Akila, Saqqara, Egypt 2000 BCE

I’ll lay the loaves out to proof in the sun and then I’ll tell you a story. My name is Akila and I live in Saqqara. My husband works building the pyramids and every fortnight he brings us his wages as a bundle of grain as big around as he can carry. The government gets the grain from payment of taxes by the landowners. Every day, I take some stalks and whip them against the stairs. My daughters race to gather up all of the seeds and we go to the roof and toss them in a basket to blow away the chaff. We can also wave to my sisters on neighboring roofs. Then I put the grains onto the grinding stone under the stairs. The rhythmic motion is very soothing and the burst grains are so fragrant! Then it’s time to make the dough—my mother likes to help add the water and starter and knead it until it tells us it’s done. We also put a bit of dough in a jug with water in the sun to make the beer for next week. Later in the afternoon, I meet my sisters at the communal oven and we make each other laugh as we throw the dough against the hot stones. As I come through the door, my children beg for a piece of bread and I give them a little taste. For dinner, we’ll eat it with some soup I made from wild greens and for breakfast; we’ll have the leftovers with honey and cheese.

Then it’s time to make the dough—my mother likes to help add the water and starter and knead it until it tells us it’s done. We also put a bit of dough in a jug with water in the sun to make the beer for next week.

It is said that when we were nomadic, we gathered berries from bushes, fruits from trees, and dug roots out of the ground. We trapped small rodents and occasionally had a large antelope to roast and dry into jerky. Even before we settled down, we were experimenting with making bread. How ever did someone decide to grind these little green seeds, add water and bake them? Bread and beer are now almost all we eat. They are so delicious, I don’t even get tired of eating them. Over in Uruk, they tell a story about Enkidu, a wild man, who was persuaded to settle down after enjoying bread and beer with the peasants and became a pal to Gilgamesh. I guess the same thing happened to all of us.

You ask about rye, but to be honest, I can’t really tell the grains apart. I think we use rye sometimes but I’m not sure. Every time my husband brings grain, they vary. But all make very good bread and beer. I enjoy having the bread and beer be a bit different each week.

Aife, Gaul 400 AD

When the last tax cart squeaked off down the packed-earth tracks, the hills around our farm were quiet. I remember my brother dropped his play stick into the wheat stubble as autumn wind blew dust in our eyes. We didn’t know it was the last tax collector cart at the time, but no one returned the next season. No more squeaky wheels, no more hungry horses. No more fancy man standing in the straw-smelling doorway of father’s granary holding his tunic up off the dusty floor and staring at our wheat seed. He would stand and look and write and look and ignore father for so long and finally whisper how much wheat we would owe Rome come harvest time. No more mother bringing cider and fluffy wheat bread to the two soldiers lounging in the cart. 

When the tax carts didn’t return, father chose to plant more rye. More tall stalks that are thick down low and so, so thin up high and make a quiet sound on windy days and wrap you up as you hide with your dark, sour bread. The wheat grew up to my shoulders, but the rye grows higher than mother. The wheat needed hours of threshing to fall out of its itchy casing, but the rye berries scatter free even when a girl like me thwacks a sheaf against the floor. Brother and I used to pull rye plants out of the wheat rows because the Romans didn’t like it dirtying their flour. The rye plants were easy to spot, poking up, tall and blueish, out of the short green wheat. We pulled for days and weeks, and we fed some rye stalks to the oxen but saved the longer plants to repair the roof. 

Wheat for the kingdom, rye for the home, mother says, and we mix the sticky rye dough. Brother drapes a sack over his shoulders and pretends to be the ornery tax collector, tiptoeing across the floor and yelling about bitter seeds in the emperor’s flour. I cover my mouth to giggle, but I get too close and the rye dough sticks to my lips and chin, and everything becomes bright and sour in my nose.

Eddo, Tarwast 1693

Left palm half-full of rye kernels, Eddo was slowly pressing the tips of her fingers into the heel of her hand, feeling the texture of the grain that had been drying in the farmhouse in bundles for weeks now. The table she was sitting at was substantial, yet it did not fit all the mouths that needed to be fed in this household. At mealtimes, the younger ones would all stand, as the elders got a priority in seating. But right now, it was just her. Post-rye harvest, the main area of the farmhouse would become a rye drying facility and the family would move to the granary portion of the dwelling. Eddo had come to the kitchen space to mix some rye bread dough — though she would simply refer to it as bread dough because wheat was the grain of landlords and the flour used in town bakeries by German bakers. 

The dried-up scrapings from last week’s batch sprinkled with rye flour were the starter for this week’s bread. Not much grain was left from last year’s harvest and the new was not usable yet, so the flour from the landlord’s watermill was heavily supplemented with chaff.

There was a substantial piece of bread left from last week — the late season loaves did not appeal to the eaters as much, and there was also more fish and swedes to complement the bread. In the town bakeries, the size of the loaves was dependent on the market price of grain. The more expensive the grain, the smaller the loaves — that helped to keep the price of the loaf the same. But in peasant households, the loaves were always large, 20 pounds apiece, to feed everybody around the table, even those with no seat at it. Having fresh bread every day was a sign of wealth and power. Peasants had neither. 

But what they did have was rye bread — toothsome, slightly smoky in flavor. The kneading would take hours, and Eddo would be walking around the trough to make sure that all the dough would get attention. Once done with the kneading, Eddo coated the dough with a layer of flour and pressed a cross mark into it. She covered the trough with her husband’s winter coat. 

The space was slowly filling with smoke from the stove — time to open the door and let some fresh air in. Her eyes were stinging. Eddo did not know yet that the price of rye — in addition to many workdays in their landlord’s fields — was her own eyesight as a result of living in a smokey dwelling. But after all those years of laboring in the house, she knew exactly how to find her way around it. And maybe it was better she did not need to see the impact of another war and another plague that severed the land.

Amy, Durham, Connecticut 1860

My dearest sister,

The laundry is finally hung on the line in the attic, and I have a moment to scratch out a few words to you. I hope Mother’s feeling better and that Sally’s making good progress on her sampler. It was so good to see you last week. 

I went to hear Pastor Miller preach yesterday and was so moved, I decided to sign a temperance pledge. No more rye for me! I have developed a taste for it, I admit. I had started drinking whiskey as an alternative to rum, to protest the sugar plantations that use slaves as labor. Just as I only use maple sugar as a sweetener at present. I fervently hope that these protests can help rid us of that abominable practice.

Our own rye crop did well this year—40 bushels! And it was so beautiful just before harvest swaying in the wind. We have enough to use for bread and animal feed and still have some to barter for the Smith’s bacon. I love making that corn-potato chowder with the bacon and then letting the crusty three grain bread soak in the juices.

Our milling business is slowing down, though. Our neighbors are selling their rye and barley to the distilleries rather than making it into flour. It feels a bit wasteful to take such a valuable foodstuff and make it into whiskey! But the tannery and bone mill are still doing well, so I may be able to go to Hale’s and buy a few yards of that black and white checked mohair for a new winter dress.

I miss you and can’t wait until I’m in your dear presence again!

Your loving sister,

Amy

Irma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1938

I’m finally going to give those bread pans away. I haven’t baked my own bread since Jimmy was born. That Wonderbread from the A&P is SO delicious—have you seen Gertrude Nieson in that glamorous red dress in the newspaper ads? My Jimmy loves his PB&J on it and it has all the vitamins and minerals he needs to grow big and strong!

I did enjoy baking bread with Grandma, but it seemed like the flour was nicer to work with back then. Now, it feels so chalky. She also had leaven that bubbled like magic in her pantry—but who knows what germs were in that! Just like who knows what germs were in the breads made by those Poles in the basement bakery! The ad says, “No hands have touched Wonderbread!”

Have you tried that new casserole with Wonderbread layers alternating with Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup? Jimmy likes it with the crusts cut off but loves the melted Velveeta on top.

My husband just bought me an electric range—our first! It’s a pearly white enamel with slender, curvy legs and such a change from the massive cast-iron stove I had before. I’m still getting used to it and I’m not sure it really holds its temperature, but it is very pretty, and Edith and Jean are so envious.

I’m so glad I don’t have to spend as much time as Grandma did in the kitchen. I get to take Jimmy to the park after school and talk with the other mothers while the kids swing to their heart’s content.

Rye? Isn’t that what the Poles eat? And poor people in Europe? Wheat is grown in the United States of America! Why would I want to eat rye?

Tiina, Jõgeva, Soviet Union 1973

“Germination estimate in October was 80%, current winter survival rate is 60%. There’s some snow mold damage on the northeast corner of the field. Weed pressure is very low but that’s what you’d expect of course. The soil hasn’t fully defrosted yet,” explains Tiina to her new field assistant. Külli nods as she is taking notes in her lined journal. It started drizzling again and some of her writing is morphing into obscure blotches of ink. Tiina is back in the field after several months away due to her mastectomy and Külli is here to provide assistance where needed. The breast cancer diagnosis was so unexpected and delayed her dissertation work, yet the rye kept on growing. Now she needs to meticulously record what has happened when she was away. 

Tiina’s hope is to work on increasing the winter hardiness of rye by selecting from the existing varieties, making crosses, and then making selections again. It all takes patience and time. She is testing the plants for their resilience whilst life is putting her own resilience to a test. She can only hope that her success rate will be as high as that of the population she has been working on. Some losses along the way seem inevitable—her rye has experienced that as well. Now she is watching Külli walk around the test plots, kneeling at times to get a better look. ‘A good sign!’ she thinks to herself. She has always been skeptical of those assistants who have previously been working on self-pollinating species. It seems to her that they are lacking the discipline and rigor that the cross-pollinating rye requires. Maybe Külli will be different?

Larger kolkhozes have now started applying growth regulators to rye to decrease its height. Initially, the sight of dwarfed rye was a bit unnerving for Tiina. Without the height, it seemed that rye was lacking in something. But sometimes parts of you might need to go to allow for your continued presence. Straw that was used as animal bedding or mulch on smaller homesteads has become useless for larger operations. Also, big combines work best in combination with uniform fields. Nobody has time to slow down and regulate the height of the header to make sure the lodged rye gets harvested as well. Those not fit get left behind. There are production goals that need to be met. Science has come so far; we can truly make the plant be the way we want it to be. Maybe soon we will be able to make winters warmer rather than select for the most winter hardy specimens?

Tiina’s mental meanderings have taken her far from the rye plots. She needs to get back to counting the seedlings and taking measurements. Disciplined data collection is the way forward in science, that is something she firmly believes in, that is why she is working towards becoming an agronomist, or maybe a breeder. ‘Nature will be totally transformed to be in service of humans. Nature, thus far deemed insurmountable, will be finally surmounted by the Soviets,’ proclaimed the introductory pages of Stalinist Reorganization of Nature and Development of Agriculture in the Soviet Union that she had been reading last night. She was not sure if she was fully convinced by those idealistic stances from the late 1950s but surely decreasing yield losses by scientific means would be a good thing indeed.

Taavet, Raplamaa, Estonia 2003

The dusk had not fallen yet—it almost never does this time of the year. A shimmer of light is always lingering close to the horizon. Every single muscle in Taavet’s body was aching. There were big orders that he needed to fill and no one to help. The three mills had been running non-stop since dawn. The order of operations remained the same. Fill the hopper, check the quality of the flour, set up the sifters where necessary, label the bags, scoop the flour into the bags—over and over and over again. He was relieved that the business was finally doing well enough to pay him a living. His uncle Ülo had been skeptical of the entire undertaking and Taavet was delighted to prove him wrong for once. 

Ülo believed expanding the farm was where the profit lay. The principle was simple: growing the same number of crops but expanding the acreage. No need to make it overly complicated. But making things complicated was where Taavet excelled. He wanted to grow a wider range of grains, build a milling operation, and purchase a dehuller for spelt and barley and a flaker for all the cereal grains. Taavet’s grandfather had been a miller and he was of the opinion that the knowledge of milling must run in his veins. How hard could it possibly be? Of course, actually getting the machinery up and running proved to be challenging enough but he was too proud and stubborn to admit that to his relatives, and to Ülo in particular. 

Taavet was convinced that there was something empowering and almost primordial in growing grains for people and then processing the harvest for them to turn into something digestible. He was growing Sangaste, quite possibly the oldest rye variety there is, and milling it coarsely because that is how the local bakers wanted it. Taavet liked the seasonal nature of his orders. Winter was always the season of rye flour, summer—the season of wheat. But a farmer needs to plan ahead and predict the demand for the following year. He tried to err on the side of caution—better to plant too much than too little. Nothing worse than having to say no to a request because you have run out of grains. Yet here he was—about to mow down a significant portion of his rye field. 

It was approaching midnight, and he was standing in his sturdy boots, a field of oats to his left, a field of barley to his right, and rye straight ahead, underneath a young moon. He started by honing the scythe, something that he remembered his grandfather teaching him when he was barely taller than the scythe. Left-right, left-right, left-right, from the bottom to the top. The neighbor’s dog started barking at something, but Taavet could barely hear the mutt. He was thinking about the Saturday ahead, the day when his to-be wife would walk down the rye aisle he was bringing into being at that very moment. He was creating his own path to happiness.

Rachel, Tartu, Estonia 2013

“Rachel dear, there’s something we forgot yesterday.”

“I got the bus ticket, Mom. Almost sold out but I snagged the last one. Glad I did, otherwise I’d arrive at the airport two hours too early!”

“No, the rye bread, Rachel. I forgot to mix the preferment last night.”

“Oh, Mom! M-ooo-m. But… I need the rye bread! I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. I need the rye bread.”

“Rachel, honey, I’m really sorry. It’s always those pre-departure days that get so overwhelmingly busy.”

A single tear appeared on Rachel’s bony cheek, then another one, and before long, she was weeping uncontrollably. Had a stranger walked past and peeked through the kitchen window at that very moment, they would have been sure something horrendous had just happened—like maybe the death of a family member. She felt self-conscious for her inconsolable sadness but only she knew how much she needed that rye bread for the Easter term ahead. Lonely days in the library and nights in her dorm room revising, she needed something to look forward to. If it could not be a hug from her mother because of the physical distance, it might as well be a slice of rye sourdough. Also, she needed to have some foods she could eat without that omnipresent guilt that struck her any time she would put anything other than water into her mouth. She was meticulously keeping track of everything she ate but made an exception for a slice or two of rye. Rye bread had always been touted as the fiber-rich health food, unlike many other items on the grocery store shelves that Rachel was mournfully craving.

Rachel’s brother was seemingly absorbed by the computer game in the living room, yet he had been observantly following the situation unfolding in the kitchen. He was so tired of it all by now. It was the third year into her anorexia. So much crying, so much guilt, so much drama over food. It was rather straightforward to him: you eat when you are hungry, and you stop when you are full. If you do not have home-made rye sourdough, you purchase it from the grocery store. His sister seemed smart enough to understand those very basic truths. To cry over a rye loaf that never came into existence seemed absurd to him. He loved his sister but sometimes, the end of the school break did not arrive soon enough.

For Rachel, those hefty rye loaves carried so much meaning and the comfort they brought outweighed the potential harm of the calories they entailed. Their supportive power also prevailed over the shame she was feeling at that very moment. The smell when a slice popped out of the toaster, the sweet-and-sour flavor… With rye bread within reach, the place in which she was struggling to be herself would feel a bit more like home. 

“Rachel, I really am sorry. What if we mixed the preferment right now?”

Jason, New Haven, Connecticut 2019

Before I took over running this bakery, I told my father that I really needed to understand bread, deeply. I needed to make smaller quantities and play with all kinds of flour which we’d try to source from local farmers. All the bread would be sourdough, and we’d proof it overnight in a cool room. Amazingly, he agreed and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few years.

But now it’s time for me to run the big operation—200 employees, 25,000 loaves a day, 10 tons of flour a day. We make a really good loaf—ciabatta is one of our best-sellers with a crisp crust and a tender flavorful interior. And we do a lot by hand—we have great employees who come from this immigrant neighborhood and really take pride in their work. We just invested $3 million in a 200-foot-long machine that gently stretches and shapes the dough—the wheat dough, where we are trying to develop the gluten without losing too much of the gas that will make it rise. Our oven is also 200 feet long with a metal conveyor belt and it takes a half a day to change the temperature, so we don’t change the kind of bread we bake very often.

So even though I fell in love with the flavor and heartiness of rye in the experimental bakery, I can’t figure out how to include more rye in the commercial bakery. Maybe we could try 10% without the dough gumming up the machinery. But would you even notice 10%? We do put some rye chops on top of one of the ciabattas.

Another challenge we have is our customers—the demand for rye bread is not there. People think they don’t want rye because they think it has a strong flavor and is too dense. They like familiar white breads. But they also want something nutritious. I’m not sure our business has the time and energy to educate people about the benefits of rye. 

Bringing more good bread into the world is deeply meaningful to me. Providing fair wages and safe and engaging jobs to people in New Haven is my calling. Keeping my father’s company flourishing is a legacy I value. In the best of all possible worlds, I would be able to do all of those things while making the kind of bread I made in the experimental bakery. But I’m still figuring out how to make that happen.

Christine, Portland, Oregon 2022

The slick sheen of the heated amalgamation of butter and chocolate and flour glistens so attractively in the warm afternoon sunlight. Christine, in the sixth hour of her shift, is absent-mindedly playing around with the sign that is placed next to the cocoa-rich slices of abundance. On one side, the orderly capitalized letters say ‘RYE BROWNIE — WRENS ABRUZZI FROM OLD OAK FARM’. The alternate side reads simply ‘BROWNIES’ with a small floral doodle on the lower right end of the sign. Whether or not the product signs should say something more about the origin of the grain is a contested issue at the bakery. Those in favor of more detail are seeing bakeries as harbingers of grain literacy, arguing that knowing more about their food would allow people to make more informed choices and also justify the higher price point of artisanal baked goods. Those against it claim that all the details are simply confusing the customers and detracting from what they should actually be focused on: the flavor.

Christine loves these brownies — it is probably her favorite accompaniment to her afternoon flat white. But adding that they are made with rye flour does not do much for her. ‘It’s like saying they’re fiber-rich brownies,’ she muses to herself. ‘And I don’t want to be thinking about my digestion when I’m eating something delicious.’ In fact, she often feels like she doesn’t want to think about the minutiae of her food purchases. Groceries are expensive enough, they eat up a lot of her salary, they need not be consuming her mental energy on top of that. Cover crop granola, regeneratively grown climate blend flour, carbon-neutral ham, slave-free chocolate… If these are the desirable options, why are there other ones on the market to begin with?

Christine’s eyes then wander to the bread shelf. The employees get to buy the leftover loaves at half the price at the end of the day and she is gauging her options. As always, the baguettes disappeared first, leaving a few regulars disappointed at 9.25am. ‘Ah, what am I going to serve to my guests then with the cheese course?!’ exclaimed one of them. But of course they did not leave empty-handed. Three years into her job, Christine has learnt that customers need to be listened to, but they also need to be given advice with great confidence. ‘You should get half a loaf of our country miche. I can slice it for you. Drizzle a bit of olive oil on top — we have some excellent Spanish ones, this year’s harvest, nice and grassy — and toast it.’ People rarely buy the whole miche though. It is substantial in its presence, large enough to feed a medieval family. 

Some customers come just for the rye loaves and they do not want to hear about anything else. Then there are those people who would not buy rye even if it meant leaving the bakery without anything. ‘Too dense!’ say some. ‘Too dark!’ say others. ‘Too sour!’ is another common complaint. But rye has time, it can wait on the shelf until the customers who appreciate its strong personality finally arrive. Christine does not know if today is the rye day for her. She still has some left from last week. Rye bread is so satiating that she rarely needs more than a slice at a time, so a loaf goes a long way. The desire for brownies though—that never fades.

Graham, Wisconsin 2023

It all came about when my wife, Marla, went to an art opening in Madison and came home with this image burned in her mind: an oil painting of tall, blue-green rye growing on the fertile soils of Ukraine. “But there was this trench, Graham,” she said, miming a hallway with her hands. “Soldiers had dug themselves into the rich soil, and they were tinkering with a drone below the towering rye.” The artist had stirred a solvent into the paint to make a delta of rye roots cut through the soil on either side of the weary soldiers. Marla said it was a cross-section of soil so dark with organic matter that you could paint a moon on it and think you’re looking at the night sky. We discussed it for hours – the artist’s decision to represent digital news images in timeless oil and brush, the striking resemblance between one of the soldiers and our nephew (so young!). Then Marla started cross-referencing the dark soil in the painting with extension service info about rye cover crops and soil carbon. And I got this hunch that rye, with its deep roots and its ability to build soil fertility, night sky soil fertility, might actually help me do something my father could never have imagined: bring our Wisconsin soil back from the brink of exhaustion.

My father—a grain farmer through and through—would never have considered planting rye. He was a wheat man, always looking for the next best variety, always chasing the newest super-wheat strains that could deliver head-turning yields. But, every year, after sowing was done, he would gripe about the cost of this designer fertilizer or that cutting-edge fungicide or some draconian payment plan on the new John Deere, and by harvest he was never in the right mindset to gloat about his record truckloads of grain. There was a lot of ego tied up in that bushel-chasing, and it led to quite a bit of isolation.

Marla and I did our walking loop around the fields this late-February morning. We sowed rye as a cover crop across our full 150 acres in mid-October, and it grew a couple inches before the snows came in December. For a couple weeks there, as the snow slowly accumulated, the fields were stark white with little dots of green, an ocean of mashed potatoes with chives. Today, high stepping through the deep February snowpack, Marla got the urge to drive her mittened hands down into the freezing stuff and check on what she called her babies. “How is it possibly still there?!” she asked. But there was the rye, dark green and ribbon-like, bent but not broken. “I swear it’s been growing under the snow!” she yelled. I cocked my head; it did look fuller than the last time we checked. Not taller, but thicker – you could hardly see the soil beneath it. I’ve heard rye can germinate in cold soil and survive hard winters. But growing under a ten-inch blanket of snow? Were we imagining this? 

Laura, Mount Vernon, Washington 2023

A scene so familiar to all the writers, and perhaps PhD students in particular. You enthusiastically open your laptop to write up in a structured fashion all the many things you have learnt (in this instance, over the course of four years of research). You repeat to yourself all the advice you have gotten: every first draft is perfect because all it needs to do is exist (I know, sounds cheesy); you cannot edit what you do not have; just write, something, anything. ‘A first draft is like brain fart — it might not be nice but it needs to get out,’ noted my playwright friend based in London a year before over a cup of tea. You open the document, you get seated more comfortably, you have a bottle of water next to you and some snacks. You stare at the screen with hope. There are thoughts in your head but for the world (or maybe most importantly, for the PhD committee) to know about them, you need to put those words down. Yet an hour passes, and you have used backspace more often than any of the letters on the keyboard.

I wish writing was more like taking a walk. If I am outside for an hour, I will have walked for an hour. I want the same thing from writing, that guarantee of an outcome. But when I intend to write for an hour, sometimes it is 50 minutes of fiddling and 10 minutes of writing and then I am disappointed in myself. With my dissertation, the heaviness was palpable. It was so hard to write because I desperately wanted to say something clever and important. I was investigating the meaning of rye, and I wanted my contribution to be meaningful. Now I was running the risk of losing sight of the playfulness and creativity that fuels my writing and my very being. 

My retired statistician friend drew some mind maps for me after having given me a reflexology session. ‘What if you think of yourself as a messenger for rye? What is it that rye might want the world to know?’ I was invigorated by her proposition but also a bit fearful. A new sense of care emerged within me towards my research subject — care for rye. But that further stifled the free flow of thoughts and ideas. Now I needed to do justice to a plant that I did not quite know how to communicate with. Trained in anthropology, I was very wary of overly anthropomorphizing my subject. Instead of giving rye its own voice in my dissertation, I decided to turn to rye for advice. 

I had become constrained by conventions and the fear of not being enough. I felt like I needed to be improved upon. Was rye not facing similar issues in the agricultural system? Shorten the straw, increase the yield. But what I value most about rye is that it is different, that it stands out. It is not for all farmers but some sure appreciate it. Rye bread is not for all eaters but there are fervent lovers of it. I do not need to be for everybody. My work does not have to be for everybody, but hopefully it adds to the diversity of voices and approaches and ideas.

I saw our spring rye population lodge due to the heavy rainfall just before harvest and I thought about people sometimes needing to lay low when the weight of the world becomes too much to carry. I also reached the conclusion that sometimes simply existing without any visible signs of productivity is an act of resistance in this goal-oriented world where everything needs to serve an intelligible purpose. 

Jeremy, New Haven, Connecticut 2024

So here is what we call America’s Smallest Grain Field. Also known as America’s Largest Bird Feeder. This twenty-by-sixty-foot field generates the least amount of market revenue of all the Yale Farm fields. But this might be our most narrative-rich field! This field brings college classes from over thirteen departments to the farm every year. A Russian Literature class threshes and winnows the rye in bed one and asks how Tolstoy and Chekhov might be over-romanticizing peasant labor. A class called Women, Food, and Culture bakes flatbreads with Ukranika Wheat from bed two and asks what such an experience might teach us about our transition from forager-hunters to agriculturalists. A classics course crouches down in the wheat beds and asks how these little calorie-dense, transportable, storable, steal-able grains occasioned the power and dominance of the Roman Empire. Studio Art graduate students use rye straw in sculpture installations, and an Evolutionary Biology course compares the processing energy needed for ancient Einkorn in bed three with the more modern Skagit 1109 Wheat in bed four.

You can learn a lot about a society—its power structures, its technology, its labor—by looking at the architecture of its grain plants. Take rye: see how it is towering seven feet above the ground? See all that straw and leafiness below the teetering seed heads? Those long, resilient stalks make great animal feed and bedding. They’re also good for roof repairs and toolmaking. See how some seed heads ripened way above my head, some ripened at eye level, and some ripened down by my chest? These uneven seed heads are probably best harvested by human hands rather than by a tractor combine. Think pre-industrial, think peasantry, think serfdom, think sickles, think scythes. Compare that with the Renan Wheat in bed five—see how this modern dwarf wheat is ripening just a couple feet off the ground? See the flat plane the Renan has ripened into, crisp like a tabletop? This is a grain that’s perfectly suited for capital-intensive agriculture. Its entire body has been designed to stand short and straight, never tip over in high winds, ripen uniformly, and be utterly available to harvest by a combine tractor. No extra stalks for draft animals or roof thatching – both of those needs are long gone in Renan-growing societies.

What you can’t see at the moment are the root systems below the ground. Let’s dig a clump of the tall rye—okay, see how, as I shake off the topsoil, these rye roots are looking copious, even smothering? A tangle of angel hair pasta? This is just a small fraction of the rye’s roots—most of the deeper rootlets snapped as I pulled. Each of these roots is doing some pretty advanced barter with soil microbes. Rye leaves make sugars from sunlight, and some of those sugars travel down to the roots and seep out of pores into the soil. These leaky sugars are called exudates. They are so valuable to the microbial life of soil that a sheath of microscopic life and death and drama forms around every root, a sheath called the rhizosphere. A soil ecologist once said that everything we consider to be soil—the dark, living, fertile layer that supports life—has been kissed by the rhizosphere. “A microbe sees most of the soil as the Sahara Desert,” he said. “The rhizospheres are the oases.” 

Maria, New Haven, Connecticut 2025

In my History of Sexuality seminar, we read diary entries from Yale student Albert Dodd in 1836 in which he obsesses over his love for Julia and his even stronger love for Anthony. My students are amazed that he doesn’t worry at all about self-labeling as a homosexual or bisexual, nor is he concerned about hiding these passions. He’s only concerned whether Anthony loves him back. But early psychiatrists looking for a way to establish the scope of their profession began to create long categorizations of sexual deviance (Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1889 noted more than 37 types) along with claims that they could be cured. The middle decades of the twentieth century produced a powerful cultural normalizing force for limited types of sex acts in the context of heterosexual married relationships, and made all other sexual practices seem disgusting and dangerous to society.

I developed a keynote presentation for the 2019 Grain Gathering conference that explored another striking historical phenomenon: in 1890, 90% of bread in America was baked at home; by 1930, 90% of bread was bought in a grocery store in a plastic bag. After 10,000 years of women baking bread at home, this dramatic change happened in only 40 years. Could the same normalizing forces be at work here as well?

What I love about this collection of vignettes is how it shows that at a small scale of farming and baking, a variety of grains can be accommodated, enjoyed and flourish. But when systems get larger and infrastructure more expensive, one type of grain (wheat for Western Europe and the US) gets normalized. Cooks and eaters lose their familiarity with and interest in other grains. What’s most fascinating is then how desires begin to align with that economic and structural normalization to prefer white fluffy breads and to find rye maybe even gross and disgusting. So, the forces working to normalize heterosexuality and to make homosexuality gross and disgusting are operating very broadly across culture.

I’ve found that once my students can identify how the cultural forces that elevate one of many to seem normal and natural, they can also envision the cultural practices that celebrate diversity and difference—among sexualities and grains! With the help of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s and 80s, the confident and varied gender expression of the twenty-first century, and changing laws and portrayals in popular culture, we can see the social and cultural power of understanding that a variety of sexual desires and genders are also natural and normal. Similarly, the health, economic, environmental and culinary benefits of growing, baking with and eating a variety of grains has grown with recent efforts to address climate change and food-related illness. Rye is making many friends these days. We are among them.