Let us take you back to when wheat was a simple, wholesome food
Wheat didn’t used to be junk food. But industrial farming and processing has made it so. With our fresh-ground heritage grains, you can bake like it's 1869, with wheat as a wholesome nutritional centrepiece rather than barren, starchy filler. Read on for the SAD story of modern flour (and how we turn back the clock).
The whole food philosophy simply says: mother nature knows best. After all, we are creatures genetically adapted over the eons to a certain diet. Yet, just in the last century, we have gotten away from traditional food.
It seems self-evident that chronic health and obesity problems are a result of this modern, dysfunctional new diet. It also seems clear that the closer we stay to a fresh, natural diet, the better. It's simply what our bodies expect, and need, to be healthy, vital and strong.
Incredibly, the Standard American Diet (SAD) now provides the bulk of calories through sugar, denatured white flour and highly refined oils. Only a fraction of calories comes from traditional sources close to nature.
This diet delivers tons of calories, yet, ironically, precious little nutrition for your body to use (no wonder it's always hungry!). How did we let this happen? The SAD story of modern wheat is a telling one.
The SAD story of modern wheat
Grain has been at the heart of man’s diet for many thousands of years. It stores well for years in kernel form (as a living seed), and is very nutritious when freshly prepared as breads and porridge. And this is how grains have been consumed over the eons—stored in whole kernel form and milled fresh as required.
Until the industrial age, man ate freshly prepared grains, full of life and nutrients. Now, practically all the grains we consume are nutritionally compromised. In other words, our modern industrial society has turned a traditional life-sustaining staple into junk food. How SAD.
The villain in this SAD story is our industrial culture of ever more and cheaper. Two things have changed over the last century or so to turn our staple into junk food: milling practices, and the wheat itself. In adapting an important food staple to our modern industrial model, we ruined it.
The first problem: modern milling
With the industrial era, milling first migrated from kitchens to the town mill. Then, the town mill became a relic and grain was processed in distant factories in huge quantities — many miles and many months from the point of consumption. The problem with this model is that grain, once milled, doesn’t keep well at all—delicate fatty acids start to degrade immediately. The solution to this problem was white flour. Stripped of germ and bran, ground to a fine dust then treated and bleached, it keeps almost indefinitely. Of course, the reason it keeps so well is that it has been stripped of vital nutrients. So man's staple wheat has become a manufactured, empty non-food. Even bugs won’t eat it, and neither should we. But it is nice and fluffy.
Even if you buy "whole wheat" flour, it has almost certainly been sifted, treated and left oxidizing for months in the distribution chain, turning rancid and destroying micro-nutrient content. Of course you can taste this. It’s that bitter unpleasantness that we so often associate with “healthy” whole grains. Which is ironic, because that flavour signifies that nutrients have been lost. No wonder so many people think they don’t like whole grains!
The second problem: modern wheat
Here the villain of industrialization pops up again: the driven quest for ever bigger yields on the farm. Modern wheat has been continuously cross-bred and hybridized over the last 100 years, with always the same goal in mind: increased yields. Where there used to be hundreds of strains of wheat varieties commonly planted, today just a few strains make up the bulk of world harvest. Is this genetic modification and standardization bad? Well, for one thing, this standardized wheat lacks unique flavour, like jug wine. It’s also generally lower in protein. We would use heritage grains for these reasons alone. But also, just in the last generation or so, an astonishing number of people complain of an inability to digest wheat, or have a wheat allergy. Yet many of these people find they can tolerate spelt and kamut. What’s going on here? We've put low cost and high efficiency ahead of nutrition.
Our fix for this SAD situation
It's simple really. Source local, organic heritage grains. Grind them on cool millstones—not too fine—and quickly vacuum-pack to preserve the exquisite fresh ground character. This, happily, results in both superior nutrition and superior flavour. Design easy recipes chock full of whole food ingredients to give busy modern people a way to bake with whole grains as they have been enjoyed through the ages: heritage seeds, organically grown, freshly ground, unsifted and unadulterated. Like it's 1869 all over again.
Dare to peek behind the curtain of modern flour production?
Check out this thoroughly researched and informative paper from the Weston A. Price Foundation:
Wheaty Indiscretions: What happens to wheat from seed to storage.
WARNING: Read this and you may never eat white flour again!