Wheat is a cereal plant derived from the wild triticum, a grass native to the Middle East. It has been cultivated since Neolithic times.
Wheat is the most widely grown cereal grain, occupying 17 percent of the total cultivated land in the world.
Archaeological records suggest that wheat was first cultivated in the Levant, a region of the Near East, around 9600 BC.
Warm dry regions produce the most valuable grain. The chief wheat producing areas of the world are the Ukraine, central and north-western USA, the Punjab in India, the Prairie provinces of Canada, parts of France and South Germany and south east Australia.
Wheat is also important in eastern and southern Africa. Wheat consumption has risen throughout Africa, and 90 percent of increased consumption in the past two decades has been provided by imports.
Norman Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009] was an American agronomist whose initiatives worldwide are said to have saved a billion lives. In the 1970's, he developed a new strain of wheat that was heavily disease resistant and could grow in very arid conditions. Between 1965 and 1970, Pakistan, Mexico, and India more than doubled their food supplies.
Wheat is the staple food for 35 percent of the world's population, and provides more calories and protein in the world's diet than any other crop.
It is the chief cereal used in bread making in temperate climates which suit its growth. However, wheat is killed by frost, and damp renders the grain soft.
A wheat crop will produce on average 7.5 tonnes of grain per hectare - that's enough to make 11,500 loaves of bread.
Flour is milled from the endosperm, the coatings of the grain producing bran and pollard.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans both liked their bread white; and color was one of the main tests for quality. Pliny wrote, "The wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread, for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria".
Wheat is used to make bread, but chaff is inedible and so thought worthless. The notion separate the wheat from the chaff appears in the Gospel of Matthew in which the winnowing of wheat and chaff is employed as a metaphor for the way we are judged by God.
The top quality pasta is made from the durum wheat which is found in the North Dakota region of the US.
Semolina is also prepared from wheat.
Wheat is a major ingredient in such foods as biscuits, crackers, porridge and breakfast cereal
Wheat can also be fermented to make ethanol, for alcoholic drinks, or biofuel.
A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can literally eat your plate.
Sometime in the early 1890s, at a Nebraska hotel, the inventor Henry Perky encountered a dyspeptic diner blending boiled wheat with cream. This gave him the idea of a product made of boiled wheat which he brought to his friend, William H. Ford, in Watertown, New York - a machinist by trade. Together, they developed a cereal manufacturing apparatus and on August 1, 1893 Perky patented a machine for the preparation of cereals for food, otherwise known as shredded wheat.
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| Pixibay |
Wheat is the most widely grown cereal grain, occupying 17 percent of the total cultivated land in the world.
Archaeological records suggest that wheat was first cultivated in the Levant, a region of the Near East, around 9600 BC.
Wheat is also important in eastern and southern Africa. Wheat consumption has risen throughout Africa, and 90 percent of increased consumption in the past two decades has been provided by imports.
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| A map of worldwide wheat production By AndrewMT |
Norman Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009] was an American agronomist whose initiatives worldwide are said to have saved a billion lives. In the 1970's, he developed a new strain of wheat that was heavily disease resistant and could grow in very arid conditions. Between 1965 and 1970, Pakistan, Mexico, and India more than doubled their food supplies.
Wheat is the staple food for 35 percent of the world's population, and provides more calories and protein in the world's diet than any other crop.
It is the chief cereal used in bread making in temperate climates which suit its growth. However, wheat is killed by frost, and damp renders the grain soft.
A wheat crop will produce on average 7.5 tonnes of grain per hectare - that's enough to make 11,500 loaves of bread.
 |
| Pixibay |
Flour is milled from the endosperm, the coatings of the grain producing bran and pollard.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans both liked their bread white; and color was one of the main tests for quality. Pliny wrote, "The wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread, for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria".
Wheat is used to make bread, but chaff is inedible and so thought worthless. The notion separate the wheat from the chaff appears in the Gospel of Matthew in which the winnowing of wheat and chaff is employed as a metaphor for the way we are judged by God.
The top quality pasta is made from the durum wheat which is found in the North Dakota region of the US.
Semolina is also prepared from wheat.
Wheat is a major ingredient in such foods as biscuits, crackers, porridge and breakfast cereal
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| Wheat is used in a variety of foods |
Wheat can also be fermented to make ethanol, for alcoholic drinks, or biofuel.
A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can literally eat your plate.
Sometime in the early 1890s, at a Nebraska hotel, the inventor Henry Perky encountered a dyspeptic diner blending boiled wheat with cream. This gave him the idea of a product made of boiled wheat which he brought to his friend, William H. Ford, in Watertown, New York - a machinist by trade. Together, they developed a cereal manufacturing apparatus and on August 1, 1893 Perky patented a machine for the preparation of cereals for food, otherwise known as shredded wheat.
Wheat fields were a fascination of Vincent van Gogh, and from his studio room at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, the artist worked on a group of paintings of the view from his window. During his stay, he made about twelve paintings showing the enclosed wheat field and the distant mountains in varying aspects. This 1889 work, Landscape from Saint-Rémy, is one of them.
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| Van Gogh Landscape from Saint-Rémy |
An allergy to wheat can cause coeliac disease, which makes the sufferer have diarrhea if they eat any food containing wheat.
The link between coeliac disease and wheat was identified during the Dutch famine of 1944. The Nazis sent all Dutch agricultural output to Germany, resulting in famine. Children with coeliac improved and mortality dropped to near zero, until after the war when the mortality rate spiked again.
At the age of 11 Alexander Graham Bell invented a device for separating wheat from its husk.
The genome of wheat is five times larger than the human genome.
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