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Today’s Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn’t matter. People want Red Fife because it is Red Fife, not just any old high-quality Canadian wheat.

“In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the ‘building material’ required … And to use their most valuable qualities for hybridisation.”

In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.

Farro is not spelt. It isn’t einkorn or emmer either. Farro “is an Italian ethnobotanical concept”.

Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.

How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?

Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?

It’s a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don’t need a heat-proof container to boil water.

Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn’t all that difficult.

It’s magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.