Driving to Kever Benjamin City from my new Ramle mall-supermarket project, I stopped by the river Natuf (road 40 before the IAI - see pic for typical grasses). So, this is where the Natufians lived. Natufians were Neolithic humans, who discovered the possibility of harvesting the emmer and einkorn cereal grasses. The Natufians carried their freshly-cut grass home, then ground it by hand using homemade mortar and pestle. As yeast-raised bread was still some 5000 years in the future, emmer and einkorn wheat was not used to bake bread, but was consumed as a porridge in bowls. Einkorn has the simplest genetic code of 14 chromosomes, while emmer has 28 chromosomes.Cold Equations writes:
In the 1980s, thousands of new wheat strains arose from hybridization experiments. Then, in the late 1980s, genetic engineering quietly got underway in which geneticists inserted or deleted single genes, mostly designed to generate specific characteristics, such as height, yield per acre, drought resistance, but especially resistance to various pesticides and weed killers. The fruits of these efforts were introduced into the market in 1994. Most of the genetically modified foods were thought to be only minor modifications of the unmodified original and thus no safety testing in animals or humans was conducted.
We now have many thousands of wheat strains that are different in important ways from original emmer, einkorn, and Triticum aestivum wheat. Interestingly, it has been suggested that einkorn wheat fails to provoke the same immune response characteristic of celiac disease provoked by modern wheat gluten, suggesting a different amino acid structure in gluten proteins. Another difference: Emmer wheat is up to 40% protein, compared to around 12% protein for modern wheat.
In other words, the wheat of earlier agricultural humans, including the wheat of Biblical times, is NOT the wheat of 2010. Modern wheat is quite a different thing with differing numbers of chromosomes, different genes due to human manipulation, varying gluten protein composition, perhaps other differences.
Somewhere in the shuffle and genetic sleight-of-hand that has occurred over the last 30 years, wheat changed. What might have been the "staff of life" has now become the cause of an incredible array of diseases of "wheat" intolerance.
5 comments:
I don't buy the idea that we have provoked Gaia by monkeying with plant genetics. Whatever the # of chromosomes , the hydrochloric acid in your stomach breaks it all down - food is food. We are hearty omnivores. All these allergies come from the fact that people are not exposed to enough dirt and parasites.
K
Agreed, but we are not adapted to synthetic food like the bread we buy in the bakery. Our natural environment is like the Natuf River Natural Reserve, we should be living in a cave and roam the valley collecting turtles to cook. Of course, it cannot be.
If you want exposure to dirt and parasites, you simply need to turn on the television.
Anon.
Probably the biggest sin is that in white bread many of the most nutritious parts of the wheat are not included. If mice get to wheat they will eat the oily nutritious germ and leave the starchy endosperm (the part that white flour is made from). Processors like white flour because it does not go rancid like whole wheat (fats go rancid, starches do not).
But again the species of plant has nothing to do with it - you could make white flour from emmer too.
K
Nice post, but I don't think I wrote that. Without looking it up, I think that's Dr Davis of the Heart Scan Blog.
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