Going for the gold

Wheat, despite what we believe, is made mostly of air, not earth, and will always be, no matter what we think. We can live out our lives in ignorance, convinced we are right, and wheat plants will not change, spinning air into sugar, a greater gift than Rumpelstiltskin's skill with straw. Grace.

The value of gold is a human conceit. An ounce will get you $1200 today, an abstract string of symbols that can be traded for over 5 metric tons of wheat berries, almost 200 bushels of wheat, about 8000 loaves, a loaf a day for over two decades, enough to get me well into my eighth decade, should I live so long. Greed.

The wheat is dying now, because the light is dying.
The light will return, as will the wheat.
And many of us will die before then, working for our Rumpelstiltskin masters, when all we had to do was just step outside.

And yet we teach our children to value metal over life.

Go ahead, prepare your children for college, for careers, for a life dependent (or so they think) on the spot price of a troy ounce of gold on the market. I'll find my gold in the light reflecting off the dying plants of autumn.

You can, too....

August light

This one's from two Augusts ago.

A

The days fade quickly now--in three weeks we'll have an hour less sunlight gracing us than today.

We will assault children with a sterile view of science, reduced to a method and streams of vocabulary, "ideas" we can test.

The sun slides south without notice as we huddle under the subtle, damning hum of fluorescent lights, each one filled with vaporized mercury, coated with phosphor, a steam punk amalgamation of  early 20th century technology and vision.

We talk little of either, the sun or the hum, the light of our lives.

***

Here's the heart of biology: We're matter put together in an orderly fashion by light. When light fades, we fall apart.

Follow the energy--the breath you take brings in oxygen that allows you to convert the toast you ate this morning back into carbon dioxide and water. You literally breathe out a few bites of your breakfast  by noon.

Wheat grown in our classroom

The toast, of course, is mostly wheat--these days we take out the best part of the grain and feed it to animals (flour keeps better on the shelves this way), but what's left over , is still wheat, a plant, like most plants, that combines carbon dioxide and water into marvelous strands of carbon compounds, weavers that rival Rumpelstiltskin--the miracle is in the flax, not the gold.

And yet when we talk of "photosynthesis" the kids groan under the weight of the terms: photolysis, ATP synthase, electron chain transport, chemiosmosis....sighing vast quantities of carbon dioxide molecules, drooling on the desks.

Yes!...there's your breakfast, in the sighs, in the drool!

***

The fading light is not metaphorical--it is real. Outside the classroom windows the living world is dying, as it does every fall. The hunger season is coming.

We start the school year in late summer, as we do, as our bodies, still untamed, feel the dying light. We pretend otherwise, talk of the "new year" and of "objectives" and "benchmarks"--as the sun slides slowly south, the shadows lengthen ominously, and the ice returns.

We teach children to stop paying attention to what matters, to focus on the trivial. That is how you survive in a world of concrete and glass, in a world where many of our children would not recognize their breakfast in its raw form.

Biology is the study of life--let's shine our light on what matters.

Back to school is a bittersweet time...

Thoughts while kneading bread

I stumbled upon an old blog of mine--forgot all about it.
I like some of what I said then, so I am sharing it anew.

On a good bread day, when the humidity is just right, the yeast budding furiously and happily in their doughy world, when my hands work unconsciously, my dough comes together after about 15 minutes of kneading.

Fold and press, fold and press, fold and press.

An occasional turn of the dough. Fold and press. It will be ready when, as the adage goes, it feels like a baby's bottom. It usually takes me about 200 folds. The purists may push for 300 folds, but after 200 or so, it feels ready. I am middle-aged, and I only know the feel of a middle-aged woman's thigh. Enough for me.

Perhaps younger bakers yearn for the firmness of 300 folds. Let them yearn. They have more energy, and certainly more time.

Wheat grown on our classroom windowsill.

200 folds. Each fold doubles the number of layers of dough beneath my hands. 2...4...8...

Which would you rather have, the old teaser goes, a million dollars now, or a penny doubled every day for a month?

16...32...64...128...256...512...1,024.

Each layer makes the gluten strands stretch and layer upon itself. A network to catch the carbon dioxide released by the yeasts busy budfucking in the dough.

2,048....4,096...8,192...16,384...32,768...65,536...131,072.

Bread made by a friend, Jessica Pierce (photo by her)

Most of us in this part of the world do not exert a whole lot of energy. Most of the carbon dioxide we release comes from the decomposed ferns and trilobites and pterodactyls that we burn without a thought. Sunlight captured 10 million years ago combusts, consumes O₂, produces CO₂.

In the States, few folks walk anymore.

262,144...524,288...1,048,576...2,097,152....4,194,304....8,388,608

My dough doubles in size in less than two hours. The hot breath of yeasties, budding and budding and budding.

16,777,216...33,554,432...67,108,864...134,177,200...268,000,000....536,000,000

We screw. We fuck. We get laid. We score. We pant. Sex. A commodity. An end in itself. Few of us take the time to bud anymore. I want to make a bud. Asexual reproduction. Proof I matter. Silly thoughts. My brow beads with sweat. Kneading is hard work.

1,072,000,000...2,144,000,000...5,488,000,000....10,976,000,000...21,195,200,000...43,904,000,000...

Photo by Jessica Pierce

The moon is about 240,000 miles away. That's about 127, 200,00 feet. Or about 1,524,000,000 inches. The dough now has 40 times more layers than inches to the moon. And I am not even a quarter of the way through.

---

I have a 300 gallon puddle in my backyard. It has a lot of critters in it. One large koi. 2 bream I nabbed from a Newark park trying to catch tadpoles. Perhaps a few dozen nymphs. A hundred thousand copepods. And hundreds of millions of bacteria. Each critter no more aware of me than I of each of them.

87,808,000,000...175,616,000,000...351,232,000,000...702,464,000,000...1,404,928,000,000

My head hurts from counting. Too many critters to think about. 6 million people, give or take a million, slaughtered in Nazi concentration camps. 20 million Russians perished in the latest world war. Maybe a million less. Maybe a million more.

2,809,856,000,000...no more counting--sweat in my eyes.

Blueberries

I say a prayer when I toss my yeast down the drain after they convert raw honey and blueberries into a lovely blueberry mel that makes my legs wobble. Most are dormant from exhaustion, poisoned by the alcoholic milieu they created.

I doubt they hear my prayer.  Not sure anyone does.

The yeast in my dough are less lucky--they are living and breathing, and they will be baked.

While I no longer ponder their sentience, I no longer question their desire either. I hear the burbling of carbon dioxide gassing out the carboy as the yeast bud and bud and bud to exhaustion.

I feel most alive when my lifelong love and I share breath and energy. Get the cortex out of the way. The cortex developed late in the scheme of evolution. The medulla is where we fall in love.

We try to imagine the pain of millions dead. The challenge is to feel the pain of one creature dying.

I recoil at the thought of millions slaughtered. I get real quiet when I remember the slow death of my mother. Millions matter, of course, but only matter if I have the courage to recall my mother's strength. "We are born to die," she said. Maybe.

Just not so slowly. Not so painfully. Not so grotesquesly.

Fold and press and fold and press.

I have a recipe for bread from an ancient Yugoslovian woman. I know her grand-daughter. I taught her grand-daughter a little bit about medicine.

Her grand-daughter knows I love bread. Her grand-daughter is not so far removed from her grandmother's world that she does not recognize a wheat berry. She gave me her grandmother's recipe for potato bread.

"Why potato bread?" I asked. Dr. Elana bowed her head ever so slightly--she still had an old world respect for her teachers. "Because," she explained, "we had no grain during the war. We were starving."

Fold and press and fold and press.

"We were starving" before she was even born, and she still feels the pangs.

Fold and press and fold and press.

Almost done. I slap the dough. Almost right. It is warming up from the life inside.

Americans confuse sensuality and sexuality because we cannot see that the two cannot be separated. We pretend otherwise at our peril. We blame the Puritans.

I'd bet my loaf of bread that Puritans knew how to make love better than most of us. I know they could make bread better than us. Too easy to blame the Puritans.

I fold again. The dough snaps. The dough is ready.

I slap the dough. I like the sound. I slap it again. Millions and millions of layers. A fine net of gluten strands ready to catch the breaths of the jubilant yeast madly reproducing, respiring, realizing. This will be a good loaf. You can know before the first rise.

A prayer before I thrust the dough into the oven hours later. The yeast die noiselessly, and (good western man I am), without awareness.

But not without desire.

Wheat does not grow on trees

“We need at least a 3 percent to 4 percent increase in total wheat production.”

Abdolreza Abbassian, 

Economist, UN Food and Agriculture Organization 

I just ordered a bunch of seeds, something I do every year. I save some seeds from last summer's garden, but I'm a sucker for cute little seed packages, and it makes it easier to use the left-overs in class.

We grow all kinds of vegetables, and we're still nibbling from the Brussels sprout stalks that survived the heavy snows. We like to eat. Most animals do.

We like to drive, too. Most animals don't. And our driving habits are biting into our eating habits.

Wheat and corn cost about 50% more than they did a year ago. That's not such a big deal (yet) here in the States, where we casually drop a dollar to buy a box of Candy Sweethearts for our love, less than 10 minutes worth of minimum wage labor.

A few years ago, all of our grain went to feed us, or the animals we planned to eat. Now a chunk of it goes to fuel our vehicles.

Teasing apart the stories can be tedious, and the corn-based ethanol folks will be quick to point out that the corn they use is feed corn, that it saves lots of petroleum that would be used otherwise, and that, by golly, it's the American way. Food prices go up for a lot of reasons--drought, speculation, floods. In the next few months you'll hear a drumbeat against the Chinese "hoarding" wheat.

To be fair, a lot of stomachs reside in China, and it's been hit by drought. It's easier (and so much politer) than blaming the SUV your neighbor drives.

It's pretty simple, really. So long as our population and grain yields go in contrary directions, our food prices will rise. So long as Americans can buy candy for a few minutes of work, we won't notice. And so long as economists keep getting paid to announce the blazingly obvious, they'll keep shouting about it instead of tilling the earth.

It gets down to biology. We are graced with just so many calories a year from our sun, with more stored as petroleum from millions upon millions of sunny days that preceded the arrival of humans.

I got a class full of children who can recite the stages of mitosis, and I get paid reasonably well to make sure this happens. If my lambs cannot make the connection between the corn in the Candy Hearts, the biofuel in their mother's SUV, and the effect of rising food prices in Egypt, well, I've not done my job, no matter how well my students perform on a state test.

I need to do better. It starts with the packets of tiny seeds.

The Necco Candy Hearts image from the Necco site here.

Today's wheat prices

Wheat prices pushed past the $8/bushel barrier today, the same day my some of my students discovered wheat berries growing on their young wheat plants.

While a few wheat berries growing in Room B362 will not affect the futures price of wheat, they do tell a story.

The class plants were small brown kernels just a few weeks ago, and now stretch towards the lights, long, green stalks topped with new wheat kernels, still green, still growing.

Each wheat berry sown gets us a dozen or so new wheat berries, for the cost of a quart or two of water and a few hundred hours of fluorescent light. (We could save on the light and just use the windowsills as spring creeps closer).

Where did the "stuff" of the wheat come from? Water, cheap and plentiful here, and carbon dioxide, otherwise wasted breath in a classroom.

It's that simple.

So while my lambs will struggle with NADPH and the Calvin cycle, trip over cytochromes and chemiosmosis, they will at least get the gist of this whole photosynthesis thing.

Light, breath, and water form our daily bread from a simple wheat berry.

Even at $8/bushel, wheat costs less than 14 cents a pound.

An iPod classic weighs 4.9 ounces, and checks in at $249, a bit over $800 per pound, and it won't do any good to water it. For the price of an iPod, you can get 3/4 tons of wheat.

Yes, of course, my bucket of wheat can't play music. But it sure tastes better than an iPod.

The lovely wheat spike picture is by from Texas A&M University
and the Soil and Crop Sciences Department found here.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Bloomfield, New Jersey, sits on the border of Newark, part of the urban fringe. No commercial farms exist here now, and if someone pursued such a quixotic venture, they would not grow wheat. We already have Kansas for that.

Still, given the rabid efforts of many Americans in these parts to grow lawn grass, it seemed a reasonable proposition to grow some wheat in a tiny patch of the backyard. Wheat is just grass all grown up.

One May afternoon, I scattered a handful or two worth of seeds over a 20 square foot patch, scritched the earth with a rake, and then went about my business. Three months later, I had my very own amber waves of grain fluttering in the warm August breeze.

I carefully cut down my wheat, tied it up into stooks and let it dry. A little pride crept in as I admired my stook, my connection to the past, smug as an urban Luddite can be. My smugness would soon be cured.

Separating the wheat from the chaff.

A quaint Biblical expression, easy enough to interpret. The wheat is the solid, good stuff. The chaff is the fluffy bad stuff. Throw the wheat in the air, and the heavier wheat berries fall straight down, while the chaff wafts away with the wind.

In the olden days, the collected chaff would be burned, not out of some symbolic representation of Hell, but just as a quick way to get rid of bulky waste.

So on Sabbath you head off to church, root for the the good guys (Yay, wheat!), tsk, tsk the bad guys (Boo, chaff!), pat yourself on the back for falling in with the wheat crowd, then go home and munch on some bagels made from, well, wheat.

Turns out it's not so simple. While today's pastor can glibly warn his flock to avoid the chaff types, any farmer back in Biblical times knew that wheat did not come in two parts. The chaff is an integral part of the wheat plant, the dry husk surrounding the wheat berry, the part used for food.

Before winnowing the chaff from the wheat berries, you need to thresh the wheat. Threshing is basically knocking the wheat kernels off the rest of the plant. Today this is done with a combination reaper/thresher (called combine for short), a machine that can cost well over a million dollars.

I was not going to invest a million dollars to harvest a tiny patch of wheat. I got to do it the old-fashioned way--beating the wheat until my arms were ready to fall off.

Initially I tried a Wiffle ball bat. Little success.

I made a flail--two sticks tied together end-to-end, allowing me to beat the heads of wheat much more efficiently. A flail looks like nunchaku, or nunchucks, for a good reason. Nunchaku were initially farming tools.

Flailing is very hard work. I pounded and pounded my small stook. I once shoveled scrap metal on ships in Port Newark. I'm not sure which is harder.

The chaff is an integral part of the plant, not some sinister fluff stalking the grain. Separating the wheat from the chaff is not about separating good folks from bad. That's too easy.

Before separating a part from itself, you need to break it. Threshing wheat requires violence. The wheat plant is broken. Separating the wheat from the chaff involves breaking one's lesser tendencies from the better.

Indeed, the actual separating part is easy. Once the grain is threshed, just wait for a breezy day and toss the threshed grain in the air. The wheat berries will bounce at your feet, the chaff blown away. People once knew this. Wheat and chaff were not distinct elements until after the threshing.

The parabolic statement about wheat and chaff reminds us not only that the community is mixed but also that each of us have our own good and bad elements. There is for each of us chaff that needs to be blown away and burned. There is a separation here of good and bad, useful and useless; but it is not like the difference between apples and oranges. Each of us individually is wheat and chaff.

The Very Rev. Dennis J.J. Schmidt, from The Wheat and the Chaff, December 9, 2001

I will not likely grow wheat again; I have too little land, and the work of threshing by hand is a bit much for a man in his fifth sixth decade.

What do I have to show for it? Well, I have a half pint of homegrown wheat sitting in a Mason jar, enough for a couple of bagels should I grind it into flour.

More importantly, I have a better grasp of "separating the wheat from the chaff," and what a loaf of bread meant to my forebears, and still means to most of the people alive today.

The thrashing woodcut is from a Czech tourism site. My Czech is a bit limited.
The wheat stook photo form the National Archives.

Grinding grain

Ye Maids who toiled so faithfully at the Mill
Now cease your work and from these toils be still;
Sleep now till dawn, and let the birds with glee
Sing to the ruddy morn from bush and tree;
For what your hands performed so long and true,
Ceres has charged the Water Nymphs to do.

Antipator of Thessalonica, 85 B.C. ¹

Grinding grain is hard work, still done by hand by much of the world, and still done here at home. Hard kernels of wheat berries, barley, maize, or rice are ground into flour, the foundation for life in an agricultural society. Bread, booze, Fritos, Lucky Charms--all from ground grains.

On Sabbath, I grind wheat, a direct violation of the melachot. It is hard work. Muscles strain, but they know what to do. My mind is idle, and in the steady whir of burr on burr, my thoughts wander.

I use a Country Mills grain mill--a solid tool. It will last longer than me. The burrs need replacing every decade or so, but the rest of the machine will be fit for my grandchildren, should they choose to grind.

A small depression is growing deeper in the cement basement floor--my left foot rocks back and forth as I crank, and over time, the sole of my foot has made its own cradle. My son's bicycle rusts in the backyard--he has long outgrown it. When I get the time, I will figure out a way to rig his bicycle to my mill. I am not getting any younger, and my legs are stronger than my arms.

A wheat berry makes a fine crackle as it gets crunched between the plates of the hand mill. One stationary plate, one rotating plate. The noise sounds like the white noise background of an untuned radio. When I have drunk too much melomel, I imagine that the wheat berries make a noise beyond the crunching on the bran. There are worse things to imagine.

First my right arm, then my left. I can feel my biceps swell. My legs work, too, shifting my weight back and forth with each pass of the milling wheel. My breathing picks up.

Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. When the wheat berries were made in Montana, the wheat plant breathed in carbon dioxide, and using the sun's energy and water, created carbohydrates and oxygen. The sun's heat is now released again in the warmth of my breath, my churning muscles, and the steel plates grinding the wheat.


Before the last few wheat berries pass through the millstone, I pick 2 or 3 to go into the garden. They are, after all, alive, until ground into flour. Conscious? No, but that's not the point.

That's not the point at all.

¹ from Mill Folklore: "History or Hearsay," http://www.angelfire.com/folk/molinologist/folklore1.html

The Country Mills grain mill photo is from the Everything Kitchen--I have no monetary interests in the product, but I do have an unnatural love for this inanimate object. If you buy one, get the "power bar"--grinding is hard work. Those prairie women were tough!

News from the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT)

The clams are roosting now--yeast has my attention in mid-winter.

Wheat futures are bouncing around $6 per bushel this week. Last February they were $24/bushel when the supplies tightened up.

In our reductionist world, we still buy grain by the bushel. Four pecks. I wonder how many traders know what a bushel is? I wonder how many care?

When you're dealing with tons of wheat, it is easier to weigh it. We really don't sell wheat by the bushel anymore. We simply redefined bushel as 60 pounds.

10 cents a pound. About a loaf and a half of bread's worth.

The wheat futures prices went up last winter--India, Argentina, and Canada all had problems with their crops, demand kept rising, and stockpiles fell.

Wheat quadrupled in price before falling back to 10 cents a pound.

40 cents a pound doesn't mean a whole lot to most of us here in the States--we grumble, but we pay far more for phones, video games, internet access, car insurance, and a whole lot of other things that won't make us dead if we lose them.

We have land, we have sun, we have water. We have money, too, but you can't eat cash.

My ancestors died with mouths stained green from grass, a land blighted with bad potatoes and bad politics, their land used to feed the cattle destined for a foreign land.

We are not so much more clever today. The rise in the wheat futures made news in the business section of the papers. It should have been news in every biology class.

You can only get so many calories out of the land in a year. Cash makes a lousy fertilizer.

If you want to teach biology that matters, you need to wander out of the textbook.