Kavilca Wheat: Eating to Extinction (PDF)

o0 DAllr\u 1v p^r grow in deserts, thrive at high altitudes, flower under low levels of sunlight or rolerare saline soils. And of course they also have unique 5 flavours and textures. All these factors determined why a communiry m...

o0 DAllr\u 1v p^r grow in deserts, thrive at high altitudes, flower under low levels of sunlight or rolerare saline soils. And of course they also have unique 5 flavours and textures. All these factors determined why a communiry might save one variety of cereal and a different communiry another' Kavilca Wheat The name given to a genetically diverse crop grown in a specific area whose seeds were kept and sown year after year and passed down through many generations, is a 'landrace'. Bii)nik Qarma, Anatolia Over hundreds and possibly thousands of years, landraces of wheat, rice, maize and other cultivated grains continually evolved and adapted to their local environment, and were intimately linked to an ecosystem and to a population of people and their culture. This connection In the small Anarolian village of etiyrik Qatma, families had risen at berween plant and place also manifested itself in cooking styles and sunrise and then slaughtered sheep to whispered prayers. The festival recipes, as a feedback loop took place between farmers in fields and of Eid had fallen in late August and husbands and wives worked cooks in kitchens. From a family of unlikely grasses, humans crafted together, hunched over tables, butchering the fresh carcasses. This an unfathomable number of distinctive foods: breads, dumplings, produced a breakfast of hearts, kidneys and livers srill warm from the porridges, pilafs, pastas, puddings, noodles, tamales, tortillas, naans slaughter, flash-fried and served in cubes of gristening fat and delicate and chapatis. slivers of muscle. The call to prayer from the nearby mosque broke To explore how this diversiry came into being, how it was lost and the silence in the village outside. why we need to save it, let's go in search of some of the world's most Biiy-uk Qatma lies on Turkey's eastern border; head north and you endangered, and most fascinating, grains. cross into Georgia, to the east lies Armenia and Iran, keep. he4ding south and you'll reach Iraq. over thousands of years, various cultures and empires have claimed this soil: prehistoric tribes, Hellenic warrlors, Romans, Byzantines, ottomans and Soviets. None settled longer than five hundred years. Throughout it all a rare source of continuiry has been a particular type of grain, Kavirca, an emmer wheat, one of the first plants domesricated by Neolithic farmers. it still grows in the fields around the village. white geese waddled berween the houses, pecking at what looked like a wall built with black roof tiles stacked in a zigzagpaftern. 'Fuel,' one of the farmers, Nejdet Dasdemir, explained. Manure had been moulded into cakes and stacked for the winter, ready to be used to warm homes and heat the clay ovens inside kitchens. people are mostly selFsufficient here; they have small herds of cattle and sheep, make cheese and butter, grow their own vegetables and keep beehives. It was harvest time, and the last uncut field of golden-yellow Kavilca formed an oasis against the backdrop of the grey-green mounrains. The marure ears of wheat were now so heavy they bowed down, their long, protective bristles waving in the wind. Dasdemir walked { I l. 62 EATING TO EXTINCTION KAVILCA WHEAT 63 among the chest-high stalks, picked off an ear and broke it apart. The 'When they cook with it in the village, I can smell it from the mi11,' grains were encased in a tight-fitting, protective shell, a glume. He he said. 'That's not true with the other grains.' He handed us a sack rubbed it berween his fingers. 'Most wheat gives up its grains easily' of Kavilca and we left him to his work he said. 'Kavilca is stubborn.' Kavilca also produces lower yields than The aroma Kaya described wafts from a variety of traditional modern varieties. I was starting to wonder why it hadn't gone extinct Anatolian dishes that feature Kavilca, one of which was cooked with long ago. the grains we had collected from the mill. Back in the village Erdal of the answer. The land around Biiyiik Qatma is Resilience is part Goksu and his wife Filiz, also farmers, roasted a goose on toP of the high and harsh, a tough place to live, for people and plants. At an macked wheat so that its fat dripped down and cooked the grains. altitude of r,5oo metres, temperafures drop to below -3ooc in the Filiz moved around the kitchen, a white, embroidered scarf covering winter, and heavy snow can close the village off-for weeks. During her head, and added bowl after bowl to the table: cream and soft the spring it rains and the air is damp, an invitation for all kinds of cheeses, pickled cabbage, peppers sruffed with spiced lamb and, at the diseases to attack crops. Few crops do well here. Kavil.ca is an exception; centre of it all, a large dish piled with Kavilca shaped into a ring, its it evolved in this environment over thousands of years, adapted, sur- brown grains glistening with the fat andjuices from the goose, with vived and thrived. Dasdemir and the other farmers viewed Kavilca as flakes of tender, buttery meat in the centre. The grains tasted rich, an inheritance, handed down by their ancestors. 'We have an emotional nutry and satisfying. 'This is a taste we recognise deep within us,' Filiz connection with this food,' he said. 'We love the way the wheat looks said, 'we feel it in our bodies.' in our fields, and the smell and taste of the grain when it's cooked.' Kavilca is now endangered, but as an emmer wheat its history goes From the field, we went in search of the only local miller stubborn back to the very beginnings of farming. Emmer wheat was one of enough to still work with the stubborn wheat. Erdem Kaya looked the first wild grasses domesticated by Neolithic farmers; it was alio tired when we arrived at his mill on the outskirts of the village. During the grain of ancient Egypt, of Mesopotamia and Greece, thp foqd harvest time, he finishes work at one o'clock in the morning and starts eaten by the people who built Stonehenge and the sailors who forged again at six. A beanpole of a man, dressed in a green overall, unshaven the maritime networks of Phoenicia. How did such an essential, world and melancholyJooking, he lives and works alone. His father had changing food end up on the brink of extinction? been a miller, he had been born in the mill and it was all he had ever known. The grey-stone mill stands beside the Kars Qayi River, the Dasdemir had given me a handful of old desiccated Kavilca seeds, a source of the power for the rwo large circular grinding stones inside. souvenir to take back to Britain, a reminder of Biiyi.ik Qatma. These A sweet smell hung in the air like freshly baked cake. Kaya disappeared I showed to a farmer in Oxford,John Letts, an sPert in ancient grains. up a ladder and pulled a long wooden lever to start the flow of water. In the early r99os, Letts srudied archaeobotany at UCL. This led him The whole room seemed to creak and then sigh as machineryjuddered to Turkey in search of the history of wheat. Staying in rural villages into life, a series of belts slapped into action and the giant stones there, he remembers waking to the thud-thud-thud of women began to turn. pounding away with enormous pestles and mortars, removing the Modern bread wheat is free-threshing which means its naked grains hulls from emmer and cracking the grains. Curious about Britain s easily come loose from their ears, ready to be milled into flour. Because wheat history, back home he started a search for ancient grains. of their tough hulls, Kavilca grains have to be milled rwice. The first It wasn't an easy trail to follow but a breakthrough came in tgg3. step removes the husks. After these outer shells have been separated Workmen repairing the thatched roof of a medieval house in Buck- (winnowed away), a second round of grinding breaks the grains into inghamshire discovered at its base a smoke-blackened jumble of straw tiny pieces, leaving it looking like fine shingle on a beach. It is the and weeds, untouched for six hundred years. This old thatch was most difficult wheat Kaya works with, but also the most satisfying. stripped and about to be destroyed when the inspector overseeing 6q EATING TO EXTINCTION KAVILCA WHEAT 6s work on the listed building recognised its importance and saved some that one family harvesting around the Karacadag for three weeks, of it in a shoebox. The box was stored at the Oxford Museum of 'without even working very hard, could gather more grain than it Natulal History until someone made the connection with Letts's could possibly consume in a year'. research and sent him what was left of the medieval thatch. When Around r2,ooo years ago, some hunter-gatherers across the Fertile he opened the box, he felt he had been handed gold. 'Inside were Crescent stafied to cultivate patches of these wild grasses. Climate landrace wheats that hadn't been grown in England for cenfuries,' change had created drier conditions, and other foods, including meht, says Letts. 'It was treasure, biological treasure, a type of genetic became harder to find, so the appeal of grains grew stronger. The diversiry Britain had completely lost.' The discovery made it possible ear$ farmers focused on two different species of wild wheat: einkorn for him to recreate a medieval wheat field and, over the years, he (Titicum monococcum), a small, tough and frugal plant (einkorn rs added to the collection. Today, in fields around his farm, he grows German for 'one grain'), and emmer (Titicum dicoccam), which had some of the rarest and most ancient varieties of wheat in the world, rwice the number of grains in each spikelet. Einkorn and emmerwere including emmer. These he mills for bakers looking for older and less domesticated separately, but eventually both spread throughout the familiar flavours. Fertile Crescent. We know hunter-gatherers traded materials such as Selecting one of the ears of dried Kavilca with a pair of rweezers obsidian for tool making, and it's likely they also exchanged seeds. and peering through a magnifying glass, Letts looked intrigued and The non-shattering genetic mutation spread too, though it took at then excited. 'This seems different,' he said, 'smaller and darker than least z,ooo years for it to stabilise and become 'fixed' in these wheats. any emmer I know. I'm getting the same chill I felt when I opened To the east of the Fertile Crescent, by 6ooo BcE, esuner and einkorn up that shoebox all those years ago.' He rwirled one of the spikes were growing in parts of today's Pakistan, arriving in Rajasthan and berween his fingers and held it up to the light. 'I think I'm holding Haryana in north-west India by 3ooo BcE; to the south, they spread one of the oldest wheats in the world.' through Palestine and Israel, and on to Egypt by around 45oo BcE; to the west, the rwo wheats went through Greece, the Balkans and-alo4g The heart of the Fertile Crescent lies south of Biiyiik Qatma on the the Danube to southern Europe; and by 3ooo BcE, einkorn and emmer south-eastern edge of Turkey. Ecologically this is a remarkable place, were growing in Oman and Yemen and traded across the Red Sea a transition zone befween desert and grassland with low rainfall on into Ethiopia. Part of the success of both of these grains came down one side, lush mountainous steppe and oak woodlands on the other. to the tight-fitting glumes (or husks) the miller of Biiyiik Qatma has Here, among scattered trees, our hunter-gatherer ancestors foraged to contend with. This protective coating not only has antimicrobial from patches of tall grasses, including wild species of wheat and barley. properties that keep fungal infections at bay, it also provides the grain They harvested grains using flint sickles with handles carved from with physical protection from cold, damp conditions and insects and wood and bone. Hard basalt rock served as their grinding stones. In birds, making it possible to store for long periods. Einkorn was hardier, prehistoric hearths, archaeologists have found charred remains of but emmer, with double the number of grains, dominated, and went ancient flatbreads made from the seeds of wild grasses. Our ancestors on to become the world's most widely grown wheat. This is how were bakers long before they became farmers. things stayed for thousands of years. In the late r95os, the American botanist Jack Harlan set out to Meanwhile, evolving in the background was a weed that had experience something of this lost food history. In the Karacadag Moun- appeared on the fringes of the emmer fields. This weed was an acci- tains of south-eastern Turkey, one of the hotspots of domestication, dental hybrid of cultivated emmer and wild 'goat-faced' grass. We he became a hunter-gatherer. First, without tools he hand-stripped know that this hybrid was growing among einkorn and emm_er by ripe ears from the wild wheat that grew along the slopes, and then around Tooo scs and started to be selected by Neolithic farmers. Today he tried harvesting the grains using a flint blade. Harlan concluded we call this 'weed' bread wheat, Triticum aestivum, and it makes up 66 EATING TO EXTINCTION KAVILCA WHEAT 6z more than 95 per cent of the global wheat crop, a food for most of provided plant breeders with the foundations of an agricultural revo_ the people on Earth. In the ancient world, the plant didn't look too lution. Experimental research programmes were launched in rhe late promising - its grains were small and lacked the tight protective nineteenth cen*lry by the British and the united states Department glumes - and it was only with the buiiding of more advanced granaries of Agriculture (USDA), and also by scientists in Russia. Tlre emergrrg capable of offering man-made protection that bread wheat eventually science of crop genetics was quickly put into practice on wheat, then, displaced emmer. Its advantage was that its grains came away from as now the world's most widely grown crop. At cambridle universiry the chaff easily, and its paper-thin coating meant its husk didn't need in the early r9oos, the first professor of Agricultural Botany, Rowrand to be removed before milling. This 'naked' wheat was also chemically Biffen, applied Mendelian genetics to breed new higher_yi.ldirrg rr"r_ different; its gluten proteins were stickier, so the dough had greater ieties; he identified arrracrive traits in wheats found the British elasticiry producing a lighter loaf of bread, and.it was more versatile. Empire and hybridised (crossed) them with other varieties. ".ros While bread wheat took over in most parts of the world, emmer Around rhe same time, inside a rab in a district of Berlin, the chemist and einkorn continued to be grown in remote and mountainous Fritz Haber succeeded in'fixing'nitrogen into liquid ammonia, creating regions: in the Alps in Switzerland and Germany; in Italy's Apennine the basis for synthetic fertiliser. until this point, lack of nitrogen in Mountains; in the Basque region of Spain; and in the Himaiayas and soil had been the biggest brake on the industrialisarion of crop pro- the Nilgiri Mountains in India (though after the British arrived in the duction; but in a lab, using extreme temperatures and extraordinary nineteenth century, Indian farmers were ordered to replace their pressures, Haber and his assistant carl Bosch managed to synthesise ancient wheats with bread wheat, using seeds supplied from the nitrogen on a large scale. It was one of the most importanr discoveries Empire). In the r9zos, Nikolai Vavilov tracked down varieties of emmer in modern history As the science writer charles c. Mann puts it, jusl as they were becoming endangered in Asrurias, in northern Spain, 'More than 3 billion men, women and chirdren - an incompiehensibly and in the mountains of western Georgia. By this time a marginai vast cloud of dreams, fears and explorations owe their existence - to crop, emmer was typically boiied up and eaten by the poor or, more two early-twentieth-cenrury German chemists.' Howevel, there was often than not, relegated to the status of animal feed' Morocco's a drawback which needed to be overcome. when farme# applied the western Rif is one of the last remaining places where einkorn is still new chemical fertilisers to rheir fields, crops became so tall-and tleir grown, in the mountainousJabala region, where it's used in the winter grains so heavy they fell over (or lodged), which either made harvesting months to make flatbreads. In Ethiopia, specific varieties of emmer too difficult or left food rotting away on the ground. This probrem are used for brewing beer. And, of coutse, in Btiyiik Qatma the emmer took decades to solve, and the solution was ingenious. they call Kavilca has continued to be cultivated through the grain's In occupied Japan in ry46, an American biologist, Cecil Salmon, rise and fall. came across a strange-looking wheat that grew just rwo feet tall irutead One consistent feature of all wheat - einkorn, emmer and bread of the usual four or five. The 'dwarf wheat', called 'Norin ro', was sent wheat - in this r2,ooo-year history, has been diversity. For a sense of first to the USDA and later, in it caught the attention of a prant scale, there are more than 55o,ooo different samples of wheat saved breeder working on a remote '.952, research station in Mexico. Norman as seed in collections around the world. And these are only the wheat Borlaug, originally from lowa, had been developing disease-resisrant varieties crop experts have been able to collect. Many others will have varieries of wheat to help peasanr farmers. He began working with already gone extinct. The greatest loss tookplace during the rwentieth Norin ro, crossing it with traditional Mexican varieties. By shrinking century following a series of scientific breakthroughs. wheat planrs, he figured, he could strengthen the stem and unleash the power of the new fertilisers. In search of improved wheat, working Charles Darwin's On the Ongin of Species (r8sg) and Gregor Mendel's alone for months on end, he cross-polinated thousands of'pla4ts by rules of inheritance gleaned from his famous pea experiments (1865) hand. He would sleep in a rat-infested research station with broken 68 EATING TO EXTINCTION KAVILCA WHEAT 69 windows and no running water. In the absence of a tractor or a horse, could also be controlled to deliver the balance of proteins and starches he strapped a harness around his chest to pull a plough across fields. demanded by an expanding global food industry After years of arduous experiments, Borlaug succeeded in creating crop breeders might argue that modern wheat is extremery diverse, new disease-resistant, higher-yielding varieties. By 1963,95 per cent of and it's true that in Europe alone, a farmer can select from the many Mexico's wheat was Borlaug's varieties, Lerma Rojo 64 and Sonora hundreds of licensed varieries that appear each year on the'Errrop.rn 64, which tripled the country's wheat harvest. They were soon adopted Union's 'approved list'. This list is decided by commitrees of seed in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and within the space of a decade, companies and *op scientisrs. About one-fifth of the list gets refreshed right across the wheat-growing world. Famines that had been antici- each year as new varieties are added. But how diverse is it rearly? pated were averted, and in Cold War politics, the Green Revolution These so-called 'elite varieties' are slightly different versions of the became a powerful tool to halt the spread of communism in developing same theme, all coming from the same narrow gene pool. Every single countries. Borlaug became known as the man who saved a billion lives one (by law) is bred for yield and homogeneiry The nurririon;l value and in rgzo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. of the wheat (e.g. zinc, iron and fibre levels) is not considered, and But the Green Revolution had other consequences. Borlaug's dwarf neither is flavour. And most farmers don't even get to choose the wheats were part of a package: they needed lots of water through wheat they grow as they often are in long-term contracts wirh the irrigation and huge amounts of fertiliser produced by the energy- food industry including the industrial bakers who supply bread to hungry Haber-Bosch process. This food revolution was nourished by supermarkets. It's these companies that often decide which specific fossil fuels. Nearly half of all the crops consumed by humans today variety of whear a farmer will grow that year. This way, consistency depelrd on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertiliser. And there was and uniformiry can be maintained right through the process, from another essential feature of the Green Revolution package: uniformity. sowing seeds to the finished loaf. The entire system, the wheat- breeding programmes and the approved List, is also designed around In a single hectare of Kavilca there could be as many as 3 million one type of product: whire bread made with refined flour for *iri.rt individual plants and considerable genetic diversity. I saw this in Bi.iytik most of the nutrients in the grain are removed in the -illirg process. Qatma. Some plants were taller than orhers, some grains dark brown, Again, by law, rhese nurrienrs are then put back in through the process others the colour of amber. Landrace wheats evolve as mixed popu- of 'fortification'. This isn't the fault of the plant breeders; ,h"y lations, and for good evolutionary reasons as variation in the crop paid to create what the current food system demands: cheap grain ".. bestows resilience; if some plants fail in a sun-scorched year, others and a commodiry that can furn a profit on global markets. A-fter rz,ooo with a different set of genetic traits will sti1l produce. Having this years of farming such a rich variery of wheat, what a srrange stare larger and more diverse gene pool gives a field of landrace wheat the of affairs we find ourselves in. biological toolkit to deal with whatever the environment throws at unlike most revolutions, the Green one achieved exactly what it it. Over time this diversity allows the landrace to adapt to longer-term set out to do, which was to boost the supply of calories for the world. changes in climate and growing conditions. Animals can run away But the planet is now paying a heavy price. Borlaug said the Green from threats, but plants survive or die depending on their ability to Revolution was only buying us time, rwenry to thirty years ar most. adapt. He hadn't inrended it to be a long-rerm fix for feeding the world but The Green Revolution created monocultures of genetically identical the world became locked into this intensive system. The land that was plants. The new science of breeding made it possible to select agtinst cleared, the fossil fuels used, and the warer extracted all are con- - diversiqy rather than embrace it. Each plant could be guaranteed to tributing not only to food diversiry becoming endangereff but,.also, grow to an identical height and mafure at the same time, making potentially, the endangerment of life on Earth. What's more, the harvesting more efficient. The chemical composition of the grains original promise is stalling; in many parts of the worrd wheat yields  EATING TO EXTINCTION KAVILCA WHEAT T have piateaued. In riding reductionism, we really did run into the hard so remarkable is that it originated as a disease that only affected rice wall of complexity. plantations. Bur a new high-yielding variety of wheat had been bred without a particular defensive gene, and this allowed the fungus to Ir:, zozo, the Covid-r9 pandemic showed us how a microscopic virus cross the species barrier and mutate to attackwheat. As with Fusarium can threaten human life, destabilise economies and disrupt social head blight, scientists are now looking for a source of resistance within norms. Microscopic diseases can also bring chaos to food security. I old landrace varieties of wheat. mentioned one example of a devastating crop disease at the beginning This is history repearing itself. In the late r94os, Jack Harlan carne of this book, Fusarium head blight. I also described it as sneaky. It across 'a miserable looking whear, tall and thin-stemmed', in a remote has a devious (yet strangely impressive) modus operandi: the fungus part of eastern Turkey. He picked a few samples and rook them back lies dormant in fields, but when it rains, droplets splash its spores with him to the USA, where they remained in a seed bank for nearly upwards and onto the ears of wheat. From here, it penetrates deep two decades. In the r96os, when a disease called 'stripe rust' broke inside the plant where, by secreting an arsenal of proteins, the fungus out across wheat fields in the American north-west, plant breeders gives itself an invisibility cloak. This allows ir to bypass the plant's experimented with Harlan's Turkish wheat. It rurned out ro have defences and travel hidden between the cells, spreading out. Then the resistance not only to the outbreak but also to fourteen other diseases. fungus delivers its coup de grdce: by releasing a chemical signal it Tonnes of food and millions of dollars were saved rhanks to Harlan's effectively causes the plant to commir suicide. It then gers ro fulfil its chance find. mission, which is to feast on all the nutrients the wheat had stored inside its seeds ready for its own reproduction. Today, the future potential of pre-Green Revolution wheats is being What has made head blight even more successfui in recenr years, explored at Britain's world-renowned cenre for plant science, theJohn decimating crops at an alarming rate, is that the gene responsible for Innes Centre in East Anglia. The centre hosts a collection of wheats dwarfing the world's wheat had a hitchhiker, a section of DNA that assembled a century ago by a Cambridge Universicy botanist named made it even more susceptible to this disease. The more uniform Arthur Watkins. While serving as an officer in the First rfforld'War wheat became, the more that gene spread and the easier it became in France, Watkins became infaruated with the crop. He noticed hoiv for the head blight to attack fields full of food. It has turned millions each French village had fields of differentJooking wheat. After the of tonnes of wheat into shrivelled, grey, chalky grains at a global cost war, at the School of Agriculrure in Cambridge, he corresponded with running into billions of dollars. So far, the mosr promising solution Nikolai Vavilov and realised the importance of the genetic diversiry to this threat lies with the ancient wheats, einkorn and emmer, both he'd seen in France. He then came up with an ingenious method for of which have greater resistance to the fungus. building his own collection. Using the Civil Service nerworh he con- Even more devastating is a relatively new disease cal1ed wheat blast. tacted staff based in British consulates in the Middle Easr, Asia, Europe Caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae it reduced harvests in parts and the Americas to help 'collect as many wheat varieties as possible of Brazil and Bolivia by two-thirds before crossing the Pacific and from around the world'. This, he told them, was for his own scientific arriving in South Asia on a shipment of grain. When it was discovered curiosity and also for 'breeding improved varieties of wheat'. He asked in Bangladesh in zo16, thousands of farmers were ordered by the them to find the oldest landrace wheats they could find because, he government to set fi.re to their fields of unharvested wheat, to burn said, 'these are always a mixture of many distinct rypes'. Hundreds their crops and throw away any seeds they had saved fiom the previous of consulate workers explored local markets and farms to buy seeds year. This fungus infects spikes of wheat and turns the plant a pinkish for Watkins and posted them off to him in Cambridge. colour, covering the grains in black spots. Soon after, the grains shrivel By the end of the r93os, Watkins had collectedT,4oo wheat samples - and deform, eventually destroying the crop. What makes wheat blast einkorn, emmer and bread wheats, including lots of different andrare  r!,{v tLUA w lltiAl 73 EATiNG TO EXTINCT. But in Gokg6l's later travels, even in the most remote villages, he varieties. He turned thisinto a living collection at the School of found that Kavilca was being replaced by what he described as 'soft Agriculture, which was then the biggest of its kind in the world' a unique and ordinary inferior wheats' and was 'doomed to go extinct'. By the he left behind is Watkins died in obscuriry but the collection end of the r95os, Kavilca was remembered by only the oldest farmers around the world before it and priceless snapshot of wheat diversity and cooks. A decade later, that memory was close to becoming myth. Researchers at John Innes was swept away by the Green Revolution' Picking up the baton from Gokgol, Karagoz also spenr years collection for genes that could are now searching tt"ot'gtt Watkins's travelling across Turkey on seed-hunting expeditions for the Ankara betransferredintomode"'varietiesinordertoimprovetheiryield' Gene Bank. In zoo4, he took Gokgol's vast wheat encyclopedias with hardiness or disease resistance' him on the road, and found that most of what Gokgol had recorded was gone. By then, less than 5 per cent of wheat being grown in Borlaug,s Green Revolution What became of Kavilca in this story? Turkey was a landrace variery. By zo16, it was estimated to be r pe5 Funded by the Rockefeller wheat arrived in Turkey in the r96os' cent. Even the living whear collecrion planted by Gokgol was losr.- supplies of seeds, fertilisers Foundation, farmers were handed free His garden, holding some of Turkey's oldest wheat varieries, had been underwent more change in a and pesticides; agriculture in Turkey abandoned after his death in the r98os. single gener"tion th* it had in five hundred years' By the end of the That r per cent included the Kavilca grown in small f"-ily plots in number of farmers fewer and decade, farms had become bigger' the Briyiik Qatma. Lack of roads to rhe remote village meant the 'revo- from around three-quarters Turkey's rurai population had dropped Iutionary' seeds and fertfisers hadn't made it here. Even if they had, (all universal fearures of of the nationar total to less than a quarter the high altirude would have been roo much for Borlaug's bread the Green Revolution, from Mexico to India)' The people who stayed wheats, and the rain and moisture-loving fungal diseases would have uaditional seeds' Landrace in the countryside stopped saving their overwhelmed them. wheatsbecameassociatedwithignoranceandpoveffy. is only known to us because of The extent of T\rrkey's lost diversiry The Turkish farmers rn Btiytik Qatma had saved their precious landrace Mirza Gokgol'Inryzg' inspired by the *ork of a young botat'i't named wheat, but Britain had lost its own. In the late surffner of zozo,I walked travelling from village to. village' col- Vavilov he set out Jn horseback' among the wheat that was growing aroundJohn Lerts's farm in Ordord, wheat he could find' assembling lecting eYery type of wild and cultivated the legacy of the shoebox of medieval straw and weeds he had been did this for more than a quarter of a collection of r8,ooo varieties' He given in the early r99os. Letts was on a mission to restore what Britain aleadtng a century. 'He was a one-man army' says Dr Alptekin Karagoz' had lost. He had scoured the contents of every seed bank and plant 'What he found was priceless'' expert in Turkey's *tt""t diversiry' collection prepared to give him access and sowed every rype of pre-Green Among ttt" cilected was Kavilca' or gernik as he Revolution wheat he could find. Hearing their names turned *rem into '"tJt-cokgol 'One of the oldest cultivated described it in old A""toil"" Turkish' characters as rich and colourfirl as Kavilca: Red Lammas, Devon Orange 'in excavations in Babylonia and wheat species,'he wrote in the r93os' Blue Rough Chaff Blue Cone Rivet, Duck-bill and Golden Drop. the poor fed on barley' Egpt, this emmer has been unearthed' While farmers The crop was tall, rwice the height of modern wheat and was eastern Turkey' Gokgol met the high-ranking ate emmer" In growing well above my shoulders. There was also diversity in the who valued emmer's abiiiry to grow in the thin soils and qold damp field. Each plant looked subtly different to its neighbour; tiny variations plateau' He watched as villagers temperature, of tnt f igf' arr"tofian and in the colour, shape and size of the grains, just like the field of Kavilca exercise of threshing the wheat gathered together i" u t*monal I had stood in with Nejdet Dasdemir. Letts's landrace population will the transformation of cracked removing tfr. no[', and he studied discover its own strengths and weaknesses and evolve in the years to and flatbreads' He saw how wheat irrro ttoo"Jtti"g di'tt"' of pilafs I come, its gene pool wide enough to give it options to adapt. a whole way of life' t, Kavilca wasn t just a crop - it supported t s ii.1 I H-  EATING TO EXTINCTION Letts,s wheat had a complex Another similarity to Kavilca was that 5 which have been ,ooi ,y*.*, much deeper than modern- variedes' soil' Landraces evolved br.d tl grow in irNt " ftw inches of fertilised Bere Barl.ey far down in search of food; without that luxury and send their roots deeper roots mean greater access to minerals and nutrients' 'Try to 'how far those roots have trav- imagine beneath our feet,' said Letts' out if one wheat produces more Orkney, Scotland elled in search of nuffients'' Working easy; there are lots of variables nutrient_rich food than another isn t at play: the rype of soil, the method of farming' right through to how cooked' But we do know for the grains have been milled, baked or As John Letts set out to prove, everywhere has - or once had - its as zinc andiron are higher in older certain that levels of minerals such own version of Kavilca, a food ecologically, culturally and culinarily wheats than in modern ones' linked to that specffic place. on the orkney Islands, rwenry miles Aftertheharvest,wetooksomegrainstoalargewoodenbarn north of the Scottish mainland, it was a rype of barley. Early settlers machines' One of these' about filled with different kinds of milling arrived here 5,ooo years ago, and the Neolithic package the crops the size of a washinfmachine' toJd "*o"" the hull from Kavilca - domesticated in the Fertile crescent - reached these islands around miller Erdem Kaya had been in seconds, Letts tolime' I wished the 4,ooo years ago, part of its westward sweep out of the Near East. In.Growing ord varieties isn t about going back in time,' there ro watch. the seventh cenrury celtic missionaries arrived on the islands, follo*ed Lems said. 'With new technology we can now start to realise their in the etghth by Vikings. Throughout all this, the people.wh.o came full potential.' to be known as 'Orcadians' were sustained by barley. Tougher and and I thought about the In my hand were the dried Kavilca seeds more tolerant ro a cold climate than wheat, this cereal made life through' all the :Tpittt that had millennia the wheat had survived possible in this exposed and wearher-bearen place. And the rype that come and gorr., to""tt"" people *tto n"a hved' loved and died' grew best on orkney and adapted to its challenging conditions was 'ht bee" reaped' ThrolSholt all of the thousands of harvests thaihad and given the name bere (Anglo-Saxon for barley). this, the plant had it out' Tiied and tested' it had evolved '""gnta One advantage of bere is that it is fast-growing, so much so that it that wheat thousands of years ago adapted. 'The people i'ho '"l"tttd can be the last crop to be sown but the first ready for harvest, soaking 'and neither were the farmers in Turkey weren t srupid,' Letts said' up the iight of the prolonged summer days in the northern hemisphere. who saved it.' 'From flag leaf - the last leaf to appear on a stalk to harvest it's - tritt.ry days,' Rae PhilliFs of Orkney's Barony Mill told me. Even in harsher years, when winter winds and colder temperarures sweep in early, bere will have grown quickly enough to produce grain when other crops have failed. In good years, modern barley and even whear fed by fertilisers and fungicides yield more than bere, bur in a_.bad year those crops might give nothin g at aJJ. When the weather is rough (and on Orkney it can get very'rough), it's possible to watch bere's resilience in action. It grows five feet tall - higher than modern dwarf cereals - but when winds gust across \ it, it will bow over as if it's shielding its grains, hunkering down until 1l k I. !' L t