October 30, 2017 The Nation. 19
O
n an august morning in minneapolis, i sat at a
wooden table inside the Birchwood Cafe, a bright, cheer-
ful restaurant a few blocks from the Mississippi River
waterfront, tasting an éclair as attentively as I could. The
flavor I wanted to detect was partly obscured by more
conspicuous ingredients: a high-pitched, jammy blueberry glaze painted
across the top of the pastry, and the sweet song of a yellow corn custard.
But beneath that, there was a subtle and earthy background note: the grain.
The pastry was made in part from wheat flour, but you could detect another
ingredient as well—something that tasted like nuts and crackers, coffee and
grass. That flavor came from Kernza, a grain almost entirely unknown to
the human diet until a few years ago, when the Birchwood became one of
the first places in the country to serve it, and the first to list it on the menu.
Tracy Singleton, the café’s owner, likes getting people, including herself, to
cal family of grasses. Three grains provide about half of
the world’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice (the only one of
the three that is occasionally cultivated as a perennial in
the tropics). In the United States, about 46 million acres
of land are covered with wheat and 91 million with corn,
a combined area bigger than New Mexico. Mostly, these
grains are planted in monoculture—one variety to a huge
field—and cultivated with the help of fertilizers, herbi-
cides, and pesticides, as well as the kind of precision and
efficiency you’d expect on a factory floor. This method of
farming has made it possible to cheaply produce food calo-
ries for hundreds of millions of people; raise vast popula-
tions of cattle, pigs, and chickens; and develop enormous
markets for other grain-based products, including ethanol.
(About 40 percent of American-grown corn in 2016 was
turned into ethanol; 37 percent was used to fatten livestock
or ended up damaged or miscounted; and a minuscule
fraction entered the human diet, mostly as corn syrup.)
But these farming methods also entail major sacrifices.
Growing grain this way requires huge amounts of fossil
fuel to power farm machinery and to make synthetic ni-
trogen fertilizer (accounting for as much as 3 percent of
the world’s carbon emissions). And every time you till and
replant, you loosen and tear up the topsoil. As a result,
millions of tons of soil erode into the nation’s waterways
every year, carrying pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers
with them, contributing to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of
Mexico, and polluting waterways all over the Midwest.
While Kernza has the taste of a cereal, it has the habits
of a prairie grass. It sinks 15-foot-long roots into the soil
and banks nutrients and carbon as organic matter. It pro-
duces edible grain for five years, during which time it re-
quires little or no tilling and less fertilizer than wheat does.
To create and grow such a grain has been the dream of a
group of scientists and sustainable-food advocates for four
decades. According to its proponents,
if Kernza succeeds as food, it could be
the start of a revolution to save soil and
fight climate change. But until recently,
perennial crops seemed like an unimag-
inably distant prospect, requiring many
generations of crossing and recrossing
to arrive at anything that would func-
tion at the scale of modern agriculture.
Then, a few years ago, Kernza breeding
trials at the Land Institute in Kansas and
the University of Minnesota began to
make rapid progress, and the research
caught the eye of big companies like the
Minneapolis-based General Mills and Patagonia, which
has a food division called Patagonia Provisions.
To make Kernza palatable to such corporations, the
researchers needed trailblazers—people who under-
stood the business of food and would try running Kern-
za from the farm, through the mill, into the kitchen,
and onto the plate. Singleton likes a good story, and she
found the tale of Kernza captivating. If there was going
to be a movement to revolutionize food, she wanted to
be a part of it.try new and improbable things. More than two decades
ago, when she was in her early 30s, she inherited about
$10,000 from her grandfather, quit her waitress job, took
out a loan, and launched the Birchwood. Her café grew
into one of the city’s best-known institutions, a place for
Midwest-grown ingredients both gourmet and unpreten-
tious. “We’ve been telling farm-to-table stories before
people were using the term ‘farm
to table,’” she told me.
So she was undaunted when
Helene Murray, an agronomist
at the University of Minnesota,
asked, in early 2013, if she want-
ed to try serving up Kernza, even
though no one in the kitchen knew
exactly what to do with it. “It was
like, ‘Wow, this a pretty big hon-
or,’ ” Singleton recalled. “Yeah,
we’ll put it in some food and we’ll
talk about it.” About two weeks
later, Murray parked her car next
to the Birchwood, and she and
Singleton hoisted a 50-pound bag
of the new grain out of the trunk
and through the café’s front door.
Kernza is sometimes called a
“perennial wheat.” Birchwood has
touted it as “the wheat of the fu-
ture.” But it’s a separate species.
Chestnut-colored, skinnier, and
more irregular in size than wheat
berries, Kernza yields a little un-
der a third as much in the field as
conventional wheat. But it has one
major advantage over the grain
that helped launch human civili-
zation: a long life span. Wheat is
an annual; it dies every year after
it sets seeds, and farmers have to
replant it again and again. Kernza
lives on, season after season.
The word “grain” has many
definitions, but it commonly re-
fers to any plant that humans eat
and that’s also part of the botani-
“I talk about
an intensive
tillage
event as the
combination
of a
tornado, a
hurricane,
an earth-
quake, a
tsunami.”
— Don Reicosky,
retired Department
of Agriculture soil
scientistThe Pioneer:
Restaurateur Tracy
Singleton jumped
at the chance to put
Kernza on her menu.Madeline
Ostrander is a
Seattle-based
MADELINE OSTRANDER (2) freelance writer.