The Wheat Wars

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH

OF

THE RISE AND FALL OF WHEAT

IN THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO

THE ROLE OF THE AUTHOR

IN THE

ADVENTURES DESCRIBED HEREIN

BY

ERASMUS GOULD

Widely referenced but rarely understood, the Wheat Crisis of 1973 came close to bringing the economic machinery of the United States to a grinding halt. In the half-century of the Tepid War, the Crisis may have been the most influential event, contributing to the brief recovery of wheat’s ascendancy and, ultimately, to its fall before the golden throne of corn. The primary players were, of course, the magnates of the industries and for a time the Nixon administration, who played the grains off each other for years. My own involvement has been a subject of dispute since the hours following the Crisis, and so I write this historical sketch in the hopes that my name might be cleared of the ignominy and dust it has accumulated in the years since.

By the year of the Crisis, white flour had been common in kitchens for almost a century, the invention of the porcelain roller mill in 187o having enabled the mass production of this minor evil. As my great-grandfather William Graham Gould had predicted in his fiery sermons, a wave of malnutrition pillaged the souls of London for the next two-and-a-half score years, yet few connect this with the dearth of bran. As Industry tightened its grip on the West’s economy, white bread made its way into the hearts and minds of Britain and America, reaching its apex with the advent of the 1950s and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s canny placement of agent Donna Reed at the forefront of American television. With her clean dress and fluffy smile, Reed embodied the values the Taggart Baking Company hoped to impose on the nation through Wonder Bread, and it worked, cementing the popularity of white flour.

It is here that the history becomes more complicated. The Crisis developed from two forces, both competing with the hale but naïve whole wheat for control of American calories. White flour, with its promises of glamour and ease, was, of course, one. The other was corn, yellow, geometric, and sweet, and destined to be a scourge upon our people.

In 1968, the Minneapolis City Council saw the threat corn posed to the reign of wheat. The city had grown around its mills, especially its largest mill, the Washburn “A,” built in 1874 by Cadwallader C. Washburn. Cadwallader C. Washburn: cofounder of General Mills, a hero to the breadbakers of America, and subject of the barroom ballad that begins “Who wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with or be / The ingenious millmeister Cadwallader C.?” A number of city council members happened upon a Jethro Tull concert, and the post-pastoral flute music of Ian Anderson gave rise to visions of the band’s namesake, the early modern agronomist and inventor of the seed drill who heralded the beginning of the end of the small family farm. Rallied by the memory of this malicious figure, the council voted to hire the author to undermine, both figuratively, and, as was later agreed would be most effective, literally, the Minnesota corn industry. Thus was the mission begun. The author set out in a Buick Invicta presented to him by F., a member of the council, in which had been placed three secret items for times of need: a Gatling gun that rose from the hood, a red button which would transform the vehicle in the space of only twenty-three hours into a crop-duster, and a sandwich in the glove compartment for a single late night emergency. The author drove the state for four years, stumping by day for einkorn, emmer, and other wheats, and tunneling, by night, with a pickaxe and spade under the cornfields of the north.

This author had some success. Tunneling allowed me not only to determine, clandestinely, the extent of corn’s acreage in Minnesota, but to cut through its roots, destroying the domestic enemy’s crops one by one. I expanded my operations to Iowa, the seat of corn, and through a number of other states as well. Unfortunately, with success inevitably comes ill will, and so, during those years, I developed a number of enemies, not least of whom was Eugene “Pickleface” Mott, a municipal bureaucrat of Des Moines whose agents were soon able to predict my every move before even I knew what it might be. Our standoff occurred in October 1972, and, as some have argued, was the beginning of the end of American wheat.

Certain details of the Tepid War should be noted here, for a complete understanding of the significance of the Crisis. As the camps of the two grains battled for dominance in the American psyche, both began developing vast arsenals of their respective products, stockpiling them in underground silos in the northern plains states. During this period the major flour mills were connected with long tunnels, deep underground, to facilitate, in the event of nuclear fallout, the escape of workers and the continual free movement of gluten from one city to another. Rumors, which have yet to be substantiated, began circulating that the Flour Tunnels, as they came to be called, connected also to the missile silos of the American nuclear arsenal, which were often situated on the same sites as the grain silos for quick snacks. This would not have been a problem but for the tendency of fine starchy dust, suspended in air, to combust, when ignited, in dangerously sudden conflagrations. Had such a conflagration occurred in one mill, it could have, it was thought, sent an explosion thundering through the Flour Tunnels to destroy the mills of other cities, as well as the nuclear missiles so wantonly placed in the innocent Midwest. My experience inadvertently proved that, thankfully, this was not the case.

Early in the autumn of 1972, the USSR purchased 30 million tons of American grain after a few years of disastrous communist harvests. There was concern about the ability of our flour mills to continue their production, and so I was sent on a special mission to General Mills’ great “J” Mill, successor of Cadwallader Washburn’s Minneapolis “A” Mill, shut down for good in 1965, with the intent of securing their production against sabotage in this time of scarcity. As, in retrospect, I should have foreseen, Pickleface Mott’s agent preceded me there, and having bound and gagged the entire workforce, waited in a bin of wheat germ for my arrival. As soon as I stepped foot in the mill, I knew something was amiss. The workers were lying on the floor and an eerie silence pervaded the building. It was at this moment, while I stood among the machinery, puzzling out the situation, that Mott’s agent chose to leap on me from behind. Memory is a fickle lover, mine as inconstant as the next man’s, but the workers who survived say we struggled for at least ten minutes, each trying to force the other under the still-rolling porcelain mill, until one of us threw the main switch and everything went dark. My only recollection is that I managed to escape the agent’s warm and malicious embrace with a swift, chance blow to the collarbone and that, in my heightened emotional state, I felt the need to gaze, for a moment, at the complex, nutritious grain that had been the seed of civilization in the Fertile Crescent so many years before. I struck a match, and the next thing I knew, I was lying in the ruins of General Mills’ last great factory, flesh filled with the ceramic shrapnel of white flour’s enabling machine, as I watched for the mushroom clouds that had to follow. Yet the horizon stayed clear, and I realized, then, that although we had again avoided total annihilation, the American diet would never be the same.

Between the Soviet purchase and my alleged destruction of the “J” Mill, the price of grain rose rapidly, encouraging farmers to produce more of their newly valuable products, but causing restlessness, by the time the prices hit supermarkets in 1973, among household shoppers. This financial dissatisfaction was exacerbated by the oil crisis the following fall. To appease consumers, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, stepped in to lower the price of corn. He abolished the Ever-Normal Granary, where the government stored borrowed corn, and instead paid farmers directly for the golden kernels scraped from their ears. This allowed the government, under the direction of Butz, continually to lower the target price of corn, thus necessitating that farmers grow increasingly larger volumes of grain to earn back their financial and emotional investments. Farmers had to find new ways to dispose of their products.

The crisis for whole wheat lay in the worries that, with the loss of the porcelain roller mills, consumers, forced to rely solely on whole wheat, would forego that grain for rye, quinoa, or another more obscure grain, resulting in the wholesale destruction of wheat agriculture. Luckily, through the ingenuity of certain influential bakers, methods were developed for making chewable whole wheat bread that actually tasted good (which was unheard of before 1977), and a black market for porcelain rollers arose, allowing the sale of white flour, if not on the open market, at least to bakers in the know, willing to pay the right price. Certainly, the power that flour had once held over the American soul could last only in the iconography of the baguette and the Big Mac bun. No longer would it hold sway in national politics as it once had.

Corn, on the other hand, became a blessing and a curse for the farmers growing it, and that difficulty continues to this day. Pressured constantly by falling prices, farmers have been growing ever higher yields, forcing industry and the government to find new ways to get rid of it. Corn has found its way into cattle feed, chicken feed, and hog feed, making these animals essentially corn with motor control. Corn has insinuated itself into our power supplies, our soft drinks and our cereals. In desperation, my research shows, the CIA has attempted to sell corn to the minors, to the poor, and to sailors (each of which the Supreme Court has found unconstitutional). The propaganda is overwhelming, and this, I must admit, has been my greatest failure. I did not foresee the cultural influence of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the involvement of Central Intelligence. While I held up a kernel of wheat and wondered at its history, its power, its nutrients, the CIA was allowing corn syrup to be manufactured in home laboratories in rural Indiana and had released it in the back streets of Hoboken, as an especially addictive upper known to itinerants and hair dressers as “chunk.” In closing, I apologize to anyone wasting away on the golden evil who finds this, for the part I played in its rise.