Near a Thousand Tables (21 page)

“Wheat,” as Darwin observed, “quickly assumes new
habits of life
.” There is something special about wheat: in alliance with man, it is a world-beater, more “ecologically tolerant” even than the other great grasses which have spread around the world. Wheat is not quite as adaptable as man, who exceeds all other species in the range of environments in which he can survive with the aid of his unique gift for devising or appropriating technology; but it has diversified more dramatically, invaded more new habitats, multiplied faster and evolved more rapidly without extinction than any other known organism. It now covers more than 600 million acres of the surface of the planet. We think of it as an emblem of the civilizing tradition, because it represents a triumphant adaptation of nature to our own purposes—a grass we have turned into a human food, a waste product of the wilderness which science has remade to sustain civilization, a proof of the unchallengeable thoroughness with which man dominates every ecosystem of which he forms part.

No relief of the Triumph of Progress, of the kind which often decorates the tympana of our academies and museums, would be complete without some ears or sheaves. Yet I can imagine a world in which this perception will seem laughable. A few years ago, I invented creatures of fantasy whom I called Galactic Museum
Keepers, and invited the reader to picture them, as they look back at our world in a remote future, from an immense distance of time and space, where, with a degree of objectivity unattainable by us—who are enmeshed in history—they will see our past quite differently from the way we see it ourselves. They will classify us, perhaps, as puny parasites, victims of feeble self-delusion, whom wheat cleverly exploited to spread itself around the world. Or else they will see us in an almost symbiotic relationship with edible grasses, as mutual parasites, dependent on each other and colonizing the world together.

Wheat is vital in shaping our present and feeding our future; yet its place in our past can still be reconstructed only partially, tentatively. Some facts are established beyond cavil. The greatest concentration of varieties of grass classifiable as wheat is and has always been, for as far back as the archaeological record goes, in Southwest Asia. The distribution zone of wild emmer is roughly commensurate with a region where wheat was intensively cultivated by the sixth millennium
B.C.
Einkorn and emmer are the wild parent wheats of all the domesticates known to have been in use by that time. Almost all early cultivators of wheat also grew barley. The earliest unquestionable evidence of wheat farming available to date comes from excavations in the Jordan valley, around Jericho and Tell Aswad, in strata corresponding to the seventh or eighth millennium
B.C.,
where varieties of both einkorn and emmer were grown. Today, the ecology of these areas looks inhospitable: desert crusted with salt and sodium. Ten thousand years ago, however, the walls which perhaps already enclosed the town of Jericho overlooked an alluvial fan, washed down from the Judean hills by trickling tributaries that fill the river as it creeps south from the Sea of Galilee. The River Jordan is thick with silt. That explains why it snakes among ancient gray deposits of marl and gypsum, left by a now shriveled lake that once occupied the valley. The banks it deposited formed the biblical “jungle of Jericho,” from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds, like God threatening Edom. Here, as a result, stood the rich wheatfields said to resemble “the garden of the Lord.” Desert people, such as the Israelites of Joshua, were excluded from it and
tempted to conquest
.

The story of wheat's own conquest of the world—the context of ecological exchanges which carried it across the globe and smothered so much of the planet in wheatfields—belongs in a later chapter (p. 169). The problem of what makes it widely popular is, however, probably related to the problem of why people grew it in the first place. Among the great grasses, some are distinguished by hardiness, others by resistance to predators and disease, others by outstanding durability in storage, others by high yield. All of them—as well as the staple roots and tubers to which we have yet to turn—are suitable for processing in the form of alcoholic
drinks. This property is worth a moment's consideration, as some authorities regard beer as the critically important product, demand for which induced people to practice agriculture in the first place. Edible grasses were presumably first gathered for seeds, which would be eaten with little preparation. But which came first: bread or beer? Beer has been proclaimed the “Ur-source of all civilization”: the magic effect of fermented grain “persuaded people to settle down
in companionable villages
.” If one subscribes to the chieftainship or “big-man” theory of the origins of agriculture, according to which farming began in order to generate surpluses for chieftainly feasts, it makes sense to assign intoxicating drinks a special role. Similarly, if religion inspired agriculture, beer as an inducer of ecstasy might well have had a special appeal.

The success of wheat, however, suggests that the critical product—if there was one—was bread. Wheat had no obvious advantage over other edible grasses for the farmers who first favored it or for the peoples subsequently seduced by it, except that it has a secret ingredient—gluten, a complex of proteins found in oats, barley and rye, but in greater concentrations than any other cereal. This makes it a peculiarly good source of bread, because gluten is the substance which combines with water to make dough malleable; its consistency contributes critically to the way the paste traps the gases released by yeast. Historically all the cultures which, at least for a time, have been indifferent or resistant to the appeal of wheat have preferred to get their starch from other confections than bread: the messes or porridge favored by millet-dependent peoples; the popcorn which presumably preceded bread in the Americas; the unleavened cakes or flatbreads, such as the tortillas of maize eaters or the oatcakes of regions beyond the range of wheat; the compressions of sticky rice which are the traditional snack of Japan, or the barley balls of the Tibetans.

Of course, other wheat products are highly palatable and some of them exploit the virtue of gluten little or not at all. Pasta is best made from durum wheat—a derivative of emmer: its naked grains, which save labor by threshing free from
surrounding bracts
, made it an enormously attractive variety for much of the past, before the development of other easy-threshing varieties, but it is not particularly gluten-rich. Neither is gluten required in the preparation of many flat breads, including stars of the modern globalized fast food menu, such as pizza and Indian breads. Cracked wheat is an acquired taste because of its strong, distinctive flavor—but a taste worth acquiring; bulgur wheat grains, in the form of couscous, are a staple of Middle Eastern cultures and trendy restaurants alike. I like wheat grains boiled and dressed with garlic and olive oil (though, in obedience to a law of Spanish culture, I must—irrationally, perhaps—have bread to eat with them).
Some people, I am told, even claim to like the instantly soggy wheat-based breakfast cereals which aggressive marketing has promoted way beyond their merits (above, p. 44). Still, all these dishes and others like them are the historic by-products of the triumph of bread. Without bread, wheat would be just another grain among many rivals.

This only deepens the mystery. For what is so special about bread? In terms of nutrition, digestibility, durability, ease of transport or storage, versatility and appeal for texture or flavor, the balance of advantages and disadvantages, compared with other potentially equivalent foods, seems nicely poised. Yet the trouble, time and technical expertise which have to be invested in successful baking are enormous. Professional bakers seem to have emerged early in every bread-eating culture. The many hobbyists who make bread at home, in conditions resembling those of early agrarian society, without exact means of measuring quantities, temperatures and timings, know how easily the process can go wrong, and how exact the baker's judgment has to be. No convincing theory of how or why bread making began has ever been proposed. Perhaps that is the key to bread's success: it is one of those “magical” foods, in which human mastery effects an unrecognizable change on the ingredients of the recipe. Just as the first farmers made grass edible, so the first bakers transformed tiny grains into a voluminous food. I should like this to be true; but it is obviously an unverifiable speculation. This vital episode in food history is likely to remain forever obscure.

Beyond the realm of bread, before wheat was elevated to its present global kingship, roots and tubers, rather than grasses, provided the basic staples of many of the world's farming cultures and some of the world's most conspicuous civilizations. Some of them may have a history of cultivation at least as long as those of edible grasses. Taro, perhaps, came first; but it is impossible to assign a date to its domestication, since—unlike grains—this corm has no indigestible parts and the leaves, though of treelike proportions in some varieties, degrade to nothingness. Still, in default of conclusive evidence, the balance of probabilities favors the suspicion that some roots, at least, were cultivated before grains, simply because some of them are so easy to replant. Taro reproduces asexually, which made it simple for early cultivators to develop varieties by selection. Because it is a kind of super-food—with an enormous yield for little effort, a huge repertoire of technically undemanding cooking methods and a high starch content accessible to every human digestive system from early infancy to strenuous old age—it seems a likely candidate for the place of honor due to the world's first
farmed plant
.

Taro showed some historic adaptability: some varieties are suitable for swamplands and dry hills. When agriculture began in New Guinea, in the wake of the great climatic changes that split “Greater Australia” and opened a strait between New Guinea and Australia ten thousand years ago, it was probably based on native varieties of taro, planted in swampy hollows in the western highlands. In the Kuk swamp, drains, ditches and mounds for taro growing were formed fully
nine thousand years ago
. By about six or seven thousand years ago, taro was cultivated in widely separated regions around the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. The heartlands of taro eating remain, however, where they have always been, where those oceans meet, in Southeast Asia, especially in New Guinea and the Philippines, and in two areas where it was a latecomer: the Pacific islands that received the plant with the eastward spread of settlers bearing the Lapita culture system during a period of uncertain date (probably complete by the mid-second millennium
B.C.),
and Japan, where, presumably, it was a late implant from China or Korea, but where it remains a ritual food of the annual autumn moon-viewing feast.

Taro could never rival the great grains or superior tubers: unlike potatoes, wheat, rice and maize, it cannot function as the chief or sole constituent of a society's common diet; it is useful only as a supplementary food—a filler that ekes out varied meals. Typically, it contains 30 percent starch, 3 percent sugar and a little more than épercent protein, with traces of calcium and phosphorus. It does not keep well and therefore fails to meet the requirements of long durability, for store-housing and redistributing, which seem to have been characteristic of the staple foods of the most successful early agrarian societies. The taste for taro seems, moreover, hard to acquire: most varieties are insipid, with a character reminiscent of potatoes for texture and yams for such taste as there is. Hawaiians make a taro paste known as poi, from the pink-fleshed variety, reputedly “royal”—the nearest thing Hawaiians had in their imperial age to a courtly dish. To make poi, one steams the corms and crushes them to dough, which is left to ferment for
a few days
. It is the pride of what might be called the national cuisine of the islands, but it has not caught on anywhere else.

Though historically important, taro has dwindled in significance and no longer makes a statistically impressive contribution to the nourishment of the world. Yams, cassava (to a modest extent), sweet potatoes and—above all—potatoes, by contrast, have histories of remarkable growth. As far as we can reconstruct it in the present state of knowledge, the history of yams begins with the gathering of wild varieties in Southeast Asia, verifiable from remains in sites in Thailand at least nine thousand years old. At present there is, as far as I know, no evidence of where and when yams were first cultivated, though a good case has been made for
their role in the independent development of indigenous West African agriculture around the fifth millennium
B.C.
According to this reconstruction, which is the work of D. G. Coursey, domestication was the outcome of progressive sacralization: the plants were first worshipped, then enclosed, then nurtured, then replanted in spaces which served both as
shrines and nurseries
. Their appearance in almost all the islands of the eastern Pacific at dates in the second millennium
B.C.
is compatible with the theory that they were domesticated in Southeast Asia or
New Guinea
and spread from there. Like taro, yams may have been part of the nursery of the earliest agriculture of New Guinea.

What yams and taro were to Southeast Asia and the Pacific, cassava, sweet potatoes and potatoes were to parts of the tropical Americas. Of these, cassava—though, as we shall see below (p. 178), it played some part in the worldwide “ecological exchanges” of modern history—has found least acceptance outside its native area, which is in the tropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean region. Like taro, cassava is a big plant with potentially huge edible roots; so part of what it lacks in appeal by way of nutrition and flavor, it makes up in yield. It defies droughts, while relishing humid environments. Like other root crops, it cannot be devoured by locusts and is good at eluding most tropical predators. It became the staple of choice of early tropical forest cultivators in parts of the New World where maize could not be successfully introduced; but the triumph of maize helped to limit its area of influence.