One of my greatest fears in life is that I’ll find out I’m gluten-intolerant, because there is almost nothing I love to eat more than really good bread. (I know that there is bread made with non-wheat flour, but … it’s just not the same.) But it turns out, according to Pacific Standard, that there’s a strain of heritage wheat that even gluten-sensitive people might be able to digest. It’s nutty-tasting, and it has an excellent name: “einkorn,” which I’m going to roughly translate as The One True Grain.
Einkorn was apparently the first cultivated wheat, and it has an different gluten structure — one that’s easier to digest — than most of the wheat we eat today. One theory about gluten intolerance is that humanity brought this curse down upon itself by adding species like “goat grass” into the wheat strain. (And I mean, come on! Did we really think that our digestive systems could handle a grass associated with an animal that can eat basically anything it encounters? We humans are delicate flowers compared to goats.) By going back to the original wheat, we can erase all the fiddling we’ve done and maybe give a break to the digestive systems of people who do not have as much in common with goats as the rest of us do.
