Heritage wheats: the Italian job

I manage L’associazione Heartland for rural development in marginal areas. We work with some of the longest-established heritage wheat co-operatives in Italy.

Cereal farming is a manmade ritual that started during the last Ice Age, in which we mimic the first cycle of rebirth after that destruction by growing wheat each year. Civilisation started with a small group of hunter-gatherers who changed their diet to cereals. They settled in one place in order to grow, harvest and store their crops. In exchange for losing their mobility and freedom, people were able to focus on improving everything they grew, and so should we. Humans sacrificed their way of life in order to grow grains and so we should nurture them to give taste to our lives, not just be a flavourless part of it.

Continuity and relationships

Growing heritage varieties is a creative process that connects us with our collective history. Through it we can guide wheat towards perfection, a process that is more important to me as a grower than the initial variety or the end result. The goal is to create a landrace, a meeting point of a crop (in this case wheat) and the land.

I think that farming in general (and even some of the heritage wheat growing community) has lost its bearings a little. Landraces are about continuity and relationships, they are identity markers. Rather than preserving another community’s heirloom variety by sowing bought-in seed each year, each community needs to think how it can reestablish or develop its own local grain heritage.

Nurturing a landrace is simple. Find miraculous wheat with a fantastic taste and grow it. If you sow, grow, save and re-sow year after year for long enough, it can become a landrace. The importance is not so much the initial wheat, it is the process that follows. Crucially, you need to engage people in and around the project, perhaps building a small community bakery and maybe even a small mill. Some old agricultural treatises from Italy describe peasant farming practices that go from turning goats out onto the fields of Sardinia in spring, to boiling old shoes with goat manure to produce fertiliser to soak seed in. This is what even some regenerative farming is missing – the importance of not just place but of its people as well.

New traditions

Italy is one of the most advanced places in the world when it comes to landrace wheats, simply because they were never lost. Some Italian landraces have grown in the same place for millennia, so their identities are the result of thousands of years’ adaptation to the land and generations of peasant farming selection. The process and importance of keeping a landrace pure in a particular place should not be underestimated. 

I do not, however, agree with people who tell me a particular landrace should only be grown by them, or that the seed must not be taken out of Sardinia or Sicily, for example. I tell them that I grew up in the Jordan Valley of Israel, homeland of the Natufian culture, who were perhaps the people who first cultivated emmer and durum. I could say that these ancient wheats, and wheats descended from them, belong to my forefathers and their descendants, but I don’t. I believe the point should not be that a variety can only be grown in one place. It should be to take an old variety of seed, plant it somewhere new and allow the land, climate and people to turn it into something unique. A premium should be paid for landraces but wheat seed should be distributed to anyone who wants to grow it. 

Flavour and identity

Bread is not all about texture and air bubbles, it is also about taste and identity. Mixing durum and khorasan will give any bread a much better flavour profile. My favourite durum landrace is Timila from Sicily. Dark and nutty, it’s an essential ingredient of Sicilian black bread and also makes the best tasting pasta. I also encourage bakers to include around 30% emmer or einkorn in the mix with older varieties of modern wheat. 

Otherwise I choose the best-tasting landraces I can find. For bread wheat we champion the Solina landrace from Abruzzo. Genetically we think it is probably the closest European variety to original bread wheat and so gives us a taste of what bread was like millennia ago. It is now available in the UK from Shipton Mill, with whom we have been working for over three years.

The steps that some farmers took in Italy 20 years ago, to revive growing older varieties in areas that had disconnected from their traditions, are now being echoed in the UK. A key difference is that Italy had landraces still growing in the fields elsewhere in the country. The UK is poor in wheat diversity and growers are having to find older wheats on farms and in gene banks overseas.

We help companies to bring landrace wheats to the UK from Italy in the form of grain for milling, flour and even pasta. Currently we’re looking for a partner who wants to lead that market but specifically for landrace wheat pasta. We help UK growers who want to adopt the landrace approach of having local area cereals to create a unique taste from each region. We are all entangled in global food systems that have helped separate us from traditional foods and our food traditions. We see the revival of landrace wheat cultivation as a pillar in the middle of reconnecting us to those traditions.

@nitsanmorag

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 57, January 2024.

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