Katherine Czapp writes: “The ancient Einkorn, emmer & spelt all have tough, tenacious hulls that must be rubbed off with quite a bit of effort before the grains can be further processed and consumed by humans. Common bread wheat exhibits the attractive characteristic of grain kernels that thresh free of their hulls” …and are higher in gluten than the older varieties. This ‘new’ strain of wheat remained rare for a long time after it was developed.

“Leavened bread, made from refined flour, that is milled and sifted many times, would have been very expensive and therefore a food only for the rich. Less affluent Egyptians, and slaves, (such as the Jews) ate flat bread from barley and the poor ate sorghum.”

The Jews, while commanded to stick with the bread of the poor, the unleavened flat cakes, not only left behind Egypt’s culture, but they stuck to the roots of the wheat grain, the older variety. This is particularly interesting when we think about people’s ever more frequent problems with gluten. Celiac disease is becoming more common, and gluten and wheat intolerance is probably more prevalent than is diagnosed at doctors’ offices. The article discusses in detail what might be some causes of Celiac’s and gluten intolerance, and suggests that it is highly treatable. The Grain Issue of the Wise Traditions journal seeks “to cast light on a medical mystery: why it is that grains, especially gluten-containing grains, are contributing to so many serious medical problems today when they have been a part of human diets (including several diets described by Dr. Price) for thousands of years. We raise the possibility that the increasing incidence of celiac disease is due not so much to bad genes (which the baking industry would prefer us to believe) but to bad bread.”