52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Standing on four robotic-looking legs that literally flexed at rubberized knees, they were swaying their metallic hips suggestively, bouncing up and down exuberantly, and just generally looking silly and weirdly animalistic. I could picture them late at night, when the mill was dark and empty,* switching on the lights and holding a surreptitious hoedown, then scurrying back into place the instant before the night watchman (with droopy mustache, of course) flipped on the light.

  “What are they doing?” I yelled to Mike over the din.

  “Look inside.” Bits of bran, flour, and grain were vibrating atop a wire screen, the smaller particles falling through. These were sifters, and their gyrations seemed to do quite an effective job.

  I’d found my way to this Clift on, New Jersey, mill, one of several owned by the Bay State Milling Company, by once again looking for the silos (shades of my trip to Bobolink Dairy). “They’re the only ones in Clift on,” Mike had told me. This old industrial city seemed an unlikely place to see twin silos rising above the factories and Office buildings.

  Which goes to show how little I know about mills. The other landmark Mike had mentioned were railroad tracks, and as I pulled into the parking lot, it occurred to me that “near the silos and the railroad tracks” could probably suffice as directions to pretty much every wheat mill in the nation. Wheat, as it has for a century or more, still comes from the Midwest in railroad cars, is stored in silos until milled, and goes out in trucks as sacks of flour. The story of wheat is largely the story of transportation, whether the grain is floating down the Nile or riding the rails of the Southern Pacific.

  On the verge of milling my backyard wheat, I thought an understanding of the process might be useful. This is partly how I’d ended up at this Bay State mill, which also happens to be one of the plants that produces the King Arthur flour I’d been baking with every week. I had another reason for being here as well. During the past nine months, I’d learned that every bag of flour sold in the United States since World War II was enriched, replacing the vitamins and minerals that milling removed. I’d found out why niacin was among those vitamins, and I’d learned the saga of the heroic New York doctor who risked his life and reputation to find the cause of pellagra. One thing continued to bother me, however. I still wasn’t swallowing the conventional wisdom that corn was responsible for the pellagra epidemic. Certain facts didn’t add up, particularly the evidence that the American diet was moving from corn to wheat at the epidemic’s peak. What better place to understand what might have happened to wheat than at a roller mill?

  The steel-roller mill represented a radical departure from the way wheat had been milled into flour for millennia. Even before there was bread, wheat had been crushed with stone, first by hand, then, from about Roman times, with rotating stone wheels. In the mid-nineteenth century, a Hungarian inventor devised a milling process that ground the wheat between pairs of chilled-steel rollers, producing the whitest flour the world had ever seen. Much of this flour went to the royal court in Vienna, where it was prized for use in the delicate pastries we still call Viennoiserie, as well as in another Viennese invention, croissants. Americans who were treated to their first taste of these delicacies at the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition brought home a sweet tooth and a demand for European-style white flour.

  As it so happened, the American gristmill was reaching its limits at about the same time. Softer southern wheat was being replaced by hardier, high-yielding varieties of hard spring wheat grown in the northern plains, a wheat so hard that it resisted grinding, often becoming scorched from the heat of the millstone before it yielded to the pressure. And unlike winter wheat, whose bran tended to flake off in chunks through grinding and could easily be sifted out, this hard spring wheat had a more brittle bran husk, which shattered into fine particles that inevitably ended up in the flour, which was white in name only. Thus in 1878, when a large gristmill in Minneapolis, the milling center of the nation, was destroyed by a “flour bomb”—highly explosive flour dust suspended in air—killing eighteen people and leveling not only the mill but two adjacent mills and the surrounding business district as well, rather than rebuild the stone mill, the owner brought over some Hungarian engineers and built America’s first steel-roller mill.

  Within a few decades, the roller mill was well on its way to displacing the stone mill. Standing on the milling floor at Bay State, I could easily see why. Grain was flying through these machines at an incredible rate. These rollers ran virtually unattended, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and, unlike a stone mill, a roller mill didn’t need to be shut down every couple of weeks for dressing of the millstones.

  Given their reputation, the size of the rollers surprised me. I’d fully expected to see massive rollers on the order of a steamroller, but these were only about a foot in diameter and four feet long, individually enclosed in metal and glass boxes. There were dozens of them, but they weren’t all doing exactly the same thing.

  Mike had brought me to the first set of rollers the tempered grain passes through, the grooved break rollers. These gleaming steel rollers were rolling inward toward each other, but at different speeds, allowing the slower roller to grip the kernel while the teeth on the other one broke it open. The rollers were not crushing the grain at all but opening it up.

  “Think about the problem,” Mike explained. “You have to shave off the inside of a spherical object. How do you do that?” I was stumped. “Well, how do you get cantaloupe off the rind?”

  Suddenly it was clear. You start by breaking the kernel open so that subsequent steps can shave off the endosperm—the starchy part of the kernel that becomes white flour—from the bran. There would be eighteen passes through rollers in all, with further separation of bran and endosperm occurring at each stage. So, I asked, do rollers simply do this faster than stone wheels?

  Not just faster, but better, Mike explained. Stone mills crush the grain, so tiny bits of bran and germ, too small to be sifted out, end up in the white flour, while roller mills scrape as they peel the endosperm from the bran. In fact, they scrape so efficiently that if you wanted to build a devitaminization machine, you couldn’t do much better than a roller mill. Only 20 to 30 percent of the wheat’s original vitamins remain in the resulting white flour. The bulk of the nutrients are found in the pieces that are sieved out: the germ, the bran, and, most significantly, the aleurone layer, a thin coat under the bran where most of the B vitamins (including niacin) are stored. Why do we strip all the healthy stuff out of our flour? Because Katie isn’t the only one who loves croissants (and white bread and hamburger rolls). The goal is to get the bran out, and the vitamins are collateral damage. If millers had their way, they’d prefer to stop refining a little sooner, because the finer you mill the wheat, the more flour dust you create, and flour dust suspended in air is highly explosive, whether in a stone mill or a roller mill.

  Mike wasn’t eager to engage me on the subject, but I knew that mills are still blowing up all the time. In the decade preceding 1997—that’s 1997, not 1897—there were 129 explosions in flour mills and grain elevators, so imagine the risks a hundred years ago, before sophisticated filtration systems were developed.

  This mill certainly felt safe, if not antiseptic, but I was ready to move on. I had one last question for Mike. “When did the roller mill become popular in America?”

  He thought for a minute. “After the turn of the century. Many of the steel-roller mills running today were built in the teens and early twenties.”

  Bingo! The dates coincided precisely with the pellagra epidemic. For me, this was the last piece of the puzzle. I was more convinced than ever that bread, not corn, was responsible for the American pellagra epidemic, and I’d seen firsthand how it might have happened. However, I’d soon feel a little bit like Goldberger fighting the skeptical establishment myself. When I returned home, I e-mailed the author of a recent biography of Goldberger with my theory about the connection between white bread and pellagra.

>   “I, too, have heard the roller-milled white flour theory of pellagra,” he answered.

  So I wasn’t crazy. This was a legitimate (if obscure) theory.

  He continued, “I have not seen evidence to substantiate the claim.”

  Well, I had.

  WEEK

  34

  Blown Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August)

  His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

  —William Shakespeare

  The threshed wheat and chaff half-filled an eighteen-gallon plastic bucket. But how much of that was wheat? When I ran my hands through it, it seemed to be nearly all light, fluffy chaff. A couple of weeks went by before I had a chance to find out, when I awoke one morning, not to the call of my conscientious wheat-eater bird, but to the welcome sound of wind rustling in the leaves. A cold front had moved in, bringing dry air and a stiff breeze. It was a perfect day to winnow.

  Anne (lucky for her) was working, but Katie was free until the afternoon.

  “I have a deal for you,” I said as she stumbled downstairs mid-morning. “I’m going to give you a chance to do something that I guarantee no other kids in this town—maybe the county, even the state!—have ever done.”

  Katie knew a rat when she smelled it.

  “Does this involve wheat?” She had seen how tired Anne and I were after threshing.

  “It’ll be fun. Trust me.” For once, I was right.

  Winnowing wheat—another chore taken care of by the combine right in the field as it cuts and threshes — is traditionally done by tossing the wheat and chaff into the air with a pitchfork. In even a light breeze, the chaff drifts off with the wind, while the denser kernels fall to the ground.

  With the stiff breeze at hand, this looked to be a snap. Katie and I spread out the tarp, stood near the center with our backs to the wind, dipped our cupped hands into the bucket, and tossed the grain into the air like a couple of referees throwing a jump ball.

  At that precise moment, the wind reversed 180 degrees and blew the chaff back into our faces. The wind was both erratic and shift ing. When it did strike, though, we quickly tossed handfuls of wheat into the air, marveling as the chaff drifted away. Soon we had gone through the bucket. What fell back onto the tarp was cleaner, but still half-chaff. We broke for lunch.

  “This isn’t looking good,” I said over a sandwich.

  “We’ll get there eventually, Dad,” Katie chirped, always the optimist.

  “That’s not what I mean. I think that bucket is all chaff. We’ll be lucky to get a loaf of bread out of this.”

  Katie plucked a few grains of wheat out of her hair and handed them to me, a touching gesture. Truly we had nothing to spare.

  After lunch, we continued winnowing, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, as we continued to go through the shrinking pile again and again, each time decreasing the proportion of chaff in the wheat, a small hill of golden grain started to rise on the tarp, covering Katie’s bare feet and reaching to her ankle bracelet.

  She giggled. “Dad, we’re making wheat! I’ll bet we’ve got enough for a dozen croissants right here!”

  By the time Katie hopped on her bike and headed to her lifeguard job at the town pool, the bucket was mostly clean wheat. Winnowing the last 10 percent, however, threatened to be 90 percent of the work, given the erratic winds. The remaining work was lonely and frustrating without Katie. If I tossed modestly, too much chaff returned to the ground. If I tossed higher, a sudden gust often carried some of the precious grain away with the chaff. Then I had a brainstorm. If chaff is that light, it should float in water, no? Wheat kernels, on the other hand, would sink. Couldn’t I take advantage of this to quickly do the final cleaning? All I had to do was run some water into the bucket of wheat, skim off the chaff, and spread the remaining grain out on the tarp to dry.

  Just to be sure, I did an Internet search with the terms “wheat winnow water” and found myself reading the abstract of an article from a scholarly journal. It seemed I wasn’t the first to hit upon the idea. Gorillas in the wild have long been observed separating wheat from chaff by crushing it in their hands, then blowing the chaff away—exactly the same method of threshing and winnowing that the farmer Erle Zuill had demonstrated. What was exciting in this article, however, was that the author had found a family of gorillas who’d learned a new, more efficient method: dipping a handful of wheat and chaff in a stream and letting the chaff float away.

  Wow—my idea had been validated by apes! Still, I couldn’t find any mention on the Internet of humans actually cleaning wheat this way, so before proceeding, I sent off an e-mail to Mike Dooley at the mill. A beep on my laptop signaled his reply a few minutes later.

  Bill,

  I would certainly try to avoid using the water. You take a risk of causing the wheat to germinate. Once germination starts, enzymatic reactions commence which convert starches into usable energy in the form of sugars, a process called malting. This will destroy your bread-baking abilities . . . (but might be a nice addition to a milk shake). Very impressive approach by the gorillas . . . but my experience has taught me that very few made it past the first semester of Milling Science and Management in the ’70s while I was in school!

  Point taken. Mike suggested I use an electric fan instead to free me from the vagaries of the temperamental wind. I figured that another few hours on the tarp in front of the fan would get the job done.

  Except that when I finally got around to doing the last of the winnowing, I discovered that many of what looked like clean wheat berries were, on closer examination, still encased in a thin membrane of husk. It took another full day of rubbing the wheat on an old window screen, a handful at a time, to remove these stubborn husks, leaving my hands raw for days afterward. In the end, though, I had wheat.

  From my small planting, I’d harvested twenty pounds of beautiful golden wheat! Yet it wasn’t the amount I’d grown that moved me; it was something less tangible. Nothing I had ever grown in the garden—not corn, tomatoes, leeks, or roses—had given me as much of a sense of accomplishment as growing wheat. I suspected I had tapped into some genomic key, connecting with my agricultural ancestors on the Russian steppe some two, five, even ten thousand years ago.

  I’d reestablished a connection I hadn’t known I’d missed. Misty-eyed, I felt as if I’d just done something very important, but I couldn’t quite say what or why. I suddenly wanted to know more about my ancestors—that is, my father’s ancestors, those Russian peasants and coal miners and priests—who had survived centuries of harsh nature and harsher rulers. I thought about how locally grown, milled, and baked bread was almost certainly the only thing standing between life and death for my great-great-grandfather. That wasn’t so long ago, just four generations.

  Yielding to a sudden urge, I went out to the garden and, using a hoe, started turning the stubby remains of the wheat back into the soil, giving it a proper burial. As I settled into my to-and-fro rhythm, replicating the survival strategies of my ancestors, I found myself again thinking about why I’d been drawn to bread, to wheat. Was I satisfying some biological or emotional imperative, witnessing the resurfacing of a suppressed primitive urge?

  Drifting off to sleep that night, in a state between wakefulness and unconsciousness, I had a kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey experience, feeling myself racing backward through the centuries, seeing my ancestors living in cities, then, moving back in time, in villages, huts, and caves, all the while growing rye and wheat, planting and harvesting, threshing and winnowing. Growing and harvesting wheat had connected me to the ages, triggering an unexpected awakening. And I hadn’t even ground it into flour yet.

  WEEK

  35

  Lecture to Young Men on Chastity

  Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness an
d sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, headache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, spinal diseases, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy.

  —Sylvester Graham,* on the perils of frequent (more than monthly) copulation between married couples, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 1834

  WEEK

  36

  Terror Firma

  I’ve built . . . full-sized ovens in half a day.

  —Kiko Denzer, Build Your Own Earth Oven, 2007

  How to Build an Earth Oven in a Weekend; or, A Recipe for Disaster

  1. Set aside a month of weekends, because regardless of what Kiko Denzer writes (and preaches in Maine), that’s closer to what you’re going to need.

  2. Drag your son out of bed at the crack of dawn and, using pickax and shovel, dig a footing deep enough to reach the frost line (allegedly forty inches in my neighborhood, but you may have to settle for less) and wide enough for a grave, because before the project is over, you’re going to want to kill yourself, I guarantee it. With any luck, you will strike clay, which you should set aside for the oven itself, which you will get around to building later. Much later.

  3. Instead of simply ordering a load of stone from your local building-supply company, who would dump it in a convenient location adjacent to the hole, follow Denzer’s post hippie admonition to fill your footing/grave with “urbanite,” his word* for the debris you scavenge in your yard and neighborhood. As much work as this is, it does have the advantage of cleaning your yard of old bird feeders, hardened sacks of mortar mix, lawn mowers, and other junk your town won’t take.