Wheat, People, and Plant Breeding

Selecting improved varieties of wheat from among existing wheat plants is an ancient art that dates back thousands of years. In contrast, the deliberate generation of new varieties by controlled breeding is more recent. Wheat breeding developed from an arcane art practiced only by a few isolated individuals into a global community of professional scientists in the period from about the mid-eighteenth century to about 1925, but especially from about 1875 to 1925. Wheat improvement, however, ultimately involved more than just finding or creating varieties with greater utility. A relationship between people and wheat developed over the millennia that increasingly left both species in a state of ever higher mutual dependency. Put another way, wheat and people coevolved in ways that left neither much ability to prosper without the other. Professional wheat breeders occupied a pivotal role in this ongoing coevolutionary process, especially after the nineteenth century. An understanding of wheat breeding thus depends upon understanding how wheat and people “grew up together.” Wheat in everyday English designates a particular grassy plant that produces a starchy grain or seed. Most people think of wheat primarily in terms of this grain, which is used to make bread, cookies (biscuits), pastries, and pasta. Consumers easily distinguish between wheat and other grains such as rice, oats, maize, rye, and barley as they appear in manufactured products or as ready-to-consume grain in food stores. In contrast to their savvy as consumers, most urban dwellers probably could not differentiate between these grains in the farmer's field, particularly between wheat, rye, and barley. Nor could they necessarily give a good explanation of why wheat is particularly suitable for the products in which it is used. Moreover, they probably would be unfamiliar with other uses of wheat, such as using the grain for feed or the straw for fodder and roof thatching. Finally, in all likelihood these consumers would be hard-pressed to give details about the quantities of grain that can be obtained per hectare per year or much about how yields have increased in recent decades. In short, most consumers know and appreciate wheat but only on rather narrow and unsophisticated grounds.