Eat Your Wheaties

What did you eat for breakfast today? A muffin? A bagel? Cereal? Pancakes? Toast? Chances are that your three squares will contain foods made with wheat. Did you ever wonder how that pizza crust got from a Kansas field to your table? Do you ever think about wheat at all?

The grain elevators which used to pierce the horizon of every Kansas town are called “the cathedrals of the plains.” In my grandparents small central Kansas town, “Bushels per acre” were the world’s most important statistic. Even more important that baseball stats. I thought about wheat a lot.

We lived in Northeastern Colorado and a drive to Kansas in early summer was a trip through the stages of the wheat harvest. We drove by golden fields ripe for threshing, past fields where a combine cut the wheat, and by stubble fields where the wheat had been harvested. Sometimes we got behind a combine en route from one farm to another, big lumbering machines that went very slow, giving a kid lots of time to think about . . . wheat.

Originally, wheat was a wild grass. It first grew in Mesopotamia and in what is now Iraq almost 10,000 years ago. The Egyptians discovered how to make yeast leavened breads between 2,000 and 3000, B.C. The workers who build the pyramids were paid in bread.

Wheat is not native to this country. It was grown as early as 1839 in the area that became Kansas, but back then growing wheat was considered a hobby. Late in the 19th century, Russian Mennonites settled in Kansas from the Ukraine, bringing a wheat called Turkey Red Winter Wheat. Kansas and the Great Plains were soon awash in amber waves of grain.

Wheat, then and now
· The commercial bread slicer was invented in 1928.
· Sliced bread and the introduction of the automatic toaster had increased the consumption of toast at breakfast.
· During the Second World War rationing, the sale of sliced bread was banned in an effort to keep prices down.
· In the United States today, wheat is grown on more acreage than any other grain
· 42 states produce wheat
· There are six different classes of wheat, and each class produces flour with unique characteristics.
· More foods are made with wheat than with any other cereal grain.
· Wheat contributes between 10 – 20% of the daily caloric intake for people in over 60 countries.
· There are more than 1000 varieties of bread on the market.
· Between 1866 and 1900 U.S. wheat production increased from 175 million bushels to 655 million bushels.
· Today, less than 2 percent of all Americans are engaged in farming, a huge drop from the 1900’s.
· Getting wheat to the mills and markets was greatly improved by the advent of cross-continental railroad service.
· Despite having fewer farmers, the United States is second in world in production.
· China is now the #1 producer of wheat.


Harvesting has changed over the years as technology advanced. In the early days of the 20th century, getting the wheat harvest in was a communal effort.
“Threshing” was the word used to describe the harvesting of wheat.

The threshing machine was never widely purchased by small farmers. They were very large and too expensive for the average farmer. Usually they were used in custom operations going from farm to farm. Custom crews still travel from the harvest, from Oklahoma to Minnesota.
The threshing machines did four different tasks. They removed grain, separated the grain from the husk, cleaned the grain, and then gathered or stacked it. Despite great advances mechanically and in computer control, the basic operation of the combine harvester has remained unchanged almost since it was invented.
In the mid-nineteen hundreds, manual labor produced a bushel in four and a half hours. In the 1940’s, new technologies in threshing meant that producing a bushel of wheat took only sixteen minutes. The farmers could get the wheat harvested before the next rainfall. Rain is the great enemy is ripe wheat.
Now, the modern combine has many luxuries, such as stereo systems, comfortable seats, and full air conditioning.

Feeding the threshing crews was always a big job. “He ate like a thresher,” was how my grandma always described a man with a big appetite. On the farm, “dinner” was the noon meal, the big one.

Roy Webster of Hesston, Kansas remembers, “Eating threshing crew dinner was like eating Sunday dinners six days a week. Each man got fried chicken and ham, two helpings of mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, homemade bread and butter, a huge piece of apple or cherry pie, and a chunk of devils food cake smeared with a rich, creamy layer of devil’s food icing”

The farm wife and her helpers would rise at dawn to bake the pies and ham and fry the 6 -8 free range chickens. Drinks were coffee, cold tea, sweet milk, or butter milk.” These gigantic meals were transported out to the fields so the crew did not have to trek back to the farm house.

Now sometimes even the “Colonel” or Burger King caters the dinners, but there is still friendship, cooperation, sharing, and at the end of the harvest, large home-cooked communal dinners where the farmers celebrate bringing in the sheaves. We should celebrate them, too.

At your next meal, when you butter a role or a slice of bread, think for a moment of the Kansas wheat farmer, and all those generations who went before, casting their eyes to the sky, hoping it won’t rain on the amber waves until they are safe inside the grain elevators.


The Natural History of Wheat." Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. The Gale Group, Inc, 2003. Answers.com 15 Apr. 2007. http://www.answers.com/topic/the-natural-history-of-wheat

Roots: Continuing Generations John R. Hess, 1828 – 1897.

Kansas State Historical Society, Wheat People.

Cyberspace Ag: Visit a Farm: A Kansas Wheat Harvest