Bottle of Rye ... Flour

At our house, we minimize a lot of allergens for medical reasons, including wheat, dairy, eggs, nuts, and soy. We do not avoid these entirely -- except for nuts, which almost never make an appearance -- but we do need alternative foods (and an EpiPen) to make sure everyone stays healthy. It is not as difficult as one might think, but it does take some effort.

We keep rye flour, spelt flour, and, sometimes, oat flour in gallon bottles that long ago held banana peppers for a Subway shop. We use these flours in place of wheat flour in our recipes. They mostly work well, and spelt is biblical, so no complaints, no worries. We are fortunate to have access a variety of grains that we like, and can even be a bit picky in this day of global markets; millet flour and quinoa flour do not make the cut in our family!

Susan recently posted on her blog about Grandpa's work to increase rye yields, and it is a very fascinating and funny tale. Besides, it combines two of my favorite topics -- family and food. So, with all credit to Susan for putting the story together, here is an excerpt about Grandpa's work to increase rye yields.

Like Gregor Mendal, who is considered "the" father of genetics; "my" father, a BYU professor of botany and genetics, also is a meddler of plant chromosomes. The big difference is that instead of creating pink pea flowers from red and white ones, my father experimented with polyploids of rye... Yes, the fiber-rich, good-for-you cereal, stuff...Rye. Eventually my dad's work led to a significant increase in the yield of cultivated rye...estimated to be around a factor of 10 fold. (that's really a big deal on the global world hunger stage....seriously.)

Thanks, Susan! And thank you Grandpa for increasing rye yields and making it easy for my family to pick up rye flour at Safeway to make normalish pancakes!

You really should read Susan's whole post because she continues the story and tells how Grandpa got her to bake a loaf of rye bread. I considered "excerpting" the whole post here, but thought it more fun to rile Susan so she will expand on the story Grandpa was telling about WWII before I "excerpt" it. Besides, she may even discover a great rye bread recipe that will inspire me to crack open a bottle ... of rye flour.

UPDATE

Susan writes and thanks me for "keeping up" with her, so I guess that means my "excerpting" of her posts is officially sanctioned.

I called Susan the day after the original post to discuss the part-plant, part-animal sea slug and, on her suggestion, I called Grandpa to talk with him about it. He had very good questions -- much better than I thought to ask, but he's the geneticist -- and I did my best to answer them. Fortunately, I recalled that the sea slug can produce chlorophyll (Grandpa asked if it was chlorophyll or chloroplasts), the sea slug can pass these chlorophyll genes down to the next generation (Grandpa asked if the genes were incorporated by each generation eating plants or if they were passed down), and the sea slug can carry out photosynthesis (Grandpa asked if it was functional change or just incorporation in the DNA). I forgot the detail that the slugs have to eat chloroplasts in order to carry out photosynthesis.

Grandpa and I also discussed his rye research. He hybridized and selectively bred rye to increase both the number of nodes per head and the number of florets per node, either of which can increase the rye yield. He explained that evolution is driven by plasticity, which is the ability of an individual organism to change its traits in response to its environment. When the change becomes permanent and is passed down from generation to generation, the organism has evolved. With the rye research, getting the plastic changes (more nodes or florets on individual plants) to become permanent (more nodes or florets on all descendant plants) was the real trick.

In the case of the sea slug, the production of chlorophyll is a permanent change -- the sea slug evolved to produce chlorophyll -- but the production of chloroplast is a plastic change -- the sea slug has not evolved to produce chloroplast, but individual slugs can produce it once they consume it. Unfortunately, at this point in the conversation Grandpa had a difficult time hearing me; I blame it on a bad cell connection. So we said I-love-yous and good-nights and promised to talk again about genetics.