thick pencils, and distributed them all over the city, nailing them to doors and walls. When one of Afros' OGPO men stopped him on the street and asked about his actions, Roman replied, "I serve the revolution, comrade. And what are you doing?" The brothers were brought before Afros and Zhuk in the house they had confiscated in the village square. Zhuk asked if Roman wanted to be taken to Murmansk. Roman said no. He explained that apparently there were no kulaks left in Ispes after the concentrated purge six weeks ago. Therefore, Roman And Ostap decided to form an organization that anyone can join, and they are holding the first assembly next week. The organization is called OWK, the acronym for 'Organization without Kulaks'. "I even used the abominable Russian word, out of national solidarity with you and your friends, Comrade Zhuk," Roman said. "It is an organization of non-wealthy farmers, a definition that applies to the entire population that remained in Ispas. It is difficult to continue to maintain in Ukraine the class war between the successful farmer and the less successful farmer, in part because the classification changes from harvest to harvest. Kulak Mouser is the bane of the current harvest. And because the harvest was so bad and despite your laudable efforts, of course, there don't seem to be any kulaks left in our village. So we don't know exactly how to conduct the class war about which you spoke so eloquently a few weeks ago." Her novel to Jouk has a friendly smile. "We are deeply committed to purging the last of the anti-communist elements. And therefore - OW-K. "If you're serious, you'll participate in collectivization," said Jock. "I understand your point about the inefficiency of the small-scale farm, comrade," Roman said. "I am attentive to her. But listen to me until the end. The land of the Lazar family is far from the other farms, and it is impossible to connect it to them easily and create the collectivization, savings and cooperation that you strive for. So this is my proposal: my family and I will agree to meet your quota without collectivization. Let's show you how we work - with your help, maybe lend us a steel plow that expresses our new understanding and partnership? I'm sure it will work much better than our old wooden plows, and we'll do the rest. We will plow our land now, we will plant your wheat in August. We will work tirelessly for the cause and bring you the grain you demand. We will not give and we will not bargain.” "And in return?" "Nothing," Roman said. "In return we will continue to fatten horses and cows in peace." "You intend to pay other people to work in your wheat fields, Comrade Lazar?" asked Zhuk in a smooth voice. "Of course not," said Roman. "I know that even if I only have three horses, and I only pay two people to work for me, it means that I am a fat and lazy kulak, lower than a human pig. Then, as a founding member of OWK, I will have to destroy myself. So the answer is no. I will not pay anyone to work for me. Every person who passes through the fields will work for free, and that is the duty of all Ukrainians, right? As you told us we have to do to be counted for true patriots.

However, many gluten-free foods are made by replacing wheat flour with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, or tapioca starch (starch extracted from the root of the cassava plant).

At Jamestown an area was cleared of trees and the fort begun. The soil was readied and the English wheat brought over for the purpose was planted. At this point Newport, in one of the small boats, led an exploring party as far as the falls of the James. He was absent from Jamestown about a week and returned to find that the Indians had launched a fierce attack on the new settlement which had been saved, perhaps, by the fact that the ships were near at hand.

At Jamestown an area was cleared of trees and the fort begun. The soil was readied and the English wheat brought over for the purpose was planted. At this point Newport, in one of the small boats, led an exploring party as far as the falls of the James. He was absent from Jamestown about a week and returned to find that the Indians had launched a fierce attack on the new settlement which had been saved, perhaps, by the fact that the ships were near at hand. These afforded safe quarters and carried cannon on their decks that had a frightening effect on the natives.

With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children. With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why

One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and researchers who compared the carbon isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. 'When you look at the isotope ratios,' Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of research, told me, 'we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Casein, which makes up 87% of cow’s milk protein, promoted all stages of the cancer process. What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels of intake? The safe proteins were from plants, including wheat and soy. As

All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy.

just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies in its season, or as a corn of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed, rises with manifold increase by the Spirit of God, who contains all things, and then, through the wisdom of God, serves for the use of men, and having received the Word of God, becomes the Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ; so also our bodies, being nourished by it, and deposited in the earth, and suffering decomposition there, shall rise at their appointed time, the Word of God granting them resurrection to the glory of God, even the Father, who freely gives to this mortal immortality, and to this corruptible incorruption, because the strength of God is made perfect in weakness, in order that we may never become puffed up, as if we had life from ourselves, and exalted against God, our minds becoming ungrateful; but learning by experience that we possess eternal duration from the excelling power of this Being, not from our own nature, we may neither undervalue that glory which surrounds God as He is, nor be ignorant of our own nature, but that we may know what God can effect, and what benefits man receives, and thus never wander from the true comprehension of things as they are, that is, both with regard to God and with regard to man. And

However, many gluten-free foods are made by replacing wheat flour with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, or tapioca starch (starch extracted from the root of the cassava plant). This is especially hazardous for anybody looking to drop twenty, thirty, or more pounds, since gluten-free foods, though they do not trigger the immune or neurological response of wheat gluten, still trigger the glucose-insulin response that causes you to gain weight. Wheat products increase blood sugar and insulin more than most other foods. But remember: Foods made with cornstarch, rice starch, potato starch, and tapioca starch are among the few foods that increase blood sugar even more than wheat products.

The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated on the planet. Wheat, rice, coffee, and cannabis, to name a few, have gone worldwide by giving us what we want. You have to wonder who has been using whom, because in terms of evolutionary success, these plants have done well by us 7—others, not so much. Through our reworking of landscapes, especially for agriculture, we have destroyed and altered habitats and, often without realizing it, created new ones. We’ve

GLYCEMIC INDEX (GI) AND GLYCEMIC LOAD (GL) OF COMMON PLANT FOODS* FOOD GI GL Black beans 30 7 Red kidney beans 25 8 Lentils 30 5 Split peas 25 6 Black-eyed peas 30 13 Corn 52 9 Barley 35 16 Brown rice 75 18 Millet 71 25 Rolled oats 55 13 White rice 83 23 Whole wheat 70 14 White pasta 55 23 Sweet potato 61 17 White potato (average) 90 26 There is a nutritional hierarchy of carbohydrate-rich plant foods.

Bok Choy Seitan Pho (Vietnamese Noodle Soup) After sampling pho at a Vietnamese noodle shop in Los Angeles, I was on a mission to create a simple plant-based version of this aromatic, festive noodle dish in my own kitchen. My recipe features seitan, a wonderful plant-based protein found in many natural food stores. My whole family loves the interactive style in which this soup is served. In fact, you can plan a dinner party around this traditional meal. Simply dish up the noodles and bubbling broth into large soup bowls, set out a variety of vegetable toppings, and let your guests serve it up their way. MAKES 4 SERVINGS BROTH 4 cups reduced-sodium vegetable broth ½ medium yellow onion, chopped ½ cup sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 medium carrot, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced 8 thin slices peeled fresh ginger root 1 tablespoon reduced-sodium soy sauce 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar 1 tablespoon agave syrup ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper 2 cinnamon sticks 2 star anise pods ½ teaspoon whole coriander 6 sprigs of fresh basil 6 sprigs of fresh cilantro NOODLES One 8-ounce package flat rice noodles TOPPINGS One 8-ounce package seitan (wheat gluten) strips, thinly sliced 2 small bunches of fresh bok choy, sliced thinly 1 cup fresh bean sprouts ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro ½ cup coarsely chopped basil 1 small lime, cut into wedges 1 small jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced 4 green onions, sliced TO PREPARE THE BROTH: 1. Combine all the broth ingredients in a large pot, cover, and bring to a low boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain the broth, discarding the vegetables and seasonings. Return the strained broth to the pot, cover, and keep warm (broth should be bubbling right before serving time). While broth is cooking, prepare noodles and toppings. TO PREPARE THE NOODLES: 1. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Add the rice noodles, cover, and cook until just tender, about 5 minutes, or according to package directions. Drain the noodles immediately and rinse with cold water. Return the drained noodles to the pot and cover. TO PREPARE THE TOPPINGS: 1. Arrange the toppings on a large platter. 2. To serve the soup, divide the noodles among four very large soup bowls. Either garnish the noodles with desired toppings or let your guests do their own. Ladle boiling broth over the noodles and toppings, and serve immediately. Allow hot broth to wilt vegetables and cool slightly before eating it. PER SERVING (ABOUT 2 OUNCES NOODLES, 2 OUNCES SEITAN, 1 CUP VEGETABLE TOPPINGS, AND 1 CUP BROTH): Calories: 310 • Carbohydrates: 55 g • Fiber: 4 g • Protein: 17 g • Total fat: 2 g • Saturated fat: 0 g • Sodium: 427 mg • Star nutrients: Vitamin A (39% DV), vitamin C (23% DV), iron (11% DV), selenium (13% DV)

Beverages. It may seem austere, but water should be your first choice. One hundred percent fruit juices can be enjoyed in small quantities, but fruit drinks and soft drinks are very bad ideas. Teas and coffee, the extracts of plant products, are fine to enjoy, with or without milk, cream, coconut milk, or full-fat soymilk. If an argument can be made for alcoholic beverages, the one genuine standout in health is red wine, a source of flavonoids, anthocyanins, and now-popular resveratrol. Beer, on the other hand, is a wheat-brewed beverage in most instances and is the one clear-cut alcoholic drink to avoid or minimize. Beers also tend to be high in carbohydrates, especially the heavier ales and dark beers.

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Mulching the vegetable garden will save you a lot of time watering and weeding. It is amazing the difference that a thick, 3-inch layer of mulch will make. If you mow your own lawn and don’t use chemicals on it, save the grass clippings—they make great mulch, and they add nutrients to the soil. Just remember to let them age for a few weeks before spreading and make sure they don’t have seed heads. Other good materials for vegetable garden mulch include: Shredded newspaper Shredded bark mulch Aged manure Compost Wheat straw Shredded leaves There’s a misconception that you shouldn’t use wood mulch in a vegetable garden. Now, you wouldn’t want to use treated wood mulch or sawdust, but shredded hardwood mulch is more beneficial than detrimental. If you can buy shredded hardwood mulch with compost in it, even better! When mulching around your plants, avoid mounding the mulch up around the stems of the plants, which can cause the plants to rot.

Against this backdrop of diverse geography, farming and fishing still dominate the economy. Many farmers rely on mule transportation and agricultural techniques that have persisted for generations. They tend citrus and olive groves planted by their forefathers, and cultivate grapes, figs, capers, olives, wheat, and tobacco. Family-run enterprises extract marble, pumice, and iron ore from local sources. The island of Halki derives its name from the Greek word for copper (halkos), a reminder of the copper mines that once covered it. Manufacturers on the island of Chios have longed produced mastichochoria, an aromatic resin used to make cosmetics and employed in other industries as well.

Farming also increasingly became an important part of the steppe economy, with crops being planted across the Lower Volga region, which included ‘many tilled fields and orchards’.16 Archaeological evidence from the Crimea from this period attests to farming of wheat, millet and rye on a substantial scale.17 Hazelnuts, falcons and swords were some of the other products sold to the markets to the south.18 So too were wax and honey; the latter was thought to provide resistance to the cold.

Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein.

will plant!” True to his word, on Friday, when she arrived, there were dozens of plants waiting by the garden plot that they had cleared earlier in the week. She stopped and stared at it, wondering at the quantity as well as where he had

For about twelve thousand years, exploiting the phenomenon of evolution, humans have been able to modify plants through a process known as artificial selection. In wheat farming and horse racing we call it breeding.

There are different ways of creating double haploids. One method is by crossing wheat with corn. Wheat thinks it’s being pollinated by another wheat plant and sends over half its genes (the haploids), but when they can’t match up with the corn’s genes, you’re left with the single haploids that you wanted in the first place.

They were hardly fit for life, much less the forests. And yet they would likely defile the lakes, ravage the forests, and plant their desert wheat. These were the people of the colored forest gone amuck. The walking dead. Better buried at the base of a cliff than

Polish pamphlet called The Perfect Distiller and Brewer, published in 1809, described the process of distilling vodka from potatoes, with the warning that it was the worst kind of vodka, behind vodka made from sugar beets, grains, apples, grapes, and acorns. In fact, potatoes only became a common ingredient in Polish vodka because they were cheap and abundant, not because they made a high-quality spirit. They tended to turn into a thick, sticky paste in the fermentation tank, the starch was not easy to convert to sugar, and they produced higher levels of toxic methanol and fusel oils. Russian vodka makers looked down on cheap Polish potato vodkas; to this day, they insist that the best vodka is made from rye or wheat instead.

Was she like the prairie, only slowly yielding to God’s plow in her life? She needed busting, then backsetting, and finally after snow and sun and rain, the seeds could be planted that would sprout into living wheat.

and refrigerate. Tip: Serve this with veggies, crackers, or rice cakes, or try on Sunny Day Flatbread (here) for lunch. Nottingham Sandwich Spread By Jane Esselstyn Say the word “Nottingham” slowly three times. The sound should be reminiscent of “Not-Eating-Ham.” This recipe is by no means a ham spread, but it sure does have the consistency and texture of one! Try this on none other than the Nottingham Flatbread (here) for lunch. Prep time: 10 minutes • Makes 1½ cups spread 1 cup chickpeas, mashed with fork ¼ cup chopped onion ¼ cup chopped pickles or pickle relish 1 celery stalk, finely chopped 1½ tablespoons mustard 1½ tablespoons applesauce ½ teaspoon fresh dill, chopped Pinch of salt Pinch of freshly ground black pepper Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl using a fork—make sure to smash the chickpeas. Spread on sandwiches, or serve as a dip. Spinach-Artichoke Dip and Spread By Kimetha Wurster Kimetha used to make her patented spinach-artichoke dip every February for a friend’s birthday party. True to her new, dairy-free E2 lifestyle, she was determined to make the recipe dairy-free, too. The guests had no idea it wasn’t the traditional one and gobbled it up. And there’s no baking necessary. Try this on the St. Nick Pizza (here) for lunch or dinner. Prep time: 10 minutes • Makes around 4 cups dip 14 ounces artichoke hearts, packed in water 2 to 6 garlic cloves 9 ounces fresh spinach, or 1½ cups frozen spinach 1 ripe avocado 1 cup nutritional yeast 6 shakes hot sauce Pinch of freshly ground black pepper (optional) Pinch of salt (optional) In a food processor or blender, pulse the drained artichokes with garlic until chopped. Add the raw spinach (or drained frozen), avocado, and nutritional yeast and pulse until well mixed. Shake in the hot sauce and season with salt and pepper as desired, and pulse again. Transfer to a bowl and serve with 100 percent whole wheat crackers or veggies,

With cooking, plants and animals became the raw materials for food, not food itself. Given that we commonly use the word “food” to describe what farmers grow, and given that we eat nuts, fruit, some vegetables, and even fish and steak tartare without cooking, the statement that plants and animals are not food may seem counterintuitive. The fact is that most of us get only a small fraction of our calories from raw foods. Even so, that fraction is probably higher than that of our ancestors, since we are the beneficiaries of millennia of breeding that have created larger, sweeter fruits and more tender vegetables and meat. Furthermore, even what we call raw has usually been subjected to many kitchen processes. Few of us sink our teeth into raw steak unless it has been finely chopped or sliced. Raw foodists allow slicing, grinding, chopping, soaking, sprouting, freezing, and heating to 104–120 degrees Fahrenheit. In spite of modern high-quality plant foods and careful preparation, it is almost impossible to thrive on such a diet, according to evidence gathered by Richard Wrangham. In antiquity, people happily accepted that humans ate cooked food. Indeed, they saw it as what distinguished them from animals. Perhaps it is because today we place so much emphasis on “fresh” and “natural” foods—which Susanne Freidberg has shown are made possible only by changing animal life cycles, modern transport, refrigeration, and ingenious packaging—that we underestimate how much we depend on cooking. In any case, there is no escaping that with cooking, food became an artifact, like clothes and dwellings, not natural but made by humans. A sheaf of wheat is no more food than a boll of cotton is a garment.

You’ll need to find a place where water meets grass. Somewhere like this:   For your wheat to grow, you’ll need to keep your farmland hydrated, basically, wet! So building it next to water will help to do this. Farmland can be hydrated up to four blocks away from the water. Next, we need to ‘till’ the grass, or make it into farmland. This can be done by right-clicking on the grass with your Hoe. Now plant your Seeds in the farmland! We’ll have to wait a bit for the Wheat to grow. But, once it has you can harvest it, collect the seeds, and replant them. You can then turn three Wheat into Bread like this:   Congratulations! You

Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three – rice, wheat and maize – provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species.

And so about a hundred million years ago plants stumbled on a way - actually a few thousand different ways - of getting animals to carry them, and their genes, here and there. This was the evolutionary watershed associated with the advent of the angiosperms, an extraordinary new class of plants that made showy flowers and formed large seeds that other species were induced to disseminate. Plants began evolving burrs that attach to animal fur like Velcro, flowers that seduce honeybees in order to powder their thighs with pollen, and acorns that squirrels obligingly taxi from one forest to another, bury, and then, just often enough, forget to eat. Even evolution evolves. About ten thousand years ago the world witnessed a second flowering of plant diversity that we would come to call, somewhat self-centeredly, 'the invention of agriculture.' A group of angiosperms refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them. [...] That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

The more concerned you are about your own fulfillment, the less fulfilled you will be. When your life is devoted to yourself, it is as small as a grain of wheat. When your life is given to God, however, it is as if that grain is planted in rich soil, growing into part of a much bigger project.

When Flury looked at the plants under a confocal microscope, which shines lasers that make the fluorescent dye in the plastics glow, he found particles had attached to the roots but hadn't penetrated them. So this is worrisome in that plastics might be accumulating around the roots we eat-carrots, sweet potatoes, radishes but it's good news in that neither a fibrous nor taproot system seemed to uptake plastic into the plant itself, unlike how crops readily soak up nutrients like nitrogen and iron. "The plant has probably an incentive to take up an iron particle, whereas a plastic particle will not be used by the plant," says Flury. This contradicts previous lab studies on wheat and other crops, like beans and onions and lettuce, showing that roots do take up plastics. Over at ETH Zürich, analytical chemist Denise Mitrano took a different tack, tagging nanoplastics not with fluorescence but with the rare metal palladium. And instead of growing wheat in agar, she grew it hydroponically, exposing the growing plants to the "doped" particles. She could then track the nanoplastics as the wheat plants took them up into their roots and shoots. "We didn't let the wheat go to grains, so we don't know if the nanoplastic would eventually get into the food source, but it did go up further into the plant," says Mitrano. However, she didn't see any big changes in the physiology of the plants, like growth rate or chlorophyl production. "But we did see that it changed the root structure a bit and the cellular structure in the root, which would indicate that the plant was still under stress.

How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks.

The challenge and the solution were described in memorable terms in September 1898 by William Crookes, a chemist and a physicist, in his presidential address on wheat delivered at the British Association’s annual meeting in Bristol. The most quoted sentence from his presentation was that “all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” and he estimated that the rising demand would bring a global wheat supply shortfall as soon as 1930. But he also identified the most effective solution and its most important component: increased crop fertilization and higher applications of nitrogen, the macronutrient that most often limits wheat (and indeed all cereal) yields. Crookes correctly observed that neither the animal manures nor the planting of green manures (alfalfa, clover) could meet future needs, and that the supply of the era’s only important inorganic fertilizer, Chilean nitrates mined in the desert of Atacama, was obviously limited. What was needed was to tap the unlimited supply of atmospheric nitrogen, to change the inert molecule (N2) that forms nearly 80 percent of air’s mass into a reactive compound (preferably ammonia, NH3) that could be assimilated by crops and supply the macronutrient guaranteeing higher yields.

Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and introgressed to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi. But most of all, genetic changes have been induced to increase yield per acre.

BAD BREEDING The peculiar oversight in the flurry of breeding activity, such as that conducted at IMWIC, was that, despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of wheat and other crops, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. So intent were the efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that these products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.

Wheat gluten proteins, in particular, undergo considerable structural change with hybridization. In one hybridization experiment, fourteen new gluten proteins were identified in the offspring that were not present in either parent wheat plant.6 Moreover, when compared to century-old strains of wheat, modern strains of Triticum aestivum express a higher quantity of genes for gluten proteins that are associated with celiac disease.7

In our rush to escape the pain, messiness, and brokenness of our lives, we often miss our opportunities for growth. Mired in the muck of our misguided mindsets, we miss what God may be doing in the midst of this dirty place. With a heave, a strain, a shove, a stretch, and a charge upward, we fight to leave the place we were planted, because surely we believe that God has to have something better for us than where we've come from and where we are. ... "Surely," we say in the midst of God's apparent silence, "He will not abandon me in this place of death!" Right when we've lost all hope, we see something we have never witnessed before. When we resolve within ourselves that maybe, just maybe, where we are is our assigned lot in life, God remains vocally silent, but reminds us of his promise by showing us the light we have never seen. We move toward the light, slowly stepping out in faith despite all the pain, filth, shame, and suffering. Breaking through the dark soil where we were placed, we sprout and rise to continue seeing another world of possibilities. The dirty place became the nurturing soil that enabled us to grow and blossom in ways we would never have experienced sitting in the safety of a greenhouse. To keep a seed from being planted is to condemn that seed to never realize its full potential. It is a fact that seeds are meant to be covered and die. Jesus said, "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." (John 12:24)

Creeper Three: This guy was good. His camouflaged head mixed right in with the wheat I was harvesting. I almost tried to pick him out of the ground. Then the flashing started and I was blown back several feet, landing on some potatoes. Half of the field is blown to pieces and water draining everywhere from the irrigation troughs. What a mess. I fixed the field, but will have to re-plant and add water another day.

I was enchanted as soon as I stepped off the train. As were the hundreds of others who got off the train with me who were now in the process of climbing into buggies and wagons, en route to the dozens of resorts, enclaves, and tent campgrounds in the area, where they would soak up the sun, get drunk on Cabernet, swim and picnic in the druidy redwood groves while reciting Shakespeare. I climbed into a wagon and was driven off by a Mr. Lars Magnusson to view the old Olson farm. We traveled a mile or so into the hills, past oak glens, brooks, and pools of water, past manzanitas, madrones, and trees dripping with Spanish moss. Sonoma Mountain was to the west; its shadow cast everything in a soft purple light. When we finally reached the farm and I saw the luscious valley spread out in front of me, I knew this was it. Greengage. It would be a home for me and Martha at first, but I hoped it would soon be something more. A tribute to my mother and her ideals; a community in which she would have flourished, where she would have lived a good long life. Greengage.The burbling creek that ran smack down the middle of the property. The prune, apple, and almond orchards: the fields of wheat, potatoes, and melons. The pastures for cows and sheep. The chicken house and pigsty. The gentle, sloping hills, mounds that looked like God's knuckles, where I would one day plant a vineyard.

pie Week 2 DAYS/ MEALS DAY 1 DAY 2 DAY 3 DAY 4 DAY 5 DAY 6 DAY 7 BREAK- -FAST Banana-Amarnath Porridge Coconut-Almond Risotto Breakfast Tofu Scramble Beet Greens Smoothie Pear Oats with walnuts Breakfast Tofu Scramble Beet Greens Smoothie SNACK Classic Hummus Roasted Corn with poblano-cilantro butter Mushroom bun sliders Roasted Cauliflower Hummus Puffed Rice Balls Latkes Red cabbage with apples and pecans LUNCH Tofu Stir-Fry Zucchini and Avocado Salad with garlic herb dressing Tofu summer rolls Quinoa Vegetable salad Tamale Casserole Autumn Wheat Berry Salad Moroccan Lasagna SNACK An apple Easy garlic roasted potatoes Stuffed mushroom One ounce of water Latkes An orange Classic Hummus DINNER Curried Rice Salad Grilled tofu Caprese Clean Vegan Pad Thai Seitan Satay Warm rice and Bean Salad Mushroom Lasagna Spicy Asian Quinoa Salad

A riot of transparent blue flowers grew up the side of a tree, reaching its highest branches and sending tendrils of milky blue to nearby trees. A net made of tiny lilac-hued blossoms crawled over the moss, snaking into the patterns of the bark. And overhanging the path, where two branches came close to touching each other, a canopy that looked as though it must have been made of downy feathers, if feathers could be diluted into something like a cloud. It was eerily strange, yet so beautiful. "Who made this?" she murmured, tracing a blossom of syrup gold suspended by a streamer from something not unlike a willow tree. "Did you?" "No one made it," the girl answered. "It is just--- this place. It takes what is given from your world and uses it." "The whole world---the world does this magic?" "What is magic?" The girl lifted her finger and beckoned Delphine. She pulled a thread from the red broadcloth. "Where did this come from?" "It's wool, the fibers from a sheep. It's cut off, and spun, and woven, and---" "Sheep. Where did 'sheep' come from?" Delphine paused. "I--- I suppose from some wild animal, domesticated many years ago." "Ah. A wild animal. A creature, begot from--- what? Its dam and sire?" She shook her head. "Now that is magic. And your plants--- they sprout, from seeds in the ground? That, too, is magic." She tested the thread between her fingers, rolling it--- no, Delphine saw with wonder, stretching it. It became thin under her fingers, flat like a ribbon, and lengthened, the color washing from scarlet to pink to palest apple blossom as the single thread became two yards long and the girl wrapped it around the crown of her head, binding her wheat-sheaf hair. "And that is what we call magic.

Celebrate vegetables and fruits: Cover half of your plate with them. Aim for color and variety. Keep in mind that potatoes don’t count (see “The Spud Is a Dud” on page 167). THE HARVARD HEALTHY EATING PLATE Figure 1. The Harvard Healthy Eating Plate was created to address deficiencies in the USDA’s MyPlate. It provides simple but detailed guidance to help people make the best eating choices. • Go for whole grains—about one-quarter of your plate. Intact and whole grains, such as whole wheat, barley, wheat berries, quinoa, oats, brown rice, and foods made with them, have a milder effect on blood sugar and insulin than white bread, white rice, and other refined grains (see chapter six). • Choose healthy protein packages—about one-quarter of your plate. Fish, chicken, beans, soybeans, and nuts are all healthy, versatile protein sources. Limit red meat, and try to stay away from processed meats such as bacon and sausage (see chapter seven). • Use healthy plant oils, such as olive, canola, soy, corn, sunflower, and peanut, in moderation. Stay away from foods containing partially hydrogenated oils, which contain unhealthy artificial trans fats (see “Trans fats,” page 83). If you like the taste of butter or coconut oil, use them when their flavor is important but not as primary dietary fats. Keep in mind that low-fat does not mean healthy (see chapter five).

don’t want to think that there is such a thing as a sheep and a goat (Matthew 25:31-36). I don’t want to think that there is such a thing as a wheat plant and a weed (Matthew 13:24-30). I really hate to think that there are virgins who remember their oil and virgins who forget their oil (Matthew 25:1-13), and I hate that somebody is not going into the wedding feast because they didn’t dress themselves properly (Matthew 22:1-14).

It's the wind, on a dead quiet day, moving through a massive wheat field. There are wheat fields so big back home, you can't imagine. Their size hardly has any meaning, you know? They just cover the earth. So you've walked for hours up to your waist in the wheat, deep in your own thoughts. You've made your way to the center of this dry ocean of living plants, not paying attention to where you are or where you're going. In all directions the horizon vanishes. Then you hear it. It's a rushing, like a million little ocean waves. It sounds like gold looks. It's the quietest power you can ever hear. It's not a tame sound at all. It's like the sound of God breathing.

He talks about a seed that loses its life for the sake of the plant that it produces: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). His words refer to his own journey through death into life.

Mycorrhizal fungi can increase the quality of a harvest, as the experiments with basil, strawberries, tomatoes, and wheat illustrate. They can also increase the ability of crops to compete with weeds and enhance their resistance to diseases by priming plants’ immune systems. They can make crops less susceptible to drought and heat, and more resistant to salinity and heavy metals. They even boost the ability of plants to fight off attacks from insect pests by stimulating the production of defensive chemicals. The list goes on: The literature is awash with examples of the benefits that mycorrhizal relationships provide to plants. However, putting this knowledge into practice is not always straightforward. For one thing, mycorrhizal associations don’t always increase crop yields. In some cases, they can even reduce them.

Westwood had quoted from his recent research and said old-style wheat grew about four feet tall, but it was being bred down to a brawnier plant with more seeds, just two feet high. In which case the local farmers were still old-style. The wheat was easily four feet tall.

Healing the Earth and the Economy We don’t seem to realize that our economy would be far healthier if we switched to eating plant-based meals. If we all ate a plant-based diet, we could feed ourselves on a small fraction of the land and grains that eating an animal-based diet requires. For example, researchers estimate that 2.5 acres of land can meet the food energy needs of twenty-two people eating potatoes, nineteen people eating corn, twenty-three people eating cabbage, fifteen people eating wheat, or two people eating chicken or dairy products, and only one person eating beef or eggs.31 Everyone on earth could be fed easily because we currently grow more than enough grain to feed ten billion people;32

The domestication of grain was accompanied by an equally radical innovation in the preparation of food: the invention of bread. In an endless variety of forms, from the unleavened wheat or barley of the Near East to the corn tortillas of the Mexicans and the yeast-risen bread of later cultures, bread has been up to now the center of every diet. No other form of food is so acceptable, so transportable, or so universal. "Give us this day our daily bread" became a universal prayer, and so venerated was this food, as the very flesh of God, that to cut it with a knife is still, in some cultures, a sacrilege. Daily bread brought a security in the food supply that had never before been possible. Despite seasonal fluctuations in yield due to floods or droughts, the cultivation of grains made man assured of his daily nourishment, provided he worked steadily and consecutively, as he had never been certain of the supply of game or his luck in killing it. With bread and oil, bread and butter, or bread and bacon, neolithic cultures had the backbone of a balanced diet, rich in energy, needing only fresh garden produce to be entirely adequate. With this security, it was possible to look ahead and plan ahead with confidence. Except in the tropical areas, where soil regeneration was not mastered, groups could now remain rooted in one spot, surrounded by fields under permanent cultivation, slowly making improvements in the landscape, digging ditches and irrigation canals, making terraces, planting trees, which later generations would be grateful for. Capital accumulation begins at this point: the end of hand-to-mouth living. With the domestication of grains, the future became predictable as never before; and the cultivator not merely sought to retain the ancestral past, but to expand all his present possibilities: once the daily bread was assured, those wider migrations and transplantations of men, which made the country town and the city possible, speedily followed.

If your vision is for a year, plant wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant trees. if your vision is for a lifetime, plant human being.

Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000 people. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

To break the mummified silence, Reyha says, "Thank you, Mom, it is delicious." A gold-rimmed china bowl filled with lettuce, wheat sprouts, and beans. I have requested a massacre of plants for lunch. The sound of the lettuce crunching between my teeth echoes in my ears... "Lettuce and carrots love human teeth," I say. They don't know that they should laugh. Mother's skin is so fair. Her lips bitterly curved downward, just like Reyhaneh's, show no sign of her usual naive smile. "It's great that you all eat meat. If everyone was a vegetarian, the sheep would die of hunger." I laugh at my own inane joke, dig out the unchewable lettuce string stuck between my teeth, and I put it on the side of the bowl. "At the front they used to tell us that if we were martyred, we would go to heaven. I have heard that in heaven, the instant you crave grapes or apples, the tree branches bend down to you. But the Quran doesn't say if there are carrots in heaven or not. Our house is better than heaven. It has lettuce, it has carrots. And I crave these every day...

The Paleo diet is about eliminating carbs Going along with the “caveman” image, many people mistakenly think that Paleo eating is all about tearing into endless plates of meat and nothing else. This is not true. On a Paleo eating plan, carbs are usually kept below 100 or 150 grams per day, which is actually ample. The kind of carbs is more important, and Paleo eaters get their carbohydrates from starchy vegetables, nuts and seeds instead of the empty calories from bread, rice or pasta. Paleo dieters will occasionally fast and put their bodies into ketosis, but this is not automatically a very low carb plan and has very little in common with the infamous Atkins diet. The Paleo diet is not practical Many people reel in horror at the thought that you could stay alive without grains. The truth is grains, especially wheat, are nutrient poor and usually only serve to disrupt blood sugar and insulin levels, promote fat storage and increase over time allergies, obesity and even the initial stages of type II diabetes. Grains contain phytates and other plant proteins that damage the intestinal lining and lead to leaky gut syndrome and a host of other complaints, not to mention overweight. A diet rich in empty carbohydrates is nutrient deficient, fattening and even addictive, if white sugar plays a big role. You can eat as much fat as you like on the Paleo diet Partly true. Again, it’s not so much the quantity but the quality of the fat in question. While eating fat has been shown again and again not to make you fat, it’s also important to choose the right kinds. Butter, good quality animal fats, avocado, coconut and olive oil as well as the fat found in eggs and good quality dairy are excellent for the health in every way. Avoid refined, deodorized and hydrogenated oils such as sunflower, cottonseed or canola oil. These are incredibly toxic to the body and high in inflammation causing Omega 6 fatty acids. Dairy is forbidden on the Paleo diet Always a point of debate, whether to eat dairy or not comes down to a matter of personal choice. Some of us possess the enzymes to properly digest milk, other do not. The only way to test for your own sensitivity is to experiment and listen to your body. If lactose is a problem, eat cultured dairy like yogurt, kefir and cheese. If milk forms a good part of your diet, be sure that you’re getting hormone free, grass fed milk from a quality source and don’t binge on milk as it’s also quite high in carbohydrates. If fat loss is your main goal, eliminate dairy until your goal weight is reached.

If your vision is for a year, plant wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant trees If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people. CHINESE PROVERB

In many places throughout the Scriptures, God likens people to plants. In our mind, God is separating the thoughts of Christ (wheat) from the thoughts of Fallen Adam (tares). That is the threshing of the wheat.

all were based in the taming and cultivation of a wild grass (yes, rice, wheat, and corn, or maize, as most of the world knows it, are grasses), and all, including the tubers, rested on plants that stored dense, durable packages of carbohydrates: starches. This is civilization. Civilization is starch, and by extension, diseases of civilization are diseases of starch, either directly or indirectly, and most of it is indeed direct: starches are complex carbohydrates, and they quickly break down, often even in a person’s mouth, into simple carbohydrates, which are sugars. Further, much of that sugar is glucose or other forms that the liver converts into glucose. The human body is perfectly capable of metabolizing glucose, which has been with us through the ages, especially in fruits and tubers. We convert it into glycogen, and any athlete will tell you that glycogen is what moves us forward. (It turns out that this is not nearly as true as we think, but for the moment, let’s let this stand.) It is not that glucose is unprecedented or even that starch is new to us; hunter-gatherers have and had both. But not in abundance, not as a sole source, not in the tidal wave of

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature's secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secret of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. (p. 89-90)

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.4

We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn't work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. But Mars fossils and organic chemicals in interstellar comets showed that the building blocks of life were not unique to Earth. Proteins, amino acids, and carbohydrates existed everywhere. The theory of panspermia was true to a degree. I had found a grass resembling wheat on our first day on Pax, and with a little plant tissue, a dash of hormone from buds, and some chitin, we soon had artificial seeds to plant. But would it grow? Theory was one thing and farming was another. Then a few days before the women had died from poisoned fruit, Ramona and Carrie had seen the first shoots, ...

A person can cultivate a new persona from a pâté of earthy personal experiences. How do I reconcile all my faults and propagate all my innate gifts to create the type of self that I am happy to claim responsibility for authorship? How do I go about turning over the peat moss that lines the feldspar of my rocky existence? How do I plow under the seedlings of my youth and grow a protective bed of winter clover to shield my adulthood? How do I mulch the clippings from variegated personal experiences, ferment the rot, harrow new rows, and plant hardy spring wheat to take root in the enriched chocolate loam of a fertile mind? Is all this laborious plow pulling work of creating a fresh and authentic self-identify worth the backbreaking effort? How does one go about revamping their personal storyline? How do I cast myself into a robust image that does not appall other people? My continued existence entails industriously giving seed to the lush myths that I live by, amassing dwindling personal willpower, and resolving to impose upon my weathered soul the missing character traits that wait forging in the glowering inferno fed by a rising mountain of ignited personal anxiety.

When we bow to a child this way, we help him or her grow up beautifully and with self-confidence. If you plant corn, corn will grow. If you plant wheat, wheat will grow. If you act in a wholesome way, you will be happy. If you act in an unwholesome way, you water the seeds of craving, anger, and violence in yourself.

Once someone asked a farmer if he had planted wheat for the season. The farmer replied, “No. I was afraid it wouldn’t rain.” The man asked, “Did you plant corn?” The farmer said, “No. I was afraid that insects would eat the corn.” Then the man asked, “What did you plant?” The farmer said, “Nothing. I played it safe.

Foods Rich in Phytoestrogens: Strengthening Women’s Health Women’s health is significantly influenced by diet, and one of the most important yet often overlooked nutrients is phytoestrogens. These plant-based compounds mimic estrogen in the body, helping to balance hormones, support bone health, and enhance overall well-being. What Are Phytoestrogens? Phytoestrogens are natural compounds found in plants that function similarly to estrogen. They are particularly beneficial for women experiencing hormonal imbalances, menopause symptoms, or those looking to strengthen their bone and reproductive health. There are three main types of phytoestrogens: Isoflavones: Found in soybeans, chickpeas, and lentils. Lignans: Present in flaxseeds, sesame seeds, and whole grains. Coumestans: Found in alfalfa sprouts and certain legumes. Top Foods Rich in Phytoestrogens Including these phytoestrogen-rich foods in your diet can promote hormonal balance and overall health: 1. Soy Products Soybeans, tofu, tempeh, and soy milk contain isoflavones, which support menopausal health, bone density, and heart health. Regular consumption of soy-based foods can help reduce the risk of osteoporosis and alleviate menopausal symptoms like hot flashes. 2. Flaxseeds Flaxseeds are a top source of lignans, which provide hormonal support, heart benefits, and improved digestion. These tiny seeds are also rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which help reduce inflammation and support brain function. 3. Sesame Seeds Packed with lignans, sesame seeds help maintain estrogen levels, strengthen bones, and support skin health. They are also a great source of calcium and zinc, essential for bone strength and immune function. 4. Chickpeas & Lentils Rich in isoflavones, these legumes help regulate hormonal fluctuations while offering a great source of plant-based protein. They are especially beneficial for women seeking to maintain steady energy levels and muscle mass. 5. Nuts (Almonds, Walnuts) Nuts contain phytoestrogens that contribute to hormonal stability and support heart and brain health. Walnuts, in particular, are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which promote cognitive function and reduce inflammation. 6. Berries Strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries are packed with antioxidants and phytoestrogens, reducing inflammation and boosting immunity. Their high vitamin C content also aids in collagen production, supporting skin elasticity and wound healing. 7. Whole Grains Oats, barley, and wheat contain lignans that support hormonal balance, digestion, and metabolic health. They also provide fiber, which helps in maintaining a healthy weight and stabilizing blood sugar levels. 8. Alfalfa Sprouts These sprouts are rich in coumestans, a type of phytoestrogen that supports bone health and helps manage menopausal symptoms. They are also packed with vitamins and minerals essential for overall well-being. Health Benefits of Phytoestrogen-Rich Foods Balances Hormones: Reduces symptoms of PMS, menopause, and hormonal fluctuations. Supports Bone Health: Strengthens bones and reduces the risk of osteoporosis. Promotes Heart Health: Helps maintain healthy cholesterol levels and improves circulation. Enhances Skin & Hair Health: Boosts collagen production, promoting youthful skin and strong hair. Aids Weight Management: Supports metabolism regulation and helps control cravings. Boosts Brain Function: Improves cognitive health and memory, reducing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. How to Include Phytoestrogens in Your Diet? Add flaxseeds to smoothies, yogurt, or oatmeal. Enjoy a soy-based meal like tofu stir-fry or soy milk. Snack on nuts and berries for a healthy boost. Use whole grains in your daily meals. Sprinkle sesame seeds on salads and dishes. Incorporate alfalfa sprouts into sandwiches and salads.

Return to: U. S. Department of Agriculture ESCS/Statistics, Room 0005 So. Bldg. 14th & Independence Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20250 H£AT ·-·-- ·-----··--- --- ACREAGE YIELD PRODUCTION By States, 1866- 1943 • All wheat • Winter wheat • All spring wheat • Spring wheat other than durum • Durum wheat U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE Agricultural Marketing Service February 1955 STATISTICAL BULLETIN NO. 158 INDEX :Spring :Spring . . All Wheat . . . . All :Wheat STATE: All ; Winter; Spring: Other : Durum: STATE All ; Winter ; Spring : Other :Durum :Wheat Wheat Wheat : Than • Wheat; Wheat : Wheat : Wheat :Than Wheat : Durum: : Durum: Page Page Page .Page Page Page Page Page Page Page Ala, 17 40 Nev. 24 47 62 Ariz. 23 46 N.H. 3 Ark. 18 41 N.J. 4 28 Calif, 25 48 N.Mex. 22 45 61 Colo. 22 45 61 N.Y. 4 27 51 Conn. 3 N.C. 14 37 Del. 12 35 N.Dak. 10 57 66 68 Ga. 15 38 Ohio 6 29 53 Idaho 21 44 60 Okla. 19 42 Ill. 7 30 54 Oreg. 25 48 63 Ind. 6 30 53 Pa, 5 28 52 Iowa 9 32 56 S.C. 15 38 Kans. 11 34 58 S.Dak. 10 33 57 66 68 Ky. 16 39 Tenn. 17 40 Maine 2 50 Texas 19 42 Md. 13 36 Utah 23 46 62 Mich. 7 31 54 Vt, 3 51 -- Minn. 8 32 55 65 67 Va. 13 36 Miss. 18 41 Wash. 24 47 63 Mo. 9 33 56 W.Va. 14 37 Mont. 20 43 59 Wise. 8 31 55 Nebr. 11 34 58 Wyo. 21 44 60 REGIONS REGIONS N.Atl. 5 29 52 S.Cent, 20 43 N. Cent. 12 35 59 West. 26 49 64 S.Atl. 16 39 u.s. 2 27 50 65 67 WHEAT BY CLASSES - - - - Page 69 * * * * * For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D.' C. - Price 40 cents WHEAT: ACREAGE, YIELD, AND PRODUCTION, BY STATES, 1866 - 1943 Presented in this report are estimates of acreage planted and harvested, yield per harvested acre, and produ2tion for all wheat, winter wheat, all spring wheat, durum wheat, and other spring wheat. Tables are presented for each kind of wheat estimated for each State. for the Geographic Divisions, and for the United States. Also included is a table, for the United States only, showing production of wheat by classes. Estimates of all wheat cover the period from 1866 (or from the first year in which estimates were made) to 1943, inclusive; estimates of winter wheat and ali spring wheat for States growing both kinds coveT the period from 1909, when separate series were initiated, to 1943, inclusive; estimates of durum wheat and other spring wheat cover the period from 1919 to 1943, inclusive; the estimates by classes cover the period from 1919 to 1949, inclusive. The series for planted acreage begins in 1909 for winter wheat, in 1919 for all spring wheat and all wheat; and in 1926 for durum and other spring wheat. Estimates for the period 1944-49, except wheat by classes, are contained in Statistica,l Bulletin Number 108, issued in March 1952 • Estimates since 1950 for all series are presented in the Annual Summary of Crop Production published in December of each year. ALL W'-!EAT: A ::REAGE, n-.:LD, MD PRODUCTION, 1866 - 1943 UNITED STATES ---7---- 1 Yi9ld: i'---- -,:-- -,---- -,-Yie!d_:_---- :,---:-- -A~r;a;e--- 7 Yieid I----- : Acreage : per : Pro- :: : Acreage 1 per : Pro- :: : __________ : per : ProYear : hd~- : har- : ductivn ::Year : har- : har- : duction ::Year : : : nar- : duction : vested : vested: :: : vested : vested: :: : Planted :Harvested: vested: ___ .:._ ___ ..,. .:_ _a~r~.!. ____ -·~ ___ : _____ : _ _!C!e_: _____ .!.=- __ ..!. ____ .!. ____ ..:. _a_£r~ 1. ____ _ Thous. Bu. ~··us. bu. Thous. Bu. Thous. bu. Thous. Bu. Thous. bu. 1<'366 1867 1368 lil69 lil70 1371 11372 1873 1374 1875 1876 1377 1378 1879 1880 1·3Bl B82 1883 1884 1885 1986 1887 1988 1889

In the crossword hymn Mut takes on the role of Creator. “Everything came into being because of her…mankind and gods are her offspring…everyone is united to her ka.”[137]  She created through visualisation and particular emphasis is placed on her role as nourisher of vegetation. She made the “papyrus and the fruit tree through her wish”. Mut is the one who “spits out the Nile…placed plants on the entire land”. Through her light “all good plants are born”[138] and she brings prosperity to the land. Her responsibility for the essential food crops emmer and wheat are specifically named in the hymn. As the solar disc, Mut takes on the role as preserver of life for without her there would be no life. She is also referred to as Lady of the Sea and this water aspect links her to Tefnut.

The web of enslaved labor was vastly interdependent, and each ingredient stemmed from another person's forced labor. Wheat was grown, harvested, and milled by enslaved farmers to provide flour to the cook to use in the kitchen. Brandy was made from fruit gown and harvested by slaves then fermented by the enslaved cook. Rum came from the Caribbean, starting as sugarcane planted, grown, cut, and distilled by enslaved hands. Feasting in Virginia meant consuming the labor of slaves, literally eating the fruits of their labor. To dine at an elite plantation during the antebellum and late colonial periods meant that one was, without question, intimately involved with slavery.

16Then he told them a story: “A rich man had a fertile farm that produced fine crops. 17He said to himself, ‘What should I do? I don’t have room for all my crops.’ 18Then he said, ‘I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll have room enough to store all my wheat and other goods. 19And I’ll sit back and say to myself, “My friend, you have enough stored away for years to come. Now take it easy! Eat, drink, and be merry!”’ 20“But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’ 21“Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.” Teaching about Money and Possessions 22Then, turning to his disciples, Jesus said, “That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. 23For life is more than food, and your body more than clothing. 24Look at the ravens. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for God feeds them. And you are far more valuable to him than any birds! 25Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? 26And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things? adopt God’s values 27“Look at the lilies and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. 28And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith? 29“And don’t be concerned about what to eat and what to drink. Don’t worry about such things. 30These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers all over the world, but your Father already knows your needs. 31Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and he will give you everything you need. 32“So don’t be afraid, little flock. For it gives your Father great happiness to give you the Kingdom. 33“Sell your possessions and give to those in need. This will store up treasure for you in heaven! And the purses of heaven never get old or develop holes. Your treasure will be safe; no thief can steal it and no moth can destroy it. 34Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.

The trees from Franklin Roosevelt’s big arbor dream have mostly disappeared. Nearly 220 million were planted, just as the president envisioned. But when regular rain returned in the 1940s and wheat prices shot up, farmers ripped out the shelterbelt trees to plant grain. Other trees died in cycles of drought over the last half a century. Occasionally, a visitor comes upon a row of elms or cottonwoods, sturdy and twisted from the wind. It can be a puzzling sight, a mystery, like finding a sailor’s note in a bottle on an empty beach.

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull--no, my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing in common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.

Like fans at a rock concert, everyone stands up, but no one gets a better view. That’s the way evolution works: it myopically selects for individual advantage, not the greater good of the species, let alone the good of some other species. From a farmer’s perspective, not only do tall wheat plants waste energy in inedible stalks, but when they are enriched with fertilizer they collapse under the weight of the heavy seedhead. Borlaug took evolution into his own hands, crossing thousands of strains of wheat and then selecting the offspring with dwarfed stalks, high yields, resistance to rust, and an insensitivity to day length. After several years of this “mind-warpingly tedious work,” Borlaug evolved strains of wheat (and then corn and rice) with many times the yield of their ancestors. By combining these strains with modern techniques of irrigation, fertilization, and crop management, Borlaug turned Mexico and then India, Pakistan, and other famine-prone countries into grain exporters almost overnight. The Green Revolution continues—it has been called “Africa’s best-kept secret”—driven by improvements in sorghum, millet, cassava, and tubers.

I want to suggest an alternative approach. The best sort of difference is one that can organically draw others into the faith and, by extension, increase the influence of the church. Rather than waging war, I propose cultivating a garden. Let us plant wheat among the tares and allow the King to separate them out.

All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today's iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way--- lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine. Today, jujubes are better known as Chinese dates. It was likely in Asia that the plant was first cultivated, and where most are still grown. By the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, at the turn of the first millennium, the tree had spread to parts of the eastern Mediterranean where, according to local tradition, it furnished the branches for the thorny crown of Jesus Christ. Around the same time, Pliny the Elder tells us, a Roman counselor imported it to Italy. The Romans were really the first Italian culinary borrowers. In addition to the jujube, they brought home cherries, apricots, and peaches from the corners of their vast empire, Parasecoli tells me. But in the broad sweep of Italian history, it was Arabs, not Romans, who have left the more lasting mark on Italian cuisine. During some 200 years of rule in Sicily and southern Italy, and the centuries of horticultural experimentation and trade that followed, Arabs greatly expanded the range of ingredients and flavors in the Italian diet. A dizzying array of modern staples can be credited to their influence, including almonds, spinach, artichokes, chickpeas, pistachios, rice, and eggplants. Arabs also brought with them durum wheat--- since 1967, the only legal grain for the production of pasta in Italy. They introduced sugar cane and citrus fruit, laying the groundwork for dozens of local delicacies in the Italian south and inspiring the region's iconic sweet-and-sour agrodolce flavors. Food writers Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari argue that Arabs' effect on the Italian palate was as profound as it was in science or medicine--- reintroducing lost recipes from antiquity, elevated by novel ingredients and techniques refined in the intervening centuries. In science, this kind of exchange sparked the Renaissance; in food, they argue, one of the world's greatest cuisines. Today, in Italy's north, where African influences give way to more continental fare, Italian cuisine leans heavier on crops taken from Indigenous peoples in the Americas: tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, zucchini, peppers, and corn, which is used to make polenta. Cultural exchange moved in the other direction as well. As millions of Italians left for the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries, Italy's culinary traditions were remixed and revolutionized again. Italian Americans pioneered a cuisine that would become almost unrecognizable to the old country: spaghetti and meatballs, chicken Marsala, fettuccine Alfredo, deep-dish pizza.