52 Loaves (21 page)

Not just faster, but better, Mike explained. Stone mills
crush
the grain, so tiny bits of bran and germ, too small to be sift ed out, end up in the white flour, while roller mills
scrape
as they peel the endosperm from the bran. In fact, they scrape so efficiently that if you wanted to build a devitaminization machine, you couldn’t do much better than a roller mill. Only 20 to 30 percent of the wheat’s original vitamins remain in the resulting white flour. The bulk of the nutrients are found in the pieces that are sieved out: the germ, the bran, and, most significantly, the aleurone layer, a thin coat under the bran where most of the B vitamins (including niacin) are stored. Why do we strip all the healthy stuff out of our flour? Because Katie isn’t the only one who loves croissants (and white bread and hamburger rolls). The goal is to get the bran out, and the vitamins are collateral damage. If millers had their way, they’d prefer to stop refining a little sooner, because the finer you mill the wheat, the more flour dust you create, and flour dust suspended in air is highly explosive, whether in a stone mill or a roller mill.

Mike wasn’t eager to engage me on the subject, but I knew that mills are still blowing up all the time. In the decade preceding 1997—that’s
1997,
not 1897—there were 129 explosions in flour mills and grain elevators, so imagine the risks a hundred years ago, before sophisticated filtration systems were developed.

This mill certainly felt safe, if not antiseptic, but I was ready to move on. I had one last question for Mike. “When did the roller mill become popular in America?”

He thought for a minute. “After the turn of the century. Many of the steel-roller mills running today were built in the teens and early twenties.”

Bingo! The dates coincided precisely with the pellagra epidemic. For me, this was the last piece of the puzzle. I was more convinced than ever that bread, not corn, was responsible for the American pellagra epidemic, and I’d seen firsthand how it might have happened. However, I’d soon feel a little bit like Goldberger fighting the skeptical establishment myself. When I returned home, I e-mailed the author of a recent biography of Goldberger with my theory about the connection between white bread and pellagra.

“I, too, have heard the roller-milled white flour theory of pellagra,” he answered.

So I wasn’t crazy. This was a legitimate (if obscure) theory.

He continued, “I have not seen evidence to substantiate the claim.”

Well, I had.

His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.
—William Shakespeare

The threshed wheat and chaff half-filled an eighteen-gallon plastic bucket. But how much of that was wheat? When I ran my hands through it, it seemed to be nearly all light, fluffy chaff. A couple of weeks went by before I had a chance to find out, when I awoke one morning, not to the call of my conscientious wheat-eater bird, but to the welcome sound of wind rustling in the leaves. A cold front had moved in, bringing dry air and a stiff breeze. It was a perfect day to winnow.

Anne (lucky for her) was working, but Katie was free until the afternoon.

“I have a deal for you,” I said as she stumbled downstairs mid-morning. “I’m going to give you a chance to do something that I guarantee no other kids in this town—maybe the county, even the state!—have ever done.”

Katie knew a rat when she smelled it.

“Does this involve wheat?” She had seen how tired Anne and I were after threshing.

“It’ll be fun. Trust me.” For once, I was right.

Winnowing wheat—another chore taken care of by the combine right in the field as it cuts and threshes
—
is traditionally done by tossing the wheat and chaff into the air with a pitchfork. In even a light breeze, the chaff drifts off with the wind, while the denser kernels fall to the ground.

With the stiff breeze at hand, this looked to be a snap. Katie and I spread out the tarp, stood near the center with our backs to the wind, dipped our cupped hands into the bucket, and tossed the grain into the air like a couple of referees throwing a jump ball.

At that precise moment, the wind reversed 180 degrees and blew the chaff back into our faces. The wind was both erratic and shift ing. When it did strike, though, we quickly tossed handfuls of wheat into the air, marveling as the chaff drift ed away. Soon we had gone through the bucket. What fell back onto the tarp was cleaner, but still half-chaff. We broke for lunch.

“This isn’t looking good,” I said over a sandwich.

“We’ll get there eventually, Dad,” Katie chirped, always the optimist.

“That’s not what I mean. I think that bucket is all chaff. We’ll be lucky to get a loaf of bread out of this.”

Katie plucked a few grains of wheat out of her hair and handed them to me, a touching gesture. Truly we had nothing to spare.

After lunch, we continued winnowing, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, as we continued to go through the shrinking pile again and again, each time decreasing the proportion of chaff in the wheat, a small hill of golden grain started to rise on the tarp, covering Katie’s bare feet and reaching to her ankle bracelet.

She giggled. “Dad, we’re making wheat! I’ll bet we’ve got enough for a dozen croissants right here!”

By the time Katie hopped on her bike and headed to her lifeguard job at the town pool, the bucket was mostly clean wheat.
Winnowing the last 10 percent, however, threatened to be 90 percent of the work, given the erratic winds. The remaining work was lonely and frustrating without Katie. If I tossed modestly, too much chaff returned to the ground. If I tossed higher, a sudden gust oft en carried some of the precious grain away with the chaff. Then I had a brainstorm. If chaff is that light, it should float in water, no? Wheat kernels, on the other hand, would sink. Couldn’t I take advantage of this to quickly do the final cleaning? All I had to do was run some water into the bucket of wheat, skim off the chaff, and spread the remaining grain out on the tarp to dry.

Just to be sure, I did an Internet search with the terms “wheat winnow water” and found myself reading the abstract of an article from a scholarly journal. It seemed I wasn’t the first to hit upon the idea. Gorillas in the wild have long been observed separating wheat from chaff by crushing it in their hands, then blowing the chaff away—exactly the same method of threshing and winnowing that the farmer Erle Zuill had demonstrated. What was exciting in this article, however, was that the author had found a family of gorillas who’d learned a new, more efficient method: dipping a handful of wheat and chaff in a stream and letting the chaff float away.

Wow—my idea
had been validated by apes
! Still, I couldn’t find any mention on the Internet of humans actually cleaning wheat this way, so before proceeding, I sent off an e-mail to Mike Dooley at the mill. A beep on my laptop signaled his reply a few minutes later.

Point taken. Mike suggested I use an electric fan instead to free me from the vagaries of the temperamental wind. I figured that another few hours on the tarp in front of the fan would get the job done.

Except that when I finally got around to doing the last of the winnowing, I discovered that many of what looked like clean wheat berries were, on closer examination, still encased in a thin membrane of husk. It took another full day of rubbing the wheat on an old window screen, a handful at a time, to remove these stubborn husks, leaving my hands raw for days afterward. In the end, though, I had wheat.

From my small planting, I’d harvested twenty pounds of beautiful golden wheat! Yet it wasn’t the amount I’d grown that moved me; it was something less tangible. Nothing I had ever grown in the garden—not corn, tomatoes, leeks, or roses—had given me as much of a sense of accomplishment as growing wheat. I suspected I had tapped into some genomic key, connecting with my agricultural ancestors on the Russian steppe some two, five, even ten thousand years ago.

I’d reestablished a connection I hadn’t known I’d missed. Misty-eyed, I felt as if I’d just done something very important, but I couldn’t quite say what or why. I suddenly wanted to know more about my ancestors—that is, my father’s ancestors, those Russian peasants and coal miners and priests—who had survived centuries of harsh nature and harsher rulers. I thought
about how locally grown, milled, and baked bread was almost certainly the only thing standing between life and death for my great-great-grandfather. That wasn’t so long ago, just four generations.

Yielding to a sudden urge, I went out to the garden and, using a hoe, started turning the stubby remains of the wheat back into the soil, giving it a proper burial. As I settled into my to-andfro rhythm, replicating the survival strategies of my ancestors, I found myself again thinking about why I’d been drawn to bread, to wheat. Was I satisfying some biological or emotional imperative, witnessing the resurfacing of a suppressed primitive urge?

Drift ing off to sleep that night, in a state between wakefulness and unconsciousness, I had a kind of
2001: A Space Odyssey
experience, feeling myself racing backward through the centuries, seeing my ancestors living in cities, then, moving back in time, in villages, huts, and caves, all the while growing rye and wheat, planting and harvesting, threshing and winnowing. Growing and harvesting wheat had connected me to the ages, triggering an unexpected awakening. And I hadn’t even ground it into flour yet.

Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, headache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, spinal diseases, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy.
—Sylvester Graham,
*
on the perils of frequent (more than monthly) copulation between married couples,
A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity,
1834

I’ve built . . . full-sized ovens in half a day.
—Kiko Denzer,
Build Your Own Earth Oven,
2007

How to Build an Earth Oven in a Weekend; or, A Recipe for Disaster

1. Set aside a
month
of weekends, because regardless of what Kiko Denzer writes (and preaches in Maine), that’s closer to what you’re going to need.

2. Drag your son out of bed at the crack of dawn and, using pickax and shovel, dig a footing deep enough to reach the frost line (allegedly forty inches in my neighborhood, but you may have to settle for less) and wide enough for a grave, because before the project is over, you’re going to want to kill yourself, I guarantee it. With any luck, you will strike clay, which you should set aside for the oven itself, which you will get around to building later. Much later.

3. Instead of simply ordering a load of stone from your local building-supply company, who would dump it in a convenient location adjacent to the hole, follow Denzer’s post hippie admonition to fill your footing/grave with “urbanite,” his word
*
for the debris you scavenge in your yard and neighborhood. As much work as this is, it does have the advantage of cleaning your yard of old bird feeders, hardened sacks of mortar mix, lawn mowers, and other junk your town won’t take.

4. After a day of lugging all this debris to the foundation, make half a dozen trips to your local home center to buy bags of stone, because all that damned urbanite you scavenged filled only a third of your enormous hole, and the small stones you pour in just vanish at an impossible rate.

5. Crawl out of bed the next day and start to build a base for the oven so you won’t have to bake lying on your stomach.

6. Instead of buying those easy-to-assemble interlocking bricks used for building retaining walls, insist (for aesthetic reasons) on using old-fashioned red brick for the base. Construct a four-foot cylinder of said brick, three feet high, taking pains to keep the structure level on your sloping site. Don’t bother using mortar, for mortar is messy and time-consuming, and besides, it seems to me that there will be no place for the brick to go once the cylinder is filled with yet more fill (see steps 3–4) and the thing is topped with a heavy oven (see steps . . . uh, well, we won’t be getting that far this weekend. Or next).

7. As the brick wall rises, continue filling with more debris. And more. After several hours of stripping your yard of anything that isn’t moving, you may be tempted to loosen your definition of “debris” somewhat, but resist the urge to go after low-hanging fruit, such as loose stones from an existing wall, the foundation of your home, or the neighbor’s cat. Trust me on this, especially if your wife has a sharp eye.

8. When the last layer of brick is in place, top off with small stones to fill in the gaps between the larger pieces of fill. Smooth with hands, then step back to watch, with horror,
as the entire structure collapses, the fill pouring out like flour from a broken sack.

9. Open a beer. Rebuild next weekend, using mortar.