At a laboratory nicknamed the Bread Lab, researcher Stephen Jones, who looks like “a lovably geeky high school teacher,” is trying to re-invent bread, “the most important food in history,” says a New York Times Magazine story. “For nearly a century … America has grown wheat tailored to an industrial system designed to produce nutrient-poor flour and insipid, spongy breads soaked in preservatives. For the sake of profit and expediency, we forfeited pleasure and health,” writes Ferris Jabr. “The Bread Lab’s mission is to make regional grain farming viable once more, by creating entirely new kinds of wheat that unite the taste and wholesomeness of their ancestors with the robustness of their modern counterparts.”
Jones grew wheat on a campus farm while studying agronomy at Chico State University in California and learned the art of wheat breeding from an Idaho breeder. He worked on traditional wheat-breeding projects for a decade but found the objectives too confining. When he moved to the Skagit Valley, halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, to become director of a Washington State U research center, he discovered that wheat was an important part of crop rotations for the region’s fruit and vegetable growers, although they often lost money on it. Jones began wondering about the possibilities of wheat varieties bred for the cool and wet climate of western Washington State.
The research center now grows thousands of strains and Jones plans to release two lines this fall, “each of which makes excellent, nutty, moderately dark bread. Once released, the cultivars will either be freely distributed or sold affordably to farmers,” says the Times.