An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them | Hacker News Reader

An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them

smithsonianmag.com

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Unfortunately the article does not identify precisely the "miracle" wheat.

"Triticum turgidum" is ambiguous, because this wheat species has many different subspecies, with very different characteristics.

There are 2 important subspecies of "Triticum turgidum", emmer wheat, which was 1 of the 3 cereals domesticated at the beginning of the Neolithic (barley, einkorn wheat and emmer wheat), and durum wheat (a.k.a. pasta wheat or macaroni wheat), which was produced from emmer wheat by a genetic mutation, several thousand years after domestication.

From the article, it is not clear if the discussed wheat is just some cultivar of emmer wheat or it belongs to a more exotic subspecies of "Triticum turgidum".

Any references from the Bible are unlikely to describe anything else but some variety of emmer wheat.

While most wheat-based food is nowadays produced from either hexaploid bread wheat or tetraploid durum wheat, there are on the market various niche products (e.g. some kinds of biscuits) made from spelt wheat, emmer wheat or einkorn wheat (though the product labels frequently confuse the hexaploid spelt wheat with the tetraploid emmer wheat).

> Unfortunately the article does not identify precisely the "miracle" wheat.

> "Triticum turgidum" is ambiguous, because this wheat species has many different subspecies, with very different characteristics.

Is it not T. turgidum var. 'grano del miracolo'? Any previous name being, at least as far as we/the author knows, lost to time?

There's a Triticum turgidum var. mirabile, which sounds like it might be the variety he found.

According to an article I found from 1951[0], it used to be popular in the Mediterranean, and the seeds can germinate after long periods of storage.

I also tried to look at the wheat in the picture, but not the highest resolution, and it looks like it might be more than one variety, which he did mention. But at least some of the heads resemble the mirabile variety.

[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4118021

Mirabile (admirable) and miracolo (miracle) are similar words but with different meanings.

I did notice that too, but it's kinda beside the point.

The early 1900's are not exactly prehistoric.

Yeah. My father, born in 1940, was an agricultural engineer in a state farm throughout the communist period in Romania. He was born in a mountain village in the Carpathians and told me when he was a kid, the wheat they grew was tall, a man's height, far taller than the varieties they adopted for intensive farming. Also told me the yield was much lower, although the "mountain wheat" was more resistant to disease and weather conditions.

Generally, the yield of old wheat varieties was nothing compared to modern versions, required to feed today's population.

To be noted too that old wheat varieties weren't likely cultivated with modern fertilizers, which increase considerably the yield, too.

And many modern wheats would not grow well without modern fertilization practices and could be more prone to disease and damage because of it.

Nor did I claim they are, but that doesn't mean we have records of every little thing that fell out of service/production/sale/use.

Many farmers here in Switzerland grow urdinkel - ancient spelt. In the USA most farmers grew it also until around the 1920s but then a new wheat came out that was easier to process. Spelt has thicker hulls and wears down the mill faster so the mills switched to the new wheat and the farmers all had to switch too.

Based on the name I think ur (ancient) Dinkel (spelt) is even older than regular spelt but I'm not sure. All I know is that it makes great crackers but terrible pasta and ok bread but not great.

The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen. Unlike other spelt varieties, it was never crossed with wheat. It was also not bred for dough stability, which is why it must be baked in a special way, for example, using a water roux. The glutenin-to-gliadin ratio is different, resulting in a highly extensible but weaker gluten network.

It is really different from usual spelt, which was crossed with wheat and has shorter straws.

Edit: maybe this is interesting to some so I'll write a short paragraph about older varieties. There is also Einkorn and Emmer. Einkorn is considered the ultimate ancestor of all modern wheat varieties. It has been grown 10k years ago and is diploid with only two chromosome sets. Then there is Emmer, which is also ancient and appeared shortly after Einkorn. It is tetraploid and yields two corns per spikelet. If you want to eat like an Egyptian Pharao you can eat bread made out of Emmer ;-)

Rye is entirely different. It is very hardy and frost resistant and can't be baked without sourdough because of the amylase.

No, Einkorn is not the ancestor of all cultivated wheat varieties, unless you extend the history of wheat a very long time before domestication, when that becomes somewhat true, because the wild ancestor of emmer wheat was produced by genome duplication from a wild ancestor of einkorn wheat.

At the start of the Neolithic, besides barley, 2 species of wheat were domesticated separately and they evolved through domestication into einkorn wheat and emmer wheat.

Einkorn wheat has always remained a minor crop, while either barley or emmer was the major crop, depending on soil and climate. For instance in the early Ancient Greece barley was the most important, while in the early Roman Republic emmer was the more important. Later, emmer ("far" in Latin) was mostly replaced by durum wheat ("triticum" in Latin), and even later durum wheat was mostly replaced by the hexaploid bread wheat ("siligo" in Latin).

Besides the original emmer and einkorn, other wheat subspecies have appeared many thousands of years later after domestication, either through mutations, like the tetraploid durum wheat (pasta wheat) or through hybridization, like the hexaploid bread wheat (and also the hexaploid spelt wheat).

I was speaking in more casual terms. Botanically you are 100% correct and the way I wrote it implies that modern wheat evolved directly from domesticated Einkorn over time. Which is not correct.

> The straws are longer, which is why they cannot be fertilized with nitrogen.

Why is that? I thought nitrogen is taken in through the roots, then distributed as other ground-based nutrition, regardless of the height.

They elongate too quickly so the walls of the straws are weaker if given too much nitrogen at the wrong time. They fall over easily. You want them to grow more slowly with stronger straws.

They would grow even higher with fertilizer and then fall over in a storm. Well it increases the chance or percentage lost to that, it always happens to some degree even with modern varieties.

Which is funny enough, one of the main attributes Borlaug used in the green revolution: crossing Japanese dwarf wheat with modern bread wheat varieties to make the resulting wheat shorter.

The whole idea behind that was that (within reason) the more N you can pump into the crop, the more it will yield, but also the taller it will grow. Wheat is essentially an inverted pendulum when ripe, with about 60% of the above-ground biomass perched at the top.

The main thrust of modern crop breeding has been to create crops that you can successfully get to harvest under high-nutrition environments, without it literally falling over or succumbing to disease due to the turgid, fleshy growth. Even then, if you're applying more than maybe 150kgN/ha, you will be relying on plant growth regulators that inhibit auxin/gibberellin response to keep the plant under control.

Because fields of wheat that grew too fast and too tall and fell over after a rain and rotted in the wet field is called a "famine".

I would call it an opportunity. Make it grow trough a mesh cage.

Or use a slower companion crop that support it.

Maybe take advantage that the grain is higher for partridges and bunnies to reach it?

I think because they collapse under their own weight?

I tried both Emmer and Einkorn, but don't remember anything special about the end result. One of the flours/doughs was pretty yellow, but that's about it. It was a while ago and I only tried about a kg of each so my memory is fuzzy.

After the appearance of durum wheat, and then of the bread wheat, the products made from emmer and einkorn (and later also from spelt) have always been more expensive, without having any decisive advantages.

Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.

So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.

As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.

I wrote a bit more, but deleted as I felt it was getting too long. I now see that what's left is missing some context. I also wrote that e.g spelt dough is in contrast very easy to recognize when you make it. It's very smooth and soft, it behaves differently, maybe even gooey. As for Emmer and Einkorn, I don't remember much other than the color for one of these.

But what is the actual benefit of Urdinkel? Honestly it sounds a bit like a fad to me, along the lines of "older = better".

They just described the structure of the thing.

In the article it describes the crops as more drought resistant etc.

As in all things commercialized, the tempting easy path weakens in the long term. Mono crops are easier to grow and then the soil gets depleted beyond all recognition. White bread probably outsells whole wheat in America but it is basically devoid of nutritional value.

“Old” means things were scarce because people had to work by hand and oxen. So a failed crop meant a dead family.

White bread is not devoid of nutritional value, because it is the cheapest source of proteins known to mankind. Legumes like lentils, beans or peas have a cost per protein content at least 2 to 2.5 times higher than wheat flour. Chicken meat and plant protein isolates have a cost per protein content at least 4 to 5 times higher than wheat flour.

White bread is also one of the cheapest sources of energy, though depending on the geographical location either maize or rice may be slightly cheaper sources of energy, but which provide much less protein.

Among cereal products, wheat bread has the highest protein content, except for oats, but oats are much more expensive per protein content.

If you eat white bread in preference to any other starchy products, like those based on rice, maize or potatoes, this ensures a higher protein intake per a given calories content, which enables a lower consumption of more expensive sources of proteins, like those based on legumes or on meat.

White bread cannot be the only food that one eats, because other kinds of foods must provide other nutrients, but it can provide at a minimum cost major fractions of the daily intake of proteins and energy.

After experimenting with many different healthy diets, I have settled on a variant that I consider optimal, where wheat bread that I bake myself at home typically provides about a third of my daily protein intake, so its nutritional value is quite important (and the fact that it is very tasty is a welcome bonus).

- White bread is not devoid of nutritional value

But it is processed food, which means it has indeed lost some nutritional value. Moreover, the way white flour is processed by our body is different from the way wheat or oats is - in very simplistic terms, the reduction of fibre content in white flour means that when it is consumed and processed, glucose / sugar from it is released very quickly into our body. Our body can handle that, once in a while. But repeated sugar spikes (and falls) isn't good for the health. And that is why doctors today (especially in India) advise you to eschew white flour in favour of others (wheat, oats, millets etc.). But yeah, the way you consume it, with other foods, matters too (and from your other comment, it does appear you follow a reasonably good diet, with a healthy outlook - without unduly obsessing over it).

> But it is processed food, which means it has indeed lost some nutritional value.

This seems like a trivially false assumption.

If processing grains into bread represented a loss of nutritional value, why would every civilization have invested their extraordinarily scarce time and resources into milling and baking instead of just eating the raw grains?

Cooking is processing too, and does indeed cause some nutritional loss. Its benefit however outweighs that (for e.g. cooked food is tastier, we are able to digest cooked faster and better, thereby expending less energy for it), and we also compensate for the loss of nutrition by consuming different food at the same time (having created recipes with different basic food groups, and what is now popular and promoted as the 'balanced diet'). I was however particularly referring more to processing wheat flour to refined white flour, from which white bread is made. These food products are optimised for taste rather than nutritional value. The more you refine it, the more likely you are to strip some nutritions from it. For example, here is how modern refined white flour is made in many parts of the world - https://food.ndtv.com/food-drinks/how-is-maida-made-and-is-i... . That aspect also matters today when you compare it past food habits and food processing - today, we refine many food products more than we used to do in the past. (And apparently, we are now even growing with food with less nutritional values, because we are prioritising and optimising more for how the produce should look - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/fruits-a... !)

I think there’s a disconnect here between someone talking about what Americans call “white bread” (the highly Wonderbread that reportedly can only be sold as cake in some European states) and someone talking about what Europeans call “white bread”, which is more traditional bread — baguettes are an example, and just one of the many shapes it comes in.

I rather suspect there is a difference between people using dictionary definitions and hard facts, versus people using "processed" = bad, which is similar to "chemicals" = bad.

We have established a correlation between degradations in health with high-processed food diets. That is a fact, but it really doesn't tell us much. From this, and ideas like "brown bread has more vitamins than white bread", people naively say generalizations like "white bread is unhealthy" and "all processed foods are bad for you".

Have you compared it to pasta wrt cost? Intuitively I suspect pasta may come out cheaper if you consider the time+electricity requirements for preparing at home.

Does whole wheat bread made from the same grain not have the same protein, or does removing all that fiber, flavour, and micronutrients somehow enhance the protein content and render it less expensive?

White flour has a slightly higher protein content (e.g. I bake bread from flour with 13% protein), but the important difference is that it is much cheaper, e.g. at least twice cheaper than whole wheat flour.

The reason for the price difference is unlikely to be due to a more expensive processing technology, but mostly from the economies of large scale processing, because the production of white flour is much greater.

Whole wheat flour has slightly higher amounts of the more valuable nutrients, but due to its high price it is an inefficient way to get those nutrients. A both cheaper and healthier diet can include white bread and larger amounts of other vegetables that are better sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals than whole wheat flour. (E.g. the food that I cook usually includes ingredients like lentils, carrots, parsnips, onions or garlic, broccoli or cauliflower, bell peppers, parsley or dill etc. Spending less on those in order to make more expensive whole wheat bread would provide much less desirable nutrients, so it would be a bad allocation of funds.)

That highlights the oddity of your calculations. You say that wheat is cheaper, but little about why. If the economies of large scale processing makes more processed wheat cheaper than less processed wheat, then maybe something else would be cheaper if our habits were different. So it's dubious to use the cheapness of white flour to argue that we should eat more white flour products.

"if...were" means nothing today, because woulda, coulda, shoulda. Today white is cheaper, so the calculation stands as it is, and makes for a very interesting argument in today's flood of influencer diets/fads.

It's very unlikely to matter economically for you or me or the op that whiter flour is cheaper. Bringing it up suggests it matters in some other way - like we have an obligation to buy the cheaper option because that has least impact on the environment maybe? But that does not follow at all. I don't think we should award points for originality either.

No, it has nothing to do with economies of scale.

Grains contain both starch and oil and when you mill the grains, the oil goes rancid much faster than the starch.

If you remove the oil you have a nutritionally worse product but it lasts longer on the shelves.

That does still sound related to economy of scale. Longer shelf life means you can have a larger inventory.

> White flour has a slightly higher protein content

The bags of 13.5% protein whole wheat flour and 16% (!) protein whole khorasan flour in my pantry are not convinced this is a generally true statement.

Well, see, the problem for me is mostly that white bread is just unhealthy. If I eat white bread, my blood sugar spikes. If I eat while wheat bread, it doesn't. Given the difference in cost does not even appear as a rounding error in my food budget, and that white bread has long-term negative health effects for this diabetic, I'll go with the more nutritious choice over the marginally cheaper one and get almost all my protein from better sources than grain seeds.

Make no mistake: I dream of gorging on delicious chunks of white sourdough bread hot and steaming from the oven. I just have good and indisputable evidence from my test strips that it is not good for me.

While the macro discussion is very interesting you are completely leaving out any mention of micros.

The wheat we eat was bred specifically to grow without nutrients.

Nutrients are divided into micronutrients, most of which are needed in quantities much smaller than 1 gram per day, i.e. vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and a few amino-acid derivatives, and macronutrients, which form the bulk of what you eat, i.e. carbohydrates, protein and fat.

What you mean is that modern wheat was selected for high production per area, which can be attained only when the seeds contain smaller amounts of micronutrients, so that their limited availability will not inhibit growth.

On the other hand, all plant seeds, including wheat seeds, in their dry form consist almost only of nutrients, unlike the other plant parts, which usually have very little nutrient content.

So wheat seeds and also the white flour made of them are very rich in nutrients, but only in 2 kinds of nutrients, starch and protein.

Animals, including humans, need a great number of essential nutrients in order to survive, around 50 different chemical substances.

White bread provides energy and protein that has a good amino-acid profile, except for low amounts of the amino acid lysine.

For complementary proteins and for the very small amounts of micronutrients that are required for a complete food, one must eat something else.

There exists no natural food that has a perfect composition that would allow humans to live eating only that (except mother milk for small babies).

So anyone must eat a combination of different kinds of foods. People who are rich might choose to eat some paleo diet or some keto diet and it is possible to conceive such diets that are healthy.

However most of the humans must allocate a limited budget for food, and within these constraints there are large areas in various places of the Earth, including Europe, where any healthy diet of optimum cost must include a non-negligible fraction of wheat.

For those who unfortunately suffer of celiac disease, a higher cost of food is unavoidable.

So the second two but not the first is technically "wheat" along with Rye ?

Spelt, Einkorn and Emmer are all from the Genus Triticum, which is called wheat. Rye is secale and not called wheat. They are all from the tribe Triticeae. Barley also belongs to the same tribe.

Oat however is from the tribe Aveneae.

Here in the far northeast of Portugal, too. Also, lots of rye, buckwheat, and all sorts of crazy cultivars of other stuff - they grow lettuce here that bolts a meter tall without any loss of flavour, and jersey walking sticks, yellow (on the inside too) watermelons with huge seeds - all sorts - because they still grow the same village/family seed stocks their medieval ancestors did, and a lot of stuff is hyper-adapted to the local climate.

Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.

Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.

Gigantic grapes sound awesome, so did a quick check. Assuming 5–6 cm in diameter, this appears to far exceed the size of any known grape variety.

I guess I misremember the size of a billiard ball. They’re like 4cm diameter, 5cm long - by far and away the biggest grapes I have ever set eyes on. They do have enormous seeds, too.

The best sardines (Nuri) in the world come from Portugal. A guy from California…

PS Even better with great bread.

Funny that I grew up in rural north portugal and never heard of any of this bs

Dunno what to tell you man, apart from maybe it depends on just how rural. Where we are, NE trás os montes, everywhere was a really long way from everywhere until the 20th century, as the terrain is a nightmare of deep river valleys and few bridges. Like, from our village, you can see the nearest village - it’s only 3km as the crow flies - but it’s 30km and 40 minutes by paved road. 10km by heavily worn track and a medieval bridge.

Funny, I was just there last week. Without getting to know locals all I saw was olive trees and almond trees and some grapes and oranges, many hectares of abandoned farms, and wonderful villages built on the seeming near-vertical sides of hills with small gardens with lots of cabbages (it was October, so that tends to be what's left). I'm sure lots was hidden from my passing eyes.

The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.

Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.

So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?

€3.5m! You can’t have been too near to us, as most everything here is cheap. There’s a watermill with 40ha of pistachios about 5km from us, €320k last I checked. It ain’t selling, even at that price.

Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.

I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.

Down in Mexico, it made the news that about 30 years ago scientists looked into a village which grew corn 20 feet high. It was of interest to them, because it seemed to have figured out how to fertilize itself. It's a wild story.

It's totally plausible that cultivars and species are in some crazy rural pocket and not well known. I'm coming to appreciate the idea that despite everyone being connected to a global computer network with a camera device, not everything has found its way into the realm of scientific knowledge. What other plants and animals might be out there?

You don’t know what you don’t know - and it works the other way around, too. I was telling people here about the wolves I’ve seen on our land and everyone is like “oh there are no wolves here”, and then I showed them the photos and videos. Now, people know there are wolves, and suddenly they notice them.

Ditto with tortoises in the river. Nobody knew they were here, and there are hundreds of the buggers - just takes one person to sit quietly by the river for a day, which nobody here has done in a generation or more.

The absence of the evidence is not the evidence of the absence.

I personally like spelt in bread. It provides a lot of aroma, especially for doughs that are overnight-leavened in low temperature.

I think there is also good evidence that dough in general which is given 24 hrs to rest - like what was traditional pre-industrial - is much better digestible for most people then the additive-loaded dough which only needs hours to minutes, which is a stark time -> quality tradeoff.

Terrible pasta? I solely buy spelt (dinkel) pasta of I can choose.

Maybe you mean it gets more sticky if you cook it too long? But al dente I think it's amazing. It has a nutty taste that works very well with tomatoes if you ask me.

Dinkelpasta..is...a..acquired taste.. lol

Maybe you had full grain pasta? That is indeed... questionable, doesn't matter if spelt or wheat.

raw spelt is fantastic in beer. Malted spelt is indistinguishable.

Before circa middle 20th century all wheat was very tall. This minor fact somehow significantly changes picture of the past for me.

This was deliberately bred out of wheat. Tall wheat falls over more easily, especially with high winds. It then dirties the oars that come in contact with the ground, which I believe can make them moldy. So they bred shorter wheat.

I feel the same about gros michel bananas

Eggplant used to actually look like an egg

https://i.redd.it/5md9vkvnx7r61.png

It's been a trend in Denmark for many years to find and grow old seeds. I'm not sure if they ship overseas, but I'm sure if you ask them nicely there is a good chance.

Aurion, a mill with a web shop: https://www.aurion.dk/

Kornetshus, a knowledge center on seeds: https://kornetshus.dk/

Both are highly recommended.

Thank you, been baking bread using spelt, I now may try something else :)

While the lede is a bit buried, I understand that while this is a rediscovery for this era, it is in fact a widely disseminated strain of wheat, so not really a huge novelty, but rather an important reminder of all the diversity still available out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triticum_turgidum

Nice story! As an aside: my wife and I only buy pasta imported from Italy because it is simply so much better tasting than pasta made with commercial US-grown wheat. I don’t know why.

The food industry in the US is pretty much messed up. We try to only buy fresh produce and fresh fish, staying away from processed food - but it is difficult. I read something about the composition of the modern Butter Finger candy bar (fake chocolate, lots is chemically processed seed oils) compared to the almost wholesome ingredients used 30 or 40 years ago.

The "processed foods" fears are misguided.

According to the NOVA classification method, baking bread or churning butter is sufficient to turn a food into "processed".

Generally laypeople are fearful of "ultra-processed foods" which use industrial distillation, stabilization, additives from petrochemical derivatives, synthetic sugars, etc.

My complaint is that some of these "processing" techniques are likely orders of magnitude more harmful than others, so we shouldn't blindly treat them all as equal.

> The "processed foods" fears are misguided.

I like Michael Pollan's advice from 200:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food

When shopping for food try to stick to the edges of the store and avoid the middle aisles with the 'shelf stable' products; look at ingredient lists and lean towards things that have (~)five or fewer listed; if there are a bunch of ingredients / chemicals with terms you cannot pronounce it's probably not that great.

Profit is the main motivator. Do you want your soda made out of cane sugar or corn syrup?

Is corn syrup actually worse somehow than cane sugar? It's an intensively-farmed monoculture crop, from which pure sugar is extracted, and then put into your drink in disturbingly high quantities. At what scale of relevance is fructose ratio, or the particular choice of crop?

Bad example, both cane sugar and corn syrup are extremely terrible for you in the quantities that exist in soda.

Excellent example. If you ever wondered why you’re cola, your orange crush, your Dr Pepper taste funny, just drink a soda made out of corn syrup, nothing you can eat on the face of the planet is good for you if you eat it in excess without exercise.

Which was something before the last century, you didn’t have to worry about because most people had to work like a horse to survive, and many people on the face of the planet still do.

There are two things allowing people to live longer lives today. Vaccines and antibiotics, both of which are critical towards any human being living past the age of 20, too bad, there are many people today in some of the Western countries that have forgotten what it was really like to live in a time when you could die from an infection before the age of 20, it only took two generations, maybe three, to forget that.

I remember the march of dimes and all those infectious diseases that took out a significant number of kids before they reached 10 years old, and if you did survive, many were either blind, disfigured or crippled many countries in the world are still going through that…

The biggest killer of humankind has always been some type of disease/pestilence or infection before the age of 20 causing death, disfigurement, or lameness and if it wasn’t that, it usually was at the hand of another human it wasn’t by eating animal fat or sugar particularly after the discovery of fire and cooking.

By the way, the screw worm fly is now in Arizona and New Mexico up from Texas hopefully the current administration has learned something from Covid the first time around, doubtful.

Corn syrup is used because it’s cheap. It isn’t used for taste. That’s secondary. Particularly in America…

The best time to think about your great-grandfather is when you're 3yo and he's still alive.

The second best time is when you recover his stash of seeds.

> It also had more arginine, an amino acid that children need to grow.

My kingdom for even a tiny bit of scientific literacy amongst people who are reporting on science.

Not only is this absurd ("children" need all amino acids to grow...as does anyone else), arginine isn’t even one of the essential amino acids. Your body makes it unless something is seriously wrong.

Hopefully it's just my lazy reading/thinking, but this part of the article feels like scientism to me. Picking out some random micronutrients this strain has more of, praising that it has less gluten. It's just using "science" to justify whatever they already wanted to do.

I was waiting for them to explain what any of the real benefits were.

i don't have a PhD like you, but aren't some amino acids essential in young mammals and conditionally essential in adult mammals?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07533...

Not my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this is an extremely limited claim (i.e. unborn babies / neonatal supplementation, or children with genetic defects), and not something you can even remotely generalize to "children" as a whole. The way we teach this in biochem 101 is "arginine is conditionally essential", with the "conditional" being "periods of stress or sickness".

In any case, I seriously doubt the author is talking about this, given the imprecision of the language. Also, eating this wheat specifically for arginine supplementation is goofy gym-science. Arginine is trivial to supplement.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...

So what you are saying is they forgot the word "small" in "arginine is an amino acid small children need to grow".

More like: we all need arginine, but our body makes it, so we don't need to supplement it. Wikipedia writes this:

Preterm infants are unable to synthesize arginine internally, making the amino acid nutritionally essential for them. Most healthy people do not need to supplement with arginine because it is a component of all protein-containing foods and can be synthesized in the body from glutamine via citrulline.

I have no idea if he is right about what he claimed, but can small really stand in for prematurely born or carrying relevant rare genetic mutation?

https://www.biochemical-pathways.org/metabolic-pathways.pdf

Your body is one hell of a lab.

Arginine is a "conditionally essential" amino-acid, i.e. there are circumstances when the internal production is insufficient, so it must exist in food.

The need for arginine may exist during some illnesses and not for children in general, but for very young babies, especially for those born prematurely.

The times when internal production is insufficient are basically neonatal and diseases. Humans, in general, do not need to supplement arginine.

Thanks for explaining this, reading this in the article made me concerned as a parent.

Don't worry too much. If you follow basic food recommendations, even those given out 60 years ago, your child can grow up fine. Even if you only follow it just half the time. Basically, all those articles have to be taken with a grain of salt. What kills you is: smoking, drinking, tanning, long periods of only junk food. And those seem to affect you mainly after age 25. Children are remarkably sturdy.

When you first read a popular science article that garbles a subject you've developed expertise in, you begin to wonder how much of what you believe to be scientific truth is bullshit (because you learned it from a popular science article.)

Well, you sort of expect the pop-science press to be crap. It's when you read papers in Science and Nature and come to the same conclusion that you start to go galaxy brain.

If Monsanto knows what they're doing, they will corporate buyout this guy and destroy his competing wheat never to be seen again - that's the optimal market solution for maximal profits.

Hope not because many of those old seeds carry resistance and immunities to various old line diseases/funguses/bacteria/viruses/pests from the past. That resistance is probably going to be needed going into the future at some point guaranteed.

Damn, I was hoping for Triffids

This is interesting for people with gluten allergies, maybe there is a way they could one day consume the ancient wheat.

Gluten allergies are relatively rare and extreme. People with Celiac have a major, sometimes life threatening reaction to gluten.

People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not. They are either experiencing a nocebo effect or have gas from other components of wheat rather than gluten. Actual non Celiac reactions to gluten are minor if they exist at all. So when someone says they are gluten sensitive it is overwhelmingly likely they either have Celiac and even a very very tiny amount of gluten will cause them horrible consequences, or they are incorrect and they are not sensitive to gluten at all.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27523634/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29102613/

More on the "other components" issue -- a lot of people have issues with some of the fermentable carbohydrates (e.g. fructans) in wheat, which also happen to be present in the other gluten-containing grains. "Have gas" is a bit of an understatement. For some people this can lead to cramps, vomiting, and other fairly severe digestive problems.

So people on the low-FODMAPs diet end up using "gluten free" as a convenient shorthand for "doesn't contain these particular grains".

To be fair, the people with psychogenic gluten intolerance have massively increased the availability and variety of gluten-free foods for people with real Celiac disease. They seem to be doing more good than harm on balance.

Probably also caused by other aspects of American wheat (many "sensitive" people notice they can eat bread in Europe just fine), such as higher glyphosate content, fortification with nasty stuff like vitamin A, possibly others.

I remember reading something about it on BBC, how over processed American Wheat ( or food in general ) leads to those symptoms and they can eat European products and bread just fine.

Yes. Whatever "over processed" means.

>nasty stuff like vitamin A

Pardon?

People get far too much of it (IIRC there even was a Polish study that kids already have a way too high intake), large parts of the population in most Western countries are liver toxic avoiding to analysis of accident victims, it significantly increases your osteoporosis risk, many people (anecdotally, including me) experience lots of health improvements after reducing their intake, and so on.

> People get far too much of it

I find it hard to imagine how. Carrots don't seem to be especially popular last I checked; and to my understanding, produce generally has become more nutrient poor in recent times due to soil quality issues.

The forms of vitamin A you get from carrots and other plants (called carotenoids) aren't toxic, but the form you get from animal products and supplements (called retinols) can be. The US recommended daily intake for an adult male is 900 μg, which is also the recommended daily maximum for 4-8 year old children. This maximum includes a hefty safety margin, so there's no reason to worry if your children eat the same food as you.

Except if you really like liver. Chicken liver contains more than 4000 μg/100g and the liver of other animals contain more. And then you start skirting dangerous levels. Apparently Inuits would avoid eating liver for this specific reason and a few Arctic explorers became ill partly because of this.

Sources: the Wikipedia articles on Vitamin A and Hypervitaminosis A, so reader beware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A

It's all the same carotene, but you absorb less from plants (unless juiced or souped and combined with fat, then you will absorb a ton). And plants produce plenty - nutrient poor soil only refers to minerals.

The body also reduces conversion of BC to vitamin A, but that is no binary off switch.

Not sure where you get your safety buffer from. People certainly get symptoms from less.

20 years ago I was "that guy" who went "uhm, actually, you almost certainly don't have celiac". Alas, my efforts did not stop the trend, and today the nocebo effect for gluten has become a multi-billion dollar racket.

And you know, the life of celiacs has improved a lot since then. Thanks to gluten sensitive people I, as a person with celiacs, can find some gluten free food in shops and even gluten free restaraunts in many big cities. Standard restaurants are not an option for me due to high chance of cross-contamination. I'm very thankful for this trend!

The "relatively rare" in numbers: so far, it's been assumed that about 1% of the population is celiac.

Italy recently started screening kids nation wide. Initial results are showing that of 4.4% of kids are affected. [1]

Celiac disease is massively under-diagnosed and GPs knowledge about the disease is limited. Also, celiac disease might cause issues which are not directly gut related: one might end up with a B12 or iron deficiency, one might get migraines, fatigue, gluten induced ataxia and many many more.

[1] https://celiac.org/2025/09/24/how-research-is-shaping-italys...

Celiac has a very high incidence in northern Spain as well - they attribute it to having a very similar Celtic genetic profile as the Irish.

Your first paragraph is correct but the second doesn't necessarily follow as there's other disease inflammation that resembles gluten sensitivity like that caused by Giardia. See the discussion here on an instance of giardiasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855307

There's also things found alongside gluten like arabinoxylan which promotes the growth of certain bacteria like prevotella. At this I should mention that a possibly helpful daily breakfast to address digestion issues (with both prebiotics and probiotics) is greek yogurt + frozen blueberries + chopped walnuts. Source: https://www.northwell.edu/news/insights/are-blueberries-good... (see also doi:10.3390/nu10020244, doi:10.1016/j.jnutbio.2017.07.001, doi:10.1002/mnfr.202300096)

These studies are far less certain than you are. Also, gluten sensitivity is not just gas.

I don't think you are responding to what my post actually says.

Statistically there is still room for there to be some unexplained physical reaction to gluten that is not explained by Celiac. However, nonexistence of such a reaction is also compatible with the studies. What is not compatible with the studies is more than a single digit percentage of non Celiac having people, as a % of people who claim to be gluten sensitive, being able to even detect whether they are fed gluten vs a placebo, despite it being very trendy to claim that you are 'gluten sensitive'.

Rarity depends on the local population, in Ireland its at least 1% of the population but probably higher as some people are asymptomatic and go undiagnosed.

Since you can't infect others with celiac, isn't "asymptomatic" essentially the same as "not having it"?

> People who do not have Celiac and say they are gluten sensitive usually are not.

“We don’t know any (other) mechanism by which gluten could hurt them, hence their lived experience is invalid.”

I _suspect_ gluten can contribute to my brain fog. The problem is, there are so many variables it is next to impossible to change only one in daily life. In fact, when you dig into it, so much literature is just trash as experiments don’t control for all variables.

Hence, I don’t claim that it does. But pasta reliably makes me a zombie and something like potato doesn’t, so glucose can’t be the mechanism.

Body is a complex system and pretending we understand it is hurting people.

Lived experience is not worth much when it fails to replicate while blinded. See Chinese Food Syndrome (MSG). Have you double blind tested whether gluten affects you beyond a statistical reasonable doubt? Food sensitivities hard to pin down and not usually immediate, so it ends up with a lot of magical thinking.

Heh, stats won’t help you with n=1!

Double blind? The only thing I can think of would be huge amounts of capsules, and even then there’s no guarantee a burp would not disclose what was eaten.

Designing a good experiment for this is seriously tough.

You could probably make a spicy bread soup or something but yeah it would be hard to be sufficiently blinded

This is a great example of modern attempts to claim that disagreeing with someone is 'literally violence'. Whenever I hear it I recognize it for what it is, an attempt to flip the script and turn a complete lack of any evidence or logic into a winning hand. Everyone has lived experience, and it's all equally worthless as a trump card to shut up people who are saying things that displease you.

That day could be today: https://www.molinograssi.it/en/retail-line/miracolo-line/

There are US-based sellers of ancient wheat (both berries and milled flour) as well.

Here's one that I learned about via their YouTube channel

https://mtranchrescue.com/products/7-s-true-whole-wheat-flou...

This still contains gluten. It can't be consumed by celiacs.

Not really. Still has gluten - just less.

There are already things like gluten free wheat starch if you want wheat without gluten, but you still have to work around not having the gluten. Like the article alluded to, it is needed for breads to rise.

From what I understand, most "ancient" grains had far less gluten; it's the modern variants that have caused the widespread gluten issues we see today.

That's obviously an oversimplification.

American Red wheat is, as far as I know, the "hardest" wheat on the planet - breadmakers use it to "fortify" flours from Europe that do not have enough gluten (... forming amino acids).

Whilst having a high amount of gluten forming amino acids might sound good in prinicple, in fact breads do not rise as well when too much is present (the gluten is too strong, fighting the expansion of the dough from the leavening agent).

Cakes require flours to have less gluten forming amino acids again.

I'm not sure about pastry though, a bottom pastry for a pie I would guess needs to be quite strong, but I have no idea if there is an upper limit.

The point here is, flours can be as strong as they like, but too much is actually bad for breadmakers - meaning - gluten levels in the diet aren't changing that much.

Edit: I forgot to mention, some parts of China have a pure gluten dish - where they hydrate the gluten forming amino acids, then "wash" the starch out, leaving only the gluten, which they then cook and eat - so 100% Gluten

Seitan is a pretty common food among plant-based eaters.

I don't know if the new varieties caused the gluten intolerance problems, but, no, the ancient varieties have less "quality" gluten. It means that the ratio between glutenin and gliadin is skewed in a way that the gluten can't trap the gas to give it big volume.

[1]https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/10/11/1763

[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6769531/

I use every week these ancient grains because they give a different flavor to the bread (and not only in bread). I also, sometimes, replace 20-30% of wheat with oat, buckwheat, quinoa, barley flours etc.

What gluten issues do you have in mind here?

Vague digestion issues, maybe that has an effect.

For celiac there's not much evidence that the difference would change whether someone develops it, and once they do develop it even minuscule amounts are very bad for them.

At the end of the article there is a brief description of the global history of stories of the sharing of crops with humans by gods. It is by a different author. In the list it includes Mexico. I was under the impression that the history of corn is fundamentally different than the main crops of the 6 pristine civilizations in that it was not as ready for consumption when first encountered by humans and that it required more coaxing from a smaller form to what it became. Is this a myth? Or were wheat and rice more readily available as nutrition from the time of human discovery?

Overconsumption of corn can lead to pellagra from niacin deficiency. To avoid this, ancients learned to treat it with lye, a byproduct of firewood ash. The other grains do not endanger any of your other nutrients.

Seed matters, old seed if it has been kept properly, but the soil it goes into matters too. The further that soil is from chemicals, and the more it has been sown without genetically modified seed, the better the yield you get from ancient seed.

In one of the pictures they show "barley coffee". During the communism, in some countries of Eastern Europe you could only find in the stores this type of coffee, as the real one required hard currency to import.

oh the "berley coffee", I'm Vietnamese and these stories was taught in school back then.

Fun exercise in this article: do an alt-f search for the word "ancient".

This reminds me of the Urzeitcode phenomenon: the idea that dormant or forgotten seeds can produce unexpectedly unusual plant characteristics when exposed to different conditions.

I recently found out that something like this would be illegal in many countries, Colombia for example.

Always with the justification of the 9 scariest words in the English language.

Wouldn't this cause ecosystem issues if seeds from 100 years ago get planted in the same area?

Planting 600 acres of a single genetically identical grass and blasting them with insecticide and herbicide... kinda already does as much damage one could possibly try to do.

A slighly taller variety of grass hardly matters.

No these require human cultivation to survive.

Curiosity is a wonderful thing.

Except the dude literally threw the seeds into cow shit because he didn't think nothing would come of them.

What an interesting story. I look at the old testament and see a survival guide for a society in a difficult neighbourhood and environment. Separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is not so easy.

Clearly this site is a breeding ground for experts, so the genetics of the wheat will be explained in other posts.

> All of the wheat types Grossi had previously seen grew only one such ear. But the tall wheat grew a full seven ears, always in the same pattern: a long one with six shorties bunched up around it like little fingers. Even the kernels themselves were bigger than those of average wheat. And unlike the typical pale-yellow wheat kernels, they came in a rainbow of colors—yellow, black, red, white and even green, sometimes all on the same stem. Grossi, a grain farmer his whole life, had never seen anything like it. “I thought it was a freak of nature,” he says. He couldn’t find a mention of it in agricultural books.

Thanks for sharing the story about this ancient wheat but I recall reading about this highly productive type of grains not in agriculture books but in holy books.

Fun facts, this type of miracle grain is mentioned in Abrahamic religions holy books namely Bible (Old Testament) and Quran.

In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:261), "The example of those who spend their wealth in the cause of Allah is that of a grain that sprouts into seven ears, each bearing one hundred grains. And Allah multiplies ˹the reward even more˺ to whoever He wills. For Allah is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing."

In the Book of Genesis (Genesis 41:5), "He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk."

This exact multiplication of deeds described in the Quran demonstrates the 700-to-1 ratio represents the actual biological maximum yield for that specific ancient wheat variety under optimal conditions.

All this while I thought the description is metaphorical allegory, but it seems originated from real grains of wheat phenomenon.

The scriptures specifically mentioned "sanabila" a type of grain with multiple ears branching out from a single stalk unlike rice paddy that's grow ears differently.

Another fun facts, in Arabic the word "sabil" meaning providing freely flowing water to travellers, and sanabila share the same root word, most probably derived from this very verse, because charity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is sadaqa.

Please note the only Quran in Chapter of Al- Baqarah (Female Cow) mentioned the analogy of multiplications for doing good deeds [1].

The other verses, one verse inside Bible in Chapter Genesis and two verses inside Quran in Chapter Yusuf (Joseph) refer to Egypt Pharaoh's or King's dream, respectively. This led to the introduction of the brilliant economic policy that saved Egypt kingdom from the severe famine that effect other sorrounding kingdoms at the time as per Yusuf's advice based on the correct interpretation of the King's dream [2],[3],[4]. Yusuf later become one of the appointed ministers of Egypt from the very humble beginning of a slave boy, and brought along other Jews to start migrating to Egypt.

Apparently Quran is more accurate since during prophet Yusuf time Egyptian rulers are called King not Pharaoh yet. Only later stage of Egyption Kingdom during Musa (Moses) time, Quran correctly refer to Pharaoh (meaning owner or king of great house) not King.

[1] Quran, Al-Baqarah 2:261:

https://quran.com/en/al-baqarah/261

[2] Bible, Genesis 41:5:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2041%3A...

[3] Quran, Yusuf, 12:43:

https://quran.com/en/yusuf/43

[4] Quran, Yusuf, 12:46:

https://quran.com/en/yusuf/46

you didn't read past the second paragraph then?

Thanks, I probably skipped the subsequent paragraphs while browsing and reading due to multiple ads intersperse in between the articles. Anyway great finding of the ancient wheat species, and the mention of this miracle seven grains ears in Quran are more profound with several occurances in different contexts and analogies.

The previous correspondent hinted at it but it seems you didn't pick up on this: the article literally says in the next paragraphs that the farmer read about it in the Bible.

Am I the only one who was hoping for a magic beanstalk?

it's sunflower seeds....

it's sunflower seeds...

The damage by the "progress" is multifold and pervasive. GM foods, with a goal of high yields, lost all nutritional value and gave the world insipid food and killed the natural foods forever. Supply chains and food regulations meant extreme processing of already killed food. What's left is bacteria-less, nutrition-less, sugary pulp that digests easily, increasing the consumption and economy.

If I think of any food and taste from the 70's, I feel suffocated now. It's disgusting to see all processed, sugar-loaded, gene-modified, beautiful foods in the stores.

The economy planners gave you cars, roads, food stores, supply chains and took away your time to grow your own food. You are just forced to take 5x amount of food in your car and consume it like biological pump with inputs and outputs. You became fat and ill and the economy tells you to believe it as a norm and call it growth. They even show in TV how all this is normal so that you don't feel bad about it.

You are turned into a country full of workers with everything streamlined to make you focus on the work. Your short working years are good enough. It has machinery to dump you in nursing home and not let your younger family care for you. Small kids? You got care centers. Don't waste your time in caring for others or yourself. Just get into the commute circus.

To be completely honest

> GM foods, with a goal of high yields, lost all nutritional value

sounds like unmitigated total bullshit.

If GM grains have zero "nutritional value" then why do tests show otherwise and why do people not die when they spend a year eating GM grain ?

Ag scientists measure nutritional value for all crops, GM and not GM, - how is possible they haven't noticed "zero nutritional value" results for GM grains?

https://www.incitecpivotfertilisers.com.au/resources/agronom...

Further:

   these data support the conclusion that GM events are nutritionally similar to conventional varieties of wheat, corn, and tomato on the market today.

~ Assessment of the nutritional values of genetically modified wheat, corn, and tomato crops (2008) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18781763/ etc.

Consider the possibility that there are nutritional values that are NOT being measured. We should accept that science is not… omniscient.

> We should accept that science is not… omniscient.

I've seen that kind of thing expressed before and it bugs me because there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient. Science is based on the best evidence we currently have, the models that are most useful to us, and all of it is subject to change as soon as newer better evidence/models are discovered which contradicts or improves on what we currently have. There are countless unknowns in science and that should surprise no one.

If you told me there were no elephants in your bedroom and I countered with "Consider the possibility that there are four microscopic elephants in your bedroom you did NOT notice. We should accept that you are not… omniscient." you probably wouldn't be convinced that you should stop saying there there are no elephants in your bedroom. It might be more accurate to say that you don't think that there are elephants and that you can never be certain, but since it's obvious that you never can be certain it's not a very useful point. It's perfectly fine to just say that your bedroom is elephant free. The "as far as I know right now" is implied and understood.

> there's zero reason anyone would ever think that science is omniscient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Quote: [The term has been adopted] as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)"

Scientism is very much in vogue, especially in the "rationalist" community which is often tangent with the HN populace. It's "science, the religion."

It's highly improbable that any in the SF lunatic fringe works the annual harvests as Agricultural scientists measuring nutrition.

Again, is there any evidence that actual people are actually suffering a nutritional deficiency solely on the basis of eating GM Vs non GM equivalents?

Scientismic is a cool word, RIP Habermas and you may say to yourself

Okay, I've considered that.

Again, why do people on exclusive GM grain diets not die due to zero nutritional value then?

There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet. Here’s more food for thought.

Living or dying is a bit coarse a metric, don’t you think?

Talk sense, please.

> There’s people that die on a Twinkie diet.

This literally has nothing to do with GM corn V non GM corn nutrition levels.

Living V dying is a spectrum with various grades of malnutrition in between - is there _any_ actual evidence of less nutrition from 100 tonne of GM grain v 100 tonne of the same grain sans the GM mod that increases weed killer resistance?

Recall the claim above is that GM grains have zero ( 0 , nada , nothing ) nutritional value.

I think I saw this movie... :-P

Yes I was thinking either Jack and the Beanstalk or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

LOL - I never thought of Jack and the beanstalk. I was thinking more along the lines of lil shop of horrors...

Clickbait title

Is it? It seems to describe exactly what happened: a farmer finds a sack of grain in his attic left by his great grandfather and plants them for the hell of it. Interesting things result.

You're likely basing this on the (better) updated title.. the original included "almost biblical" in the title. Shame mods didn't document the change.

The "almost Biblical" line comes from the fact that - before he knew what variety it was - he read about a similar wheat mentioned in the Bible.

That phrase is actually in the article.

Sure does. And his grandfather surely wasn't in the bible or even 2000 years close to it.. so.. that's one hell of a use of almost.

"Black Plague almost annihilated FIFA 2026 final" is closer historical range than this usage.

Description of ancient grains, meanwhile, reach back into Egyptian and other empires that precede the bible.

I actually could not use the full article's title at submission time as it was too long, so I shortened it to its current version, not sure if mods used the full article's title at some point.

Ah thanks, I didn't see that original title.

Hey the-golden-one, I downvoted you because your comment didn't make any sense to me. Other commenters point out that you were responding to an earlier title. Sorry! Time has passed, and I am no longer able to unvote.

This is pretty classy.

It is a pretty terrible title, but the article is interesting

I also found it interesting, and the title pretty much describe what happened? I don’t see the problem

did they copy the Times of India? https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/discovery/italia...

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