I think food wins. Partly ’cause someday, I really do want somebody to buy the t-shirt! But also ’cause I realized that I have lots of places to write the other stuff, and also… ’cause, even though I can’t think of much to say about walking in the dew through the garden to pick cabbage, I do love the foodies. :)

Anyway, I want to talk about flatbread.

I love this because it’s made from actual whole wheat. Not “50% whole wheat” like the stuff I’ve been seeing at the store. And the coolest thing is that it’s so easy that even I succeeded in making it the first time.

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 Tablespoon active yeast
• 2 Tablespoons honey (the yeast needs a real sugar to be quick)
• 2 1/2 cups fresh whole wheat flour
• 2 Tablespoons oil
• 1 teaspoon salt

Mix the water and honey, sprinkle on the yeast and stir it in. Stir in about half the flour. Set the bowl in a warm place for about ten minutes. Mix together the rest of the flour, the salt, and the oil, and blend it with the first part.

Squish it in your hands or knead it for about ten minutes. Roll the dough in balls, about 2″ in diameter.

Roll out each ball until it’s 1/8″ thick or so. You don’t want them paper thin… try experimenting.

I cooked mine in an iron skillet that I’d heated to “medium” — Lay the flattened dough in the hot, ungreased pan, and cook for 1-2 minutes per side. (Use the lid to hold in heat, if you like.) You could also cook them on a stone in a 500+ degree oven, but I liked using the iron skillet, and it worked well.

I can’t believe how easy it was!

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beef loving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until now.—Michael Pollan

A Canary in a Coal Mine

It’s said that coal miners would keep a canary in the mine with them, because the canary would react to dangerous situations (gasses in the air) before the miners could detect them. If the canary keeled over dead, the miners knew to get out of there!

I think I — and people like me — are just like those canaries. I’ve spend a lifetime eating industrial food, culminating in a couple of decades of high-fructose corn syrup in everything from salty snacks to spaghetti sauce to… yes, bread. The result? A condition that runs in my family, variously known as Metabolic Syndrome, Syndrome X, Dysmetabolic Syndrome, Insulin Resistance, or pre-diabetes.

And “normal” people all seem to think they’re immune. I want to say “People! Stop doing this! Your body will rebel too, eventually.” You might think you’ve escaped it, but did you know that 20% of people aged 60 or older have diabetes? Twenty percent! Obesity rates have soared over the last 20 years. Is that because our characters have become weaker and weaker? Or maybe because we’re eating junk?

It’s not bread’s fault

I’m pretty sure that real wheat, ground whole, and mixed with water and allowed to grow yeasty, then baked, isn’t the murderous villain that it’s cousins are. (By cousins, of course, I mean everything from Wonder Bread, made of styrofoam, I think, to the “100% Whole Wheat” bread available at the local grocery.)

But my body doesn’t work anymore. I’m afraid it might be too late for me to give up industrial food.

Industrial Low Carb Bread from Hell

Some times when I’m sick of not eating bread, I get this lovely stuff from Great Harvest. It’s pretty good. Not heirloom wheat allowed to rise slowly, without sweetners to rush the yeast, but it’s still good.

Other times, though, when I know that bread is making my insulin levels soar, and wearing out my pancreas, or whatever, I break down and buy — and eat — crap like this “5 Net Carbs” bread. Sad, but true.

I’ve talked about sugar-free chocolate, and the mix of xylitol and stevia I use. I’ll even admit to the occasional diet soda. Until you’ve had to give up your own home-made jams, most bread and grains, and every single sweet thing you’ve ever eaten, don’t judge me for the soda pop, ok?

Real hippies eat grains

I want to eat a lovely, sustainable, grain-based diet. I also don’t want to die early, having achieved full-blown diabetes and a weight over 300 lbs by my 50th birthday, blindness by 60, soon followed by amputated limbs, and, eventually, death. What’s a hippy to do?

For now, I’m aiming for some balance, however frustrating. I have a few industrial food-like substances that serve as crutches. And I’m gambling that a real food diet, with a reasonable amount of whole, real grains (and I don’t mean this stuff) will help me recover before it kills me. I allow myself one slice of Great Harvest bread with my local, delicious eggs in the morning, even though I shouldn’t, and I eat brown rice or millet with dinner.

Come back and ask me in a few years, and I’ll tell you whether it worked or not.

When I started learning to bake bread, I found a lot of sources that said “Whole wheat bread won’t rise. You have to blend in some white flour too.” Then I found sources that said you don’t need white flour, you just have to add a little wheat gluten to make it rise. I thought that was kind of weird, because surely they made bread before refining methods were so… um, refined. Right?

If you’re lucky, you live near a Great Harvest Bread Company. This place is where I learned, years ago, that the idea that you can’t make whole wheat bread without adding a little white flour or wheat gluten was just false.

What they told me was that if you grind your wheat fresh, it will rise, even without the added fluffers. So, right there in the little franchise bakery (there are no mega-franchises; they range from one to a few stores) they stone-grind the wheat, and the next day they bake it into fresh loaves, with an ingredient list that says something like this:

ORGANIC STONE-GROUND WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, YEAST, SALT, HONEY.

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

I’m learning now from the folks at grain.org that the sweetner, which feeds the yeast, isn’t necessary either if you’re willing to let your bread rise a little longer, and I’m excited about their methods. But for now, Great Harvest still seems pretty darn cool.

Coming soon: Baking bread at home.

WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CRACKED WHEAT, HONEY, WHEAT GLUTEN, SALT, YEAST, SOYBEAN OIL, MOLASSES, WHEAT BRAN, RAISIN JUICE CONCENTRATE, CALCIUM PROPIONATE (PRESERVATIVE), GRAIN VINEGAR, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, MONOGLYCERIDES, CALCIUM SULFATE, ASCORBIC ACID (DOUGH CONDITIONER), SOY LECITHIN, AZODICARBONAMIDE.

I’m sure you’ve guessed I have a problem with this. I’ll skip the High Fructose Corn Syrup for now. And as usual, I have no idea what the big words mean. What I do know is that wheat gluten is not “whole wheat.”

See, before the “100%” craze, we used to get snowed by “whole wheat bread” which was made with both white flour (called “enriched wheat flour” on the label) and whole wheat flour, often mostly the former. Why? Because it’s easier to get bread to rise and be fluffy if it’s stripped of the stuff that makes it *substantial* — the bran and the germ. White, high-gluten flour makes fluffy (stryofoam) bread. People liked this.

Then people caught on to the ruse. “Whole wheat” bread is full of white flour, and isn’t “healthy” after all. The solution? Well, if you’re Wonder Bread (or Safeway, or Kroger, or…) you solve this problem by selling “100% whole wheat bread,” and adding something that doesn’t count as white flour, but is in fact what I’d call extra-extra white flour, or the stripped-down wheat grain: wheat gluten.

All wheat contains some gluten, and bread wheat contains relatively more than other kinds. But if 2% of the bread is added wheat gluten, that means the bread wasn’t made with just whatever gluten content the “hard” wheat had, but with some more ultra-refined wheat in addition. Hardly “100% whole wheat.”

As it happens, I have a child who won’t eat *food,* so I bought some of this stuff to keep him alive in the short run, while I work on helping him figure out the long run. And who knows? Maybe he’s one of the lucky ones who can tolerate this stuff.

Me, though — I require food.

Coming soon: Good news about bread!

Of course, you need calories to live, so consumers must be careful not to attempt to live on Diet Coke alone. “However,” says Becky Phlemming, vice president of corporate strategy for con-agra, “there is an easy solution. Wonder Bread has now created a 100% whole grain bread made from our albino wheat, so it’s still white as the driven snow.”

Stay tuned for more breaking news, including ingredients lists.

P.S. Some folks have told me they’re not sure if I’m serious. Well, I *am* serious, in that these products really exist. I’m not serious about them being good for you. Yuck!