Meet the Trailblazers Who Want to Make Bread Nutritious Again
By: Rachel Cernansky
Tags: Bread, Heirloom, Food, Baking

In the four years since it opened, Moxie Bread Co. has developed an outsize presence in Colorado. It’s not just that people flock to Andy Clark’s bakery outside Boulder for the bread and pastries, though they are delicious. The wheat varietals he’s using are standouts in terms of quality and flavor, such as Turkey Red and blue emmer: heirlooms that might as well be a different species than the stuff you’d find in your average supermarket bread.

They grow differently, bake differently, and digest differently — enough of the latter even to convert gluten abstainers back to gluten. Clark said customers he’d lost to gluten sensitivities have returned since he transitioned his bakery to heirloom wheat, saying they can tolerate the new formulations. That’s consistent with research suggesting that people who identify as gluten-intolerant have a sensitivity to many gluten-containing foods, but not necessarily to gluten itself.

While your average Wonder bread is hard to digest and has a high glycemic index, naturally fermented bread made from quality grains has lower gluten levels, potentially even matching those of gluten-free products. The brief explanation is that the long, slow fermentation allows live cultures to feed on gluten, a process that the use of dough conditioners and mass production baking skip over.

There’s some evidence to back this up. “Now research shows us that lacto-fermentation of wheat has the potential to drastically reduce gluten levels,” writes the Boston-based Old Ways Whole Grain Council, a finding based on three studies, including one from 2007 and recurring studies in 2013 and 2014 from National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the NIH.

Clark said customers he’d lost to gluten sensitivities have returned since he transitioned his bakery to heirloom wheat, saying they can tolerate the new formulations. That’s consistent with research suggesting that people who identify as gluten-intolerant have a sensitivity to many gluten-containing foods, but not necessarily to gluten itself.

Grain advocates like Clark are drawn to the grains themselves, but also to the opportunities they offer to revolutionize local economies and food systems. Clark began sourcing heirloom wheat directly from a Kansas farmer; that’s become a steady relationship, and he’s continuously cultivating other partnerships with farmers throughout the region.

Just as farmers markets have brought locally grown produce and dairy to communities around the country, there’s interest in building that farm-to-table connection for grains as well. But grains are a specialized kind of crop that require massive infrastructure — milling equipment, for example, to turn the grain into flour — that fruits and vegetables don’t. Clark belongs to a strong and growing network of community players dedicated to establishing a local grain economy in the semi-arid, mountains-meet-plains state of Colorado.

“Our agricultural system has focused on yields and similarity and not a lot of originality in flavor and nutrition. We’ve lost all of that in wheat, my goodness, and in grains in general,” said Nanna Meyer, health sciences professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, who’s led the university’s efforts to restore heritage grain production in the Rocky Mountain West.

Meyer, who worked in Olympic sport nutrition for two decades before coming to focus on the nutritional benefits of whole grains, helped UCCS launch the Grain School in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance in 2016. Research into what grains used to be grown in the area was followed by getting their hands on physical seeds from seed banks around the world. “We started trials of things we didn’t even know existed,” she said.

Thus began a slowly unfolding experiment to transform the theoretical — the region’s agricultural history, identified on paper — into the practical — crops that people can actually use. That involved myriad steps, including multiplying the handfuls of stored seeds into supplies big enough for farmers to plant fields with. Meyer worked with over a dozen backyard gardeners to grow out the early batches, then handed those seed harvests off to larger-scale growers; now, about 70 growers are testing out more than 150 varieties of heirloom grains in the region, such as einkorn, emmer, red fife, and khorasan.