Pirate's Cove

It’s always something with this doomsday cult. Did they have to do this during the previous Holocene warm periods? We know they had a lot of problems growing wheat during the Little Ice Age, which made making bread difficult

Can better bread be a climate change solution? These bakers think so

It’s a drizzly, cold spring day outside, but inside the Washington State University Breadlab in the Skagit Valley, richly scented steam billows out of a toasty commercial oven as baker Mel Darbyshire pulls out a tray of puffy mahogany loaves of bread.

“They look excellent,” she says, inhaling and examining their shiny, domed crusts. She pops one out of its tin and cuts into it. The slice looks exactly like the bread emoji — fluffy-topped and perfectly shaped — only this bread is a rich, warm brown on the inside.

That’s because it’s made from 100% whole wheat flour. And not just any whole wheat: a mix of different types of wheat called a “Climate Blend,” developed specifically to withstand the increasingly intense weather brought on by human-caused climate change. Both of those factors make this loaf a paragon for the future and a symbol of what bread can be in a climate-changed future.

On top of that, “it tastes amazing,” says Darbyshire.

That whole 1.6F increase in 174 years has been dangerous, eh?

That consistency has a price, says Jones. To produce flour that looks and behaves so consistently, the wheat it comes from has to be relatively uniform. That pushes farmers and wheat breeders to create and plant wheat varieties that are also relatively uniform, genetically selecting over time for plants of a certain height, or kernels a certain color and hardness.

Consistency is good for a product like flour; it helps keep a product like bread predictable. But it can be risky for plants themselves. In a field of plants that are genetically similar to each other — like siblings instead of two strangers from opposite sides of the world — a risk to one is a risk to all. A sensitivity to heat could wipe out a whole field, or region, if a heat wave comes along. A susceptibility to disease or pests could ruin a crop.

Jones, and many other crop scientists, have long been concerned that such selection also narrows the biodiversity of crops within a field, a farm, or even a whole region. That could, they think, increase the vulnerability of a crop. There are real-life examples of such disasters: Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s, for example, was driven by a potato blight disease that wiped out fields across the country and led to more than a million deaths.

But, that makes sense, because the climate, and the weather that makes up climate, is always changing. However, other reports say that wheat production is even more diversified than 100 years ago.

“If we have a chaotic climate, our strategy is to have genetic chaos in the field,” says Jones. “To strike back, to fight chaos with chaos.”