Hot Bread, Warm Planet

flour, climate change, and whole grains

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I wrote this piece after reading the article “Food As You Know It Is About to Change” by David Wallace-Wells. I was on a long-haul flight and had too much time to think about its message: climate change is not only changing what we eat now, but what we’ll be growing in the future. 

Sitting in steerage, contributing to greenhouse emissions as the jet fuel below propelled me back to America, I realized that too much of the climate change and food discussion is about innovation: it’s about fixing systems which aren’t totally broken and about finding ultra-profitable and patentable solutions for Tech and Ag. All the while, as productivity (stimulated by innovation) is claimed to be the end-all to hunger, People and Planet continue to starve and degrade.

I don’t think the discussion should be about innovation, a proposed solution which has failed us in many, many ways. Instead, we need to start looking at how we eat what we already grow. Because what we grow, and how we eat it, are not just facets of climate change. They’re its main ingredient. 

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Wallace-Wells states that the main solution for food’s role in climate change is “adaptation and innovation.” He cites startling statistics–the price of food in the U.S. has increased by 21% in the past three years; we are using more land to grow less food; global obesity and undernourishment are up while our food’s micronutrient density is down. He bundles these issues and the many more we’re facing into the phrase “a food polycrisis.” 

Such a call to arms for agricultural innovation has always given itself the challenge “to feed a growing world.” This bell has tolled for centuries and its intention is an honorable endeavor. From Fritz Haber’s fertilizers to Borlaug’s dwarf wheat, Science has successfully applied its arsenal of R&D to seeds and soil. Innovation–along with its corollary PROGRESS!–was always its crucible. But in the process gastronomy, ecology, foodways, and genetic diversity were mauled by its innovations. 

Norman Borlaug, in a field of ripe (dwarf) wheat, 1960s. A generation earlier, the wheat would have been twice as tall. Image source.

For the past fifteen years I’ve been saying that grains are the most misunderstood and neglected ingredient in our cuisine. Whether it’s corn or wheat or sorghum or rice, the foundation of a healthy diet–for the planet and its people–are complex carbohydrates. Properly fermented whole grains provide everything the human body needs: from protein to polyunsaturated fats, from amino acids to choline. They also aid the earth in the sequestration of carbon, in complex root systems which encourage microbially-rich soils, and as rotational crops which encourage diversity and habitat flexibility. 

And I agree that we need to feed a growing world. But too many people continue to believe that we can grow our way out of what is actually an eating problem: food insecurity is the fault of humans, not nature. And most bakers–the world over–are getting flour wrong. In doing so, we’re perpetuating the problem.

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Wheat, the most widely grown crop on the planet, accounts for 1 out of every 5 calories consumed across the world. And the white flour made from it is treated by bakers and eaters alike as a product. But I’ve spent my career saying that flour is an ingredient. (I’m pretty sure it’s why I was a James Beard Finalist in 2020). I believe this not just from a culinary perspective: fresh, whole grain flour is deliciously alive and encourages bakers to respond creatively. But also from an ecological perspective–the self-stable, tasteless, colorless, anemic white flour we’re all used to is killing our bodies and the planet. 

Based on some airplane napkin math I did before coffee service, I estimate that 95% of the world consumes ultra-refined white flour. This product is made via roller milling. In this process the grain is moistened to make it pliable and then sent through a series of steel roller pins (between 8-16) which chaff and reduce the grain into finer and finer particles. If the massive digitized mills and the “miller” who babysits them are doing their job, 100 lbs of whole grain will yield 75 lbs of white flour. The other 25 lbs is a wasted byproduct which the mill sells for cereal or animal feed. (Imagine throwing away 25% of the ingredients you bought to make dinner!)

Cross section of a roller mill. Image source.

Before the invention of roller mills in the mid-19th century, the entire world used some variation of a stone mill. In these mills whole grains are placed between two stones and crushed. Unlike the roller mill, stone mills cannot distinguish between different particles of the outcoming flour. In other words: all 100 lbs of whole grains go, all 100 lbs come out as flour. 

Putting this in ecological terms: milling 75 lbs of unhealthy white flour requires eight to sixteen times more energy than milling 100 lbs of super-healthy whole grain flour. Not only that, but it takes 25% more acreage–and all the commensurate energy, inputs, transports, material, packing of the waste, and water–to make up the difference in total flour yield. 

So we’re committing three fatal acts when we’re buying and baking with white flour: we’re throwing out whole food to make refined food, we’re using more energy to transform whole grains into white flour, and we’re using more land and resources to compensate for this waste by growing more wheat we don’t need. All of this for a product which is making us, and in turn the planet, sicker with the cocktail of modern plagues: diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and colo-rectal cancer. 

Let me give you an example of how white flour hurts and works: pasta. That starchy, soporific comfort food which spikes our blood sugar and then quickly staggers our stamina. All major Italian pasta companies use durum wheat grown in the U.S. or Canada because Italy has limited arable land. What’s been happening for decades is that these companies–Barilla, De Cecco, etc.–corner the market on grain grown in Arizona, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. This wheat–where in Arizona it’s grown in the desert with patented seeds and government-subsidized water sold at below market prices–is then transported across the American continent, across the Atlantic, and finally delivered in Italy. (Barilla alone uses 3,086,471,671 lbs of grain per year). This North American wheat is then sent to local Italian roller mills which strip away about 25% of the grain’s total weight (that’s 771,617,918 lbs of nutritious wheat bran and germ discarded annually) to make white flour. Water is added and out comes pasta which then makes the journey back to North America to be sold in our supermarkets and restaurants. Talk about food miles. Talk about waste. Talk about a lack of innovation.

A man suffering from pellagra, USA early 1900s. When corn production reached the efficiency that wheat holds today–improved varietals, windfall yields, mechanized milling–the world faced a severe dietary crisis in spite of crop overproduction. The result was pellagra–a disease caused by the over-consumption of highly-refined and un-fermented starch. This human constructed plague rests at the intersection of climate change, gastronomy, and innovation. And it’s a warning of how dangerous highly refined foods are. Image source: Discover  

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The most poignant question from Wallace-Well’s article was this: “How [do we] extract more calories from less land and how…[can we do] so without bankrupting the earth and its soils along the way?” Although I used pasta as an example, the implications of white flour in all products–bread, cookies, cakes–are no different. 

I’ve traveled the world to teach and learn about baking–Eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Western Europe, North America. And everywhere I’ve gone ultra-refined white flour is pervasive. I’ve come to realize that one solution for the food and climate change crisis is to invert Wallace-Well’s statement: when we use white flour we are extracting less calories from more land and in doing so we are bankrupting the earth and its soils. So if we ate less, but more nutritionally dense bread made with regionally grown and milled whole grain flours, we’d get more quality calories and need less land to grow them. 

On the first point. I covered this fact above–that it takes about 100 lbs of whole grain to make 75 lbs of white flour: so we are wasting our wheat before we’re even eating it. The resulting white product is nutritionally vacuous–it lacks most of the essential vitamins, nutrients, and minerals found in whole grain flour. Not only does it take more resources to grow, mill, and transport; white flour gives us less energy and leaves us more hungry and less full because it is not a calorically dense food. So we need more of it just to feel half full. (Try eating an entire loaf of whole grain, naturally leavened bread from your local baker in one sitting. Impossible. Try eating an entire loaf of white flour bread, which is under or not fermented at all, from any supermarket in one sitting. Very possible). 

On the second point. The grains grown to make white flour require more inputs than the grains made into stone milled flour. These varietals are–as a rule–more disease prone, more thirsty, less flavorful, less calorically dense, and do awful damage to our soils and bowels. This is because wheat breeders throughout the country, following the well-intended precedent set by the Green Revolution, design wheat to be higher yielding, stronger, and more plump (so easier to shear off in the roller mills). The cost of these goals is unsurprising: these wheats require more fertilizers, more herbicides, more fungicides, more water, more sophisticated equipment, and more guidance to grow them successfully. Sometimes, but not always, these seeds are also patented. (I mention this again because the privatization of food solutions is a very dangerous integer in this already fragile equation). 

In essence, the problem we face with white flour has just as much to do with the planet as it does with the bakers using it: just as we’re dedicating more of our land to grow food to feed animals, we are also dedicating more of our ovens to bake loaves which don’t fully nourish us or sustain the earth. And as I wrote above, the climate change and food discussion should not be about innovation. It should be about how we’re eating what we already grow: to continue on this path of using ultra-refined white flour we harass our ecosystems by growing nutritionally decent wheat. But then we turn around and make this grain nutritionally deficient by refining it, throwing away all the parts which make it healthy and whole. In doing so, we contribute to climate change by mercilessly requiring more of what, in essence, we don’t need: we need to feed our growing world, but we also need to eat the growing world. 

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A dust storm approaching Rolla, Kansas, May 6, 1935. (Image: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives).  Plowing, perfectly innovated in the 19th century to feed the growing world, climaxed in agricultural and social disaster by the early 1930s. 

Value is the most neglected topic in the climate change and food discussion. Most people in the Western world do not balk at spending $18 on a cocktail, $6.50 on an oat milk latte, $15 on a glass of wine, or $9 on a pint of “craft” beer. Yet, if an artisan baker dares to charge $12 for a loaf of wholegrain, sourdough bread those same customers raise eyebrows and pinch pennies. This–despite the fact that none of the above things–require a fraction of the skill, labor, or technique it takes to make healthy and delicious bread. For whatever reason, right or wrong, most food consumers place a higher value on everything except bread. 

So the baker becomes a terrified reactor to the value others impose on their loaves. Scared to charge what they should, artisan bakers then devalue their craft by underselling the true cost of their work. Even worse, most of them run for cover from stone milled whole grain flour because it’s more expensive than processed white flour and they’re terrified of raising their already low prices. Not only does this fear hurt the earth, it also strangles the financial feasibility of bakeries as businesses. And it chokes the creativity of the baker who, instead of working with regionally grown and milled flour, uses the same dust as everyone else. The result is a global artisan baking culture which is defined by homogeneity: I find the same open-crumb single-score white flour batard from Malaysia to Montana, from Lima to London. Our loaves have become copies of copies of copies.

Chefs respond to ingredients everyday. Most of them embrace terroir–the belief that each ingredient is expressed by its particular place. The best ones cook with the whole animal and the entire plant. By choosing to use ingredients this way, value is preserved not just on the plate but in the soil. Doing so requires less energy for the planet and gives eaters more calories, fiber, fats, protein, minerals, and vitamins. Yet bakers neglect their main ingredient everyday: it comes on a pallet in a sealed bag and we scoop it out by the shovel full without once wondering about where it comes from or what it tastes like. 

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I care very much about the ecological cost of white flour. But I’m just as concerned by how we suffocate our creative potential as bakers by using the same lifeless product everyone else uses. If bakers began using freshly stone milled whole grain flour, we could eat less bread and be nourished more. We could restore integrity to our craft and value to our ingredients while preserving the health of the planet. Most inspiring is the creative potential of stone milled flours: unlike white flour, whole grain flours are alive. They are nutritionally dense and incredibly flavorful because everything that nature puts into whole grains is preserved in these flours. So instead of being an edible napkin like white flour, which bakers saturate with fat and salt and sugar and overripe sourdough to mask its vacuous taste like something, whole grain flours offer a full scale of texture, flavor, and nutrition which bakers can use to express themselves and where their flour comes from. After all, the food we make is a mirror. Might as well smile.

I know that the climate can be changed if bakers embrace their creativity by using whole grain flours. Otherwise, we’ll be culpable in its chaos. To me it’s clear that the world doesn’t need innovation: Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos don’t need to develop wheat to grow on Mars, thank you very much. (And God forbid if they ever make a baguette). Their kind of innovation is not necessary because the problem is not the solution: we need more food, yes. But really, we need to eat more of the food we already have. And if we re-oriented our growing of grains and baking with them–if we preserved their integrity and our own by using them whole–the planet would slowly heal by us using less. Because in turn, everyone would be getting more. 

I don’t know how hot bread on a warmer planet will look and taste. But I do know that right now we don’t need innovation. We don’t need special tractors, we don’t need research companies whose profitability is proportional to the problem, we don’t need silver bullets. And we don’t need heroes. We just need whole grains. 

The author with a loaf of whole grain bread. 2012.