Waves of Diverse Grains

"where creativity can spark like a dialectic"

A fact I’ve been enjoying mentioning to anyone I think might be remotely interested is that buckwheat is in the same plant family as rhubarb. I learned this when I baked the buckwheat sugar tarts from Rose Wilde’s cookbook of grain-forward recipes, Bread and Roses. The book is organized geographically, by continent, and then by grain type. On the introductory page to the section on Asian-native grains, which includes rice, barley, and buckwheat, she notes about buckwheat that it’s “one of the oldest cultivated crops and a rare complete protein” that “grows in poor-quality soil and is very adaptable,” and “is often used as a cover crop, preventing weeds and providing nutrition back to the soil.”

When I’ve baked at home recently, I’ve explored recipes in Bread and Roses, and generally been inspired to turn to grains other than wheat: buckwheat tartlets with the texture of a butter cookie for our New Year’s Eve party, buckwheat soba noodles for a weekend dinner, a delightfully spongy, 100% spelt olive oil cake. The recipes I bake from at work proudly feature non-wheat varieties, too: a chocolate scone with buckwheat flour, croissant dough with practically 50% of the flour weight being spelt, tart dough with rye or Kernza for added textural character and depth of flavor. 

In a society where the majority of the flour found on grocery store shelves is industrially processed wheat flour, devoid of nutrition, flavor, and terroir, serving as a blank canvas upon which to load sugar and spices, it is refreshing and inspiring to incorporate these alternative flours into my pantry and my baking repertoire. I’m lucky to be able to source these flours locally, from Meadowlark Organics, a farm and mill just 40 miles from where I live. To bake with these grains is an expression of the possibilities of agricultural diversity, as well as a mode of connecting with the land. 

Using the crops that are grown locally and regionally can inspire such diversity in our diets. In their essay published in Wordloaf, “In Pursuit of Vegan Milk Bread,” Gan Chin Lin writes, “I want to show you what professionals and home-bakers before me have done with what was local to them: mashing root vegetables, turning beans and pulses into pastes, using starches like tapioca and rice; turning the material of our lived experiences into the fillings and bodies of unspeakably delicious loaves and buns.” Baking with grains other than common wheat (Triticum aestivum, which accounts for 95% of wheat produced globally) as well as other starchy foods, as Lin points out, proves that baking can be an activity full of “free play.” Baking with the grains and starches that we have locally available opens up radical possibilities for hearty breads and sweet pastries alike; they may not look like the French-style baked goods that we’ve come to see as ‘traditional’, and that’s okay, because they express the places from which they’ve come. As we only increasingly confront the impacts of climate change, it’s imperative that we look beyond industrialized common wheat, and instead to grain varieties that are drought- or flood-resistant, and farming systems that mitigate erosion and soil degradation and that enrich communities. 

In their article, “An agroecological vision of perennial agriculture,” Reynolds et al. explore what it truly signifies to prioritize perennial farming practices through a case study focusing on a farmer, Jacob, who “plans to plant most of his several hundred hectare farm to silvopasture that provides shade and fodder for his cattle, pigs, and chickens; contributes to nutrient cycling, soil stability, resilience to extreme weather, esthetic quality, and biodiversity on his farm and in his neighborhood; and provides nutritious food to a regional food system for many years to come. Though he has yet to use these words, Jacob’s broader vision is for perennial agriculture.” Their agroecological vision includes the incorporation of annual crops within a perennial system, recognizing that many annual crops produce valuable food and do contribute beneficially to overall economic, social, and ecological systems. Scenarios where farms rely on only a few annual crops, an approach with deep ties to monocropping and industrialized agriculture, is often where farming becomes environmentally degrading. A key argument to their article is that “perennial practices need to be socially, ecologically, and economically sound to stay successful.” This extends the definition of perennial farming practices beyond the farm to consider the communities that farmers are a part of and reach through the distribution of their food, and those smaller-scale, more localized economies that such farms can participate in and support. I believe, too, that this justice-based approach must consider labor: what are the conditions for those farm workers implementing and maintaining a perennial farming system, especially in the face of the extreme weather events we’re experiencing as climate change worsens? The sustainability that perennial agriculture touts must apply to labor practices, too.

“Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic,” wrote Audre Lorde in the essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. She was writing about the significance of intersectionality — the interplay of race, sexuality, gender, class, and age in our lived experiences with the world — in social discrimination, and questioning how these factors that define our differences can be used in the organization of social movements, in the agitation for a more equitable world. She writes, “as women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change”; we are taught to normalize, streamline our identities and to isolate ourselves from those who encourage us to engage with the world otherwise. The encouragement of gendered normativity follows the same logic as monocropping: it’s a standardization and streamlining toward the capitalist goal of efficient production — of product and workforce alike. Like seeing diversity as being able to powerfully unite people in the work to create strong communities and alliances, a perennial approach to agriculture can see differences and diversity as having radical potential for the future of the land and community.

Buckwheat sugar tarts, topped with roasted grapefruit.

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Grain Resources

Benefits of Regional Grain Networks (Tufts University)

Heritage Grains Guide (Hayden Flour Mills)

Meadowlark Organics Grain Guide (Meadowlark Organics)

About the Artisan Grain Collaborative (Artisan Grain Collaborative)