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

Posted by ecares 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by adrian_b 22 hours ago

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).

Comment by OJFord 20 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by Cordiali 17 hours ago

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

Comment by smallerize 17 hours ago

The early 1900's are not exactly prehistoric.

Comment by OJFord 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by MichaelRo 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by Saline9515 10 hours ago

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

Comment by comrade1234 1 day ago

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.

Comment by kuerbel 1 day ago

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.

Comment by adrian_b 23 hours ago

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).

Comment by kuerbel 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by grumbelbart 1 day ago

> 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.

Comment by kuerbel 1 day ago

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.

Comment by liesandfalsehoo 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by steve_taylor 20 hours ago

Who's "they"? Feel free to sprinkle some lead on your Corn Flakes.

Comment by AyyEye 20 hours ago

Their username is lies and falsehoods. Brand new account. Don't feed the trolls.

Comment by jo909 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by a_bonobo 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by cseq 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by liesandfalsehoo 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by cseq 21 hours ago

At micromolar concentrations this may be true. There is plenty of Pb to go around in the soil and in the air from private aviation for such a minor micronutrient. I also doubt elevating Pb levels in crops is at the top of many public health agendas.

Comment by liesandfalsehoo 21 hours ago

It should be. It has the same effect on people - they grow too much too fast, but remain immature and fragile both mentally and physically. They do hit puberty very early though.

Comment by subscribed 20 hours ago

Did you just requested "supplementing" children and adolescents with lead?

Looks like you had too much of it yourself :)

Comment by thereforegrin 20 hours ago

do you have any reference to that claim that Pb is positively correlated with growth/height, either in crops or in people?

Comment by steve_taylor 20 hours ago

Calmodulin needs calcium, not lead.

Comment by bregma 22 hours ago

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".

Comment by liesandfalsehoo 21 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dr_dshiv 23 hours ago

I think because they collapse under their own weight?

Comment by Melatonic 1 day ago

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

Comment by kuerbel 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by blauditore 1 day ago

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

Comment by whatthejesus 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by adrian_b 22 hours ago

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).

Comment by thisislife2 18 hours ago

- 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).

Comment by philwelch 15 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by misev 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by bregma 21 hours ago

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?

Comment by adrian_b 21 hours ago

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.)

Comment by vintermann 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by amluto 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by imtringued 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by inquist 18 hours ago

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

Comment by im3w1l 22 hours ago

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

Comment by liesandfalsehoo 21 hours ago

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

Comment by adrian_b 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by locallost 1 day ago

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.

Comment by adrian_b 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by locallost 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by daneel_w 1 day ago

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

Comment by mentalgear 1 day ago

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.

Comment by madaxe_again 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by Danox 14 hours ago

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

PS Even better with great bread.

Comment by huhtenberg 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by 3884848484 23 hours ago

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

Comment by subscribed 19 hours ago

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

Comment by madaxe_again 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by bregma 21 hours ago

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?

Comment by madaxe_again 21 hours ago

€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.

Comment by smhg 1 day ago

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.

Comment by _s_a_m_ 1 day ago

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

Comment by hobo123 1 day ago

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

Comment by garrickvanburen 1 day ago

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

Comment by k4r1 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by NightPageReader 21 hours ago

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

Comment by codesnik 1 day ago

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

Comment by rocqua 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by morgoo 21 hours ago

I feel the same about gros michel bananas

Comment by y-curious 18 hours ago

Eggplant used to actually look like an egg

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

Comment by goobatrooba 20 hours ago

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

Comment by avadodin 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by timr 1 day ago

> 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.

Comment by eternauta3k 1 day ago

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.

Comment by unsloppable 23 hours ago

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

Comment by someothherguyy 1 day ago

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...

Comment by timr 1 day ago

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/...

Comment by morsch 1 day ago

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

Comment by tgv 1 day ago

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.

Comment by cma 1 day ago

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?

Comment by dopa42365 1 day ago

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

Your body is one hell of a lab.

Comment by adrian_b 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by timr 23 hours ago

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

Comment by p1anecrazy 1 day ago

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

Comment by tgv 1 day ago

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.

Comment by mark_l_watson 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by thephyber 16 hours 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.

Comment by Danox 13 hours ago

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

Comment by gwerbin 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by kibwen 7 hours ago

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

Comment by dibujar 12 hours ago

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?

Comment by dickiedyce 39 minutes ago

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

Comment by mattoxic 1 day ago

Damn, I was hoping for Triffids

Comment by tmaly 1 day ago

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

Comment by ltbarcly3 1 day ago

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/

Comment by phyzome 1 day ago

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".

Comment by hobo123 1 day ago

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.

Comment by ksec 1 day ago

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.

Comment by hobo123 22 hours ago

Yes. Whatever "over processed" means.

Comment by zahlman 1 day ago

>nasty stuff like vitamin A

Pardon?

Comment by hobo123 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by zahlman 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ThePestoParagon 1 day ago

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.

Comment by zihotki 1 day ago

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!

Comment by zarzavat 1 day ago

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.

Comment by keane 15 hours ago

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)

Comment by mywacaday 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by donjoe 1 day ago

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...

Comment by swiftcoder 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by strideashort 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by eudamoniac 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by strideashort 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by eudamoniac 5 hours ago

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

Comment by perpetualpear 1 day ago

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

Comment by ltbarcly3 14 hours ago

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'.

Comment by profquail 1 day ago

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

Comment by zihotki 1 day ago

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

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1 day ago

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...

Comment by Miner49er 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1 day ago

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.

Comment by cuvert 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by Dylan16807 1 day ago

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.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by awesome_dude 1 day ago

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

Comment by zargon 1 day ago

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

Comment by netfortius 1 day ago

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.

Comment by cavoirom 23 hours ago

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

Comment by r0l1 23 hours ago

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.

Comment by NotCamelCase 22 hours ago

Curiosity is a wonderful thing.

Comment by xandrius 19 hours ago

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

Comment by caretrs 1 day ago

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

Comment by aDyslecticCrow 1 day ago

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.

Comment by timcobb 1 day ago

No these require human cultivation to survive.

Comment by flies 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by Profazia 13 hours ago

it's sunflower seeds....

Comment by lysace 1 day ago

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

Comment by cynicalpeace 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by teleforce 1 day ago

> 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

Comment by devindotcom 1 day ago

you didn't read past the second paragraph then?

Comment by teleforce 1 day ago

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.

Comment by goobatrooba 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by achierius 12 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by Profazia 13 hours ago

it's sunflower seeds...

Comment by ren_767x 22 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by blackberrysoda 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by netsharc 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by EA-3167 1 day ago

As the article clearly states it was the farmer himself who made the initial ID of the grain based on a bible passage he heard at church. It’s not a quote the Smithsonian added for the hell of it.

If a straightforward account of a story offends your sensibilities, rather than complaining, simply move on.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by skmurphy 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by loufe 1 day ago

I know I tend to like some takeaway "summary" comments on HN, but this one just feels like snippets from an LLM reading the article. What's the thinking? The original text isn't particularly long or dense, and this isn't commentary.

Comment by skmurphy 1 day ago

It's hand curated verbatim extracts designed to encourage HN members to read the full article. The clickbait title does not provide accurate context for the article which details events from 1990.

Reasonable people may differ and your mileage may vary. What were your key takeaways from the article?

I left out the points about shortcomings of Bourlag's wheat and the value of genetic diversity in a population. But my focus was to encourage people to read an article I found significant.

On a side note I don't use AI to craft HN comments beyond sometimes using Grammarly to check them for basic errors.

Comment by dawnerd 1 day ago

Ironically that sounds like something an llm would say in a reply. Not saying you did or anything just kinda funny how it reads.

Comment by rgarrett88 1 day ago

They sure are designed to sound like people

Comment by Brian_K_White 1 day ago

But no particular person.

Like that line in Barbie, ... actually not a life guard, my job is just "beach".

Comment by CalRobert 1 day ago

I appreciated it. The article was too verbose in my view

Comment by vineyardmike 1 day ago

What’s the thinking on pointing out everything that could maybe but probably not be “AI Slop”?

I wasn’t going to click on the click-bait headline without understanding the topic better, so the length of the original was unknown and irrelevant to me. The above comment tersely explains it enough to satisfy my prerequisite.

The comment, “slop” or not, was useful. When slop fills comments with junk and fake commentary, it’s far more annoying and detrimental than a basic summary. Slop-policing is exhausting to read - just downvote or flag trash instead of adding more noise that takes away from the actual content.

Comment by pferde 1 day ago

My, my, how low we have sunk. It used to be "I won't jump into the comment section without first reading the article", now it's "I won't read the article without first reading (and possibly engaging in) the comment section". Shame.

Also, how is this headline click-bait? If anything, it's anti-clickbait, dull, matter-of-factly, and not really that inviting.

Comment by tejohnso 1 day ago

A lot of submissions have comments about how the article is "AI slop" or that a comment comes from an LLM. What is the point of repeatedly pointing this out? One person's AI slop is another person's useful and intriguing submission. In this case someone points out a comment is LLM generated and it turns out it isn't. So what if it was? It was a useful comment either way, and your ability to correctly identify LLM generated content is not perfect, and is likely to become less accurate over time.

Comment by wahnfrieden 1 day ago

Community is oriented around policing each others content (upvote downvote flag vouch). The behaviors spill over into the other lever (reply)

Comment by fc417fc802 1 day ago

Well yes, the entire point of a link aggregator is to surface content of value to the readers so that necessitates passing judgement on it. It seems that most of us don't come here for slop so that receives negative responses. Everything working as intended I guess.

Comment by barney54 1 day ago

What do you mean “what’s the thinking?”

Comment by skmurphy 1 day ago

I think the meaning was "why did you write this?"

Comment by ahartmetz 1 day ago

Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators make wheat shorter and prevent it from buckling and falling over. They aren't the most suspect chemicals, but not exactly above all suspicion neither...

Comment by benjiro29 1 day ago

Height is a solvable problem today. Chemical growth regulators

Or you do what Claudio Grossi did, and you mix the ancient grain with short growing grains that add stability. Sometimes the solution is simpler then just throwing chemicals at the problem.

Comment by hommelix 1 day ago

This is a great practical approach, but when you harvest the crop you get a mix of higher crop and lower crop. It is more difficult to sell some mix than a pure crop with known properties. Technically, it would be possible to build a harvester with two cutters at different heights to separate the crops, but I've never seen one.

Comment by benjiro29 1 day ago

You forgot about the height. It will overshadow the smaller crop, and lack of sunlight on this smaller crop may simply not produce any ears as a result. Just a "balcony farmer" but that is what i have seen with most plants that are overshadowed by dense/taller plants.

Comment by lelandfe 1 day ago

A good story that touches on this is the Wizard and the Prophet, covering Norman Borlaug's efforts to crossbreed wheat that wasn't too tall, was resistant to blight, etc.

Comment by corroclaro 1 day ago

That reminds me, I never got back my copy of that book...

Comment by lelandfe 18 hours ago

I swear I’m almost done with it

Comment by Retric 1 day ago

That’s true in generation 1, but breeding isn’t a single generation. You repeat things across generations until you find a stable mix.

Comment by saalweachter 1 day ago

You just raise the head.

You harvest the top crop, the one you want, cutting above the lower height, then go back through and make a second pass with the head lower.

You'll lose some of the lower crop, crushed under the wheels, but it was there as bonus anyway.

Comment by ahartmetz 1 day ago

It seems like the genes that cause long stalks also have other benefits, otherwise they'd have been bred out a long time ago. At least that is what I figure.

Comment by aDyslecticCrow 1 day ago

Short grains are modern;

- allow modern machines to harvest it more easily

- move slighly more of the plants energy into the seed

- prevent wind damage. (small farms bordered with trees was more typical historically)

On the historical side;

- The long stalks allow the crop to be bundled and dried without the seed touching the ground.

- It makes the stalks themselves useful as a building material in walls, roofs, isolation, bedding.

- It makes for a good grip as the seeds are pulled form the stalks with an historical thresher.

In short, we didn't start breeding grains to be short until modern post industrial farming techniques. Short grain does provide better yield on industrial mono-crop farming. But would have been seen as worse historically.

Comment by kinj28 1 day ago

Problem with modern grains 1) gluten 2) weed killers/ pesticides 3) lack of nutritional value

My father and many other people in my family increased to neutral millets and started giving up wheat as much as they can.

Those problems are worth solving for or roll back to grossini seeds and use his creative technique to not let it withered by wind and let’s you have better nutritional value

Comment by aDyslecticCrow 20 hours ago

nutrients contents is more about how its milled. We mill away the germ part of the seed which contains most nutrients since it contains fats that spoil the shelflife.

But I'm not sure one can even buy whole milled wheat like that... mabie speciality stores? I often buy rough flour that contains some husks for taste and texture, but I'm pretty sure that's technically fully milled white flour with husks mixed back in...

The starch part is mostly the same with more or less gluten. But ye modern grains contain much more more gluten (the article even mentioned difficult rising the bread) because it makes for fluffier bread.

---

If you're sensitive to gluten, then it makes sense to avoid modern white flour... but it makes for badly risen bread.

you've ever tried barley?

Comment by quixoticelixer- 1 day ago

Old grains still have plenty of gluten, and aren't immune to weeds or pests and have more or less the same nutritional value.

Comment by Filligree 1 day ago

Did older grains have more gluten? I might try to search them out just for that reason.

Comment by rebuilder 1 day ago

Probably less gluten, I believe high protein content is one of the things modern varieties have been bred for. It improves baking qualities.

Comment by quixoticelixer- 1 day ago

Lodging is still a big problem even with modern varieties and growth regulators and even pre-modern wheat plants were probably shorter than they were originally.

Comment by skmurphy 1 day ago

They confer advantage over many weeds according to the article.

Comment by pseudohadamard 1 day ago

Friends of mine found some unknown seeds in a rental they'd just moved into and planted it. When they saw what sprouted they decided they should probably burn the evidence, slowly, one bud at a time.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 1 day ago

Tall wheat fields are a significant plot device in Klara and the Sun. Not to mention the various woody fibers involved in Wicker.

Yes, I spent an interesting week hanging out at the cinema!

Comment by thedrexster 1 day ago

various woody fibers, indeed, sir!

Comment by ltbarcly3 1 day ago

These are all just unsubstantiated claims from someone promoting a product. The reason the entire world switched to dwarf varieties is that full height wheat falls over in heavy storms and this can lead to a loss of entire harvests and major famines.

This grain, while interesting, is far far less productive than modern varieties and less efficient to grow. It's valuable for genetic diversity and rediscovering it is wonderful and valuable, but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty.

Comment by margalabargala 1 day ago

> but it is more or less worthless for farmers as anything other than a novelty

This is clearly not true, considering it has already been successful as a niche specialty product. So you're obviously wrong.

You could become right by weakening your claim. The wheat will remain a niche specialty product, and will not overtake other wheats in the mass market.

Specialty products made on a smaller scale can be plenty valuable and successful. They are not "novelty" products.

Comment by ltbarcly3 14 hours ago

By "novelty" I mean a niche or specialty product. I think that's basically the definition of novelty in terms of a product being sold, correct me if I'm wrong.

There are numbers for this specific wheat. Emilia-Romagna's 2016 agricultural economic assessment compares grano del miracolo with conventional wheat [1]:

  Yield: 1.5 vs 5.8 tonnes/hectare.
  Variable costs: €527 vs €570/hectare.
  Selling price: €390 vs €203/tonne.
  Gross margin: €58 vs €607/hectare.

That's roughly 74% less grain, with only 8% lower variable costs per hectare. Even selling at nearly twice the price, its gross margin is about 90% lower. These are the government's planning estimates, with Miracolo's yield based on agricultural experts consulted for the assessment.

Preserving genetic diversity is valuable, and specialty buyers may pay enough to make growing it worthwhile. But that specialty market is precisely what I mean by "novelty." The economics of growing it as ordinary commodity wheat are poor.

[1] https://agricoltura.regione.emilia-romagna.it/psr-2014-2020/...

Comment by margalabargala 13 hours ago

For me, "novelty product" has a connotation of "extraneous, just for fun, useless". If that's not what you meant, never mind!

Comment by ltbarcly3 8 hours ago

Well I think this grain is just for fun and useless. There is no benefit to growing it apart from maintaining the genetic diversity it may contain.

Comment by margalabargala 7 hours ago

What about flavor? Fuck all those people who think it tastes better I guess?

Comment by quixoticelixer- 1 day ago

It's not really just a storm risk. The higher yeilding your wheat the higher risk of lodging, so growing tall wheat in poorer conditions is fine, but the higher the grain weight the higher the risk of lodging.

Comment by hobo123 1 day ago

The article mentions other benefits, such as many Italian farmers lost their harvest in the drought of 2024, while many traditional grains fared better in the dry climate and could be harvested.

Comment by ltbarcly3 14 hours ago

The article is effectively an advertisement.

The yield of this wheat is 1.5 (Miracle Wheat) vs 5.8 (Standard) tonnes/hectare. That's about 25%. Since wheat can easily be stored for many years, you would have to have droughts in 3/4 of years before you break even due to drought resistance. In the meantime farmers can barely break even financially growing this stuff.

*HOWEVER* Miracle Wheat is very very susceptible to lodging (falling over and dying in the rain). So in years where there isn't a drought you would sometimes lose almost 100% of the crop. So even if there were droughts 3/4 of the time, you would still never break even.

Comment by the-golden-one 1 day ago

Clickbait title

Comment by PeterHolzwarth 1 day ago

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.

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

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.

Comment by ecares 1 day ago

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.

Comment by PeterHolzwarth 1 day ago

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

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1 day ago

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.

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

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.

Comment by PeterHolzwarth 1 day ago

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.

Comment by gnabgib 1 day ago

This is pretty classy.

Comment by kayson 1 day ago

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

Comment by jahala 1 day ago

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

Comment by croisillon 1 day ago

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

Comment by mech422 1 day ago

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

Comment by SoftTalker 1 day ago

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

Comment by mech422 7 hours ago

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

Comment by zkmon 1 day ago

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.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

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.

Comment by vconnor 1 day ago

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

Comment by autoexec 22 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by vconnor 20 hours ago

> 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."

Comment by defrost 20 hours ago

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?

Comment by blackberrysoda 18 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by The_Blade 18 hours ago

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

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

Okay, I've considered that.

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

Comment by vconnor 1 day ago

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?

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

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.

Comment by blackberrysoda 19 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by pcblues 22 hours ago

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.