My Grandfathers Bread

My grandfather, a slice of bread, and what got lost along the way.

My grandfather grew up in Indiana during the Great Depression. Times were lean, but he always said they ate well. Even late in life, he told me he'd give anything for one more slice of his mother's homemade bread.

As I got further into my own health journey, I learned that the wheat his mother baked with wasn't the same wheat most of us grow up on today. Not necessarily what people call an "ancient grain"—just a different wheat than the one that eventually replaced it.

A Bridge Back to the Table

For a while, I went gluten-free. I didn't feel better eating gluten-free products, and honestly, I just missed sitting down and eating the same meal as everyone else at the table. That's where wheat varieties like einkorn came in—not as a cure, just as a bridge back to eating with the people I love.

Along the way, I've actually come to enjoy these older grains—flavors that sounded strange to me at first, and honestly, kind of were at first. Over time, working with them, I started noticing how much flavor modern wheat seems to be missing by comparison.

The Case for Modern Wheat

It's worth saying plainly: modern wheat has done enormous good in the world. The short-stemmed, disease-resistant varieties developed by Norman Borlaug in the mid-20th century dramatically increased how much wheat a single acre could produce. In Mexico, wheat production roughly doubled. In India and Pakistan, yields climbed so fast that both countries went from facing famine to becoming self-sufficient in grain within a decade. Borlaug's work is credited with helping prevent widespread starvation for hundreds of millions of people, and it earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

That same wheat is also easier to mechanically harvest, more resistant to disease and bad weather, and cheaper to produce—which matters enormously for food affordability and access, especially for people who don't have the luxury of paying extra for specialty grain. None of what follows is meant to erase that.

The Case Against

At the same time, that progress came with trade-offs worth naming. Durum wheat—the kind used for pasta—is often chemically dried right before harvest to speed things up, especially in the northern U.S. and Canada, where most of it's grown.

Modern wheat breeding has also narrowed the genetic pool significantly. The same handful of ancestor lines show up in the pedigree of roughly 80% of modern wheat varieties, and that narrowing has measurably changed how wheat interacts with soil microbial life.

And a lot of commercial and food-service baking still uses bleached, and in some cases bromated, flour. Bromate is banned in the EU, UK, and Canada—it's still legal in most of the U.S., though most bagged retail flour dropped it years ago.

Where I Land

I'm not a scientist or a doctor, and I want to be honest about that. A lot of this comes down to feeling, not proof—these are just the decisions I've made for feeding my own family, and for what we serve you. I'd encourage you to make your own, whatever those look like for you.

I'm genuinely grateful for the farmers and scientists working to feed the entire world—that's not a small or easy problem, and I don't take it for granted. I laid out both sides above because I mean it: there are real arguments on both sides of a lot of this, from GMOs to modern wheat breeding, and I don't think it's as simple as one side being right and the other wrong.

What I keep coming back to is a question I've asked myself for years: can I do better? Can we do better? For me, working with ancient and heritage grains has been less about a health verdict and more about finding my way back to my grandfather's table—one slice at a time.