In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley
What do we forfeit when we rely on other regions to provide us with food we could grow ourselves? We gain reliability and consistent supply, of course, but we also lose the flavor of a diverse life, and its savor—the knowledge that this flavor is only a season long, or only found with some searching. By growing a diverse food system in the Heartland, organizations like Seed Savers Exchange and small, independent orchards like Hoch are ensuring that there is yet magic in the world to attract our children to the outdoors and the richness that can imbue their lives with the memories of a vibrant past.
The apples we find at the Land School are a product of its isolated history. The school is in a remote area half an hour from supermarkets and shopping malls. The neighboring farmers who remain here eke out a meager livelihood raising dairy cattle, goats, sheep, and CSA vegetables, as well as some hay, corn, and soy. This farm’s isolation has allowed my old tree to thrive through four generations of families who picked the fruit, made sauce and pies, and stored the apples, wrapped in newspaper, in baskets in the root cellar.
The school’s apples are unique to this farm, to its soil, rain, and sun. I’ve never eaten anything like them. Will our kids recall their flavor? It’s the taste of fall family work weekends with wheelbarrow races, basketball in the hayloft, flashlight tag; of the day our big sloppy black Lab was ambushed by the bossy rooster. It’s the hours our youngest son, Tim, spent on the creek’s shore building “troll” houses with sticks and leaves; it’s the scent of the campfire’s wood smoke as parents and kids talked late into the night after dinner; and it’s that sticky, apple-rich scent that filled the packing shed when we sorted apples into the CSA boxes for the weekly share.
The new varieties from the U of M, SweeTango, Zestar!, and their forerunner, Honeycrisp, were not created in nature and are not the happy accident of wind or bees. Yet they’ve become the industry standard, exploding with juices and a crackling crunch, bloated and thin-skinned. That first snap of sweetness quickly turns cloying because they are a one-note fruit—big, and often hard to finish. The Land School’s neighboring farmer Dale told me that even his pigs seem to have tired of them. “If I put Honeycrisp or SweeTango in their trough they’ll tip it over. They’ve just gotten used to more complex flavors,” he jokes. “They’re interested at first, but then, you know, I can tell that they’re looking for something else.”
That saying—“The apple never falls far from the tree”—is often used as a catchall for the inevitable strengths and weaknesses that the older generation passes on to the young. Among farmers, the wisdom being passed can only be seen as a positive. The work being done to preserve heirloom apples is making it possible for those eager to learn the old ways to carry them forward, melding modern technologies and ecological wisdom. Our nineteenth century’s apple diversity reflected different purposes and different needs, but reflected an appetite for differences. When I taste a good apple, I taste the biodiversity it represents. If we succumb to a world of the generic apple, we are in danger of our taste buds becoming generic as well. Cultivating ourselves is the first step toward diversifying our orchards.
Dan Bussey’s orchard grows apples in fascinating shapes, colors, and flavors that can delight and nurture us all. As such, the apple is a “democratic” fruit, as varied and interesting and diverse as our country itself. An affordable luxury, apples are within the means of every person. Their enjoyment requires nothing more than our attention to the variety of trees and the stories they tell. Simple and straightforward, this fruit has a special meaning among people who know what they are eating. In many ways, the apple may lead us to a greater understanding and appreciation of our food and our land, in the same way the original apple, in the Garden of Eden, provided another kind of wisdom that carried us forward.
After that first Thanksgiving in Minneapolis, the farmers’ market stalls were given over to Christmas trees, and I felt little of the holiday merriment. Afternoons were long and gray, my job hunting proved fruitless, and I was envious of my husband’s work and long hours. One night, after gazing through the kitchen window onto patches of crusty snow, I turned my attention to the table my brother had built and a wooden bread trencher filled with unopened mail. “Get the flour from the pantry, the yeast, and the salt,” I could hear my late grandmother’s voice intone beneath the sweeping tick of our kitchen clock. “Set out the measuring cups, tie back your hair, and for pity’s sake, wash those hands with the brown soap over the sink.”
As the cold laced my windowpanes with crystalline ice, I mixed and kneaded, warmed by the thump-whacking rhythm of making bread. I drifted back to my grandmother’s kitchen, where as a child I would stand on a step stool to reach her speckled Formica countertop and help roll out a thin slab of her holiday bread dough. We’d cut it into small circles with a juice glass to make the “elf rolls” that we baked to a golden brown and slathered with sticky white icing.
That night, as flour dusted my counter, table, and chairs, I made my first loaf of bread in our new kitchen and so laid claim to our home. Since then, on dark, weary, wintry evenings, I seek refuge in this work, conjuring images of my grandmother: her long, knobby fingers and faded purple-flower apron; her yellow kitchen on Claremont Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey. All of this links me to the generations of women who have baked bread through the ages and I come face to face with the moment when bread meant life.
For many of our region’s early settlers, bread was salvation, sometimes the only food on the table after the root cellar had been emptied and spring was months away. Back then, amber waves of wheat shimmering with prosperity drew immigrants to our fertile plains. Even our currency’s bright pennies were minted with the image of sheaves of wheat until 1959.
This iconic crop is a strange little grass. “One of the most complex plants in existence,” said Dr. Abdullah Jaradat, a research agronomist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) at University of Minnesota–Morris. Both scientist and wheat historian, Jaradat is on a mission to revive the early varieties of wheat that made the Upper Midwest the “breadbasket of the world.”
This slight, well-tailored scholar in his late fifties moved to Minnesota from Jordan nearly thirty years ago to research sustainable grain crops so they might grow again across our plains. He’s a passionate cook and accomplished baker, and he told me he has a personal interest in heritage wheat because he has trouble digesting food made with commercial flours. On a tour of the research facility, Jaradat relayed the story of how wheat evolved nearly twelve thousand years ago into the industrially farmed commodity crop, bred for easy harvesting and storage, that’s traded on the grain exchanges of Kansas City, Chicago, and Minneapolis today.
Wheat, derived from wild species, consists of three different subgenomes joined in two events of natural hybridization. Emmer, the progenitor of our modern grain, was first grown in the Fertile Crescent on the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Iran. Around the same time, einkorn wheat grew near the mountainous area of southeastern Turkey.
Amid the expansive fields of commodity corn and soy, Jaradat is growing out trials of the earliest strains of wheat—einkorn, farro, and emmer. He’s also propagating Turkey red and red fife wheat, the varieties first grown here in the 1800s. “I can enjoy baked goods made from heritage grains,” he told me.
“I come from the birthplace of wheat. Ever since wheat’s domestication ten thousand years ago, farmers have developed and improved wheat’s genetic diversity as a ‘landrace,’ the term we use to describe plants that have adapted through natural selection to a region’s particular environment. Wheat does this especially well. It’s a very smart, highly versatile plant,” he said, and continued with the story.
Through harvesting and sowing, farmers helped guide the natural breeding process to produce wheat crops with desirable traits. These early strains of wheat grew in the Karadag Mountains of Turkey around 9600 BC and spread through Greece, Cyprus, India, Egypt, and eventually into Germany and Spain by 5000 BC, finally reaching England and Scandinavia by 3000 BC.
“The best