“I went to a village in eastern Turkey where a very small number of farmers had an emmer,” Saladino says. Emmer is one of the earliest domesticated types of wheat in the world, feeding ancient Roman and Egyptian communities for thousands of years. “It’s the wheat that the people who built Stonehenge ate,” says Saladino. “It was such an important type of grain.”
Some regions still grow this type of wheat, but it is not as widespread as it used to be. Think less “endangered,” more “fallen from grace” with the rise of modern mass-produced wheat in the 20th century. “People who grow them today love these landraces not only for their resiliency, but also because they have these deep root systems,” says Saladino. “The argument is that they can reach nutrients in the soil that modern wheat, which doesn’t have that root system, can’t.”
There is limited data comparing the nutritional differences between emmer and modern bread wheat, but studies have shown that emmer contains a higher protein content than common wheat, as well as resistant starch, fiber and carotenoids. “We know that the mineral content of those grains is higher,” says Saladino.
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