I'd hand this book, along with a few Wendell Berry books to all my friends, if they were all within my hands reach! I Love Kamut- I dream of my fields producing it, I dream of giving seeds of it to every person I greet on the street! How wonderful to be handed such a gift- the gift of seed...his stories and growth mindest are inspiring, make my heart sing and give me hope in humanity and the future of land I was born to. ( )

This 2019 book from Island Press is one of the few books on wheat that is based on sound nutrition principles. When author Bob Quinn took over his family's Montana farm, he started off on a long journey to find and manifest agricultural integrity. No-till farming? Check. Organic farming? Check. Farm foods that enhance human nutrition? Check.

The only correction I offer is that teaching in the USA about organic whole grains as a major element in the human diet did not start "in the late 1960s," it started with a network of macrobiotic teachers in the late 1950s, first in New York City, then expanding to Boston and its suburbs. George Ohsawa, plus Michio and Aveline Kushi, with their students and colleagues opened the very first US natural food stores to sell a wide range of whole grains and whole grain products. US writers like William Dufty (Sugar Blues) and actress Gloria Swanson (Swanson on Swanson), along with many other writers popularized macrobiotics; the result nowadays is an Americanization of the natural foods movement, which is as it should be. US stores that popularized nutrition before the late 1950s, like Lindblad Nutrition, only sold supplements, *not* whole foods.

Mr. Quinn is dead right on the mistaken US wheat seed hybridization fad to create an extra-hard bran layer to protect the inner wheat berry ... that "development" did indeed create a US distaste for whole wheat products, since the resulting flour still contained unpleasantly sharp edges of bran. This book is a great read. ( )

Bob Quinn is not your average organic visionary. He is a lifelong conservative Republican and was raised on his father’s traditional farm in Big Sandy, Montana. Bob earned a PhD in plant biochemistry at UC Davis and started a career in his field of study.

But when he returned to his father’s farm, he saw how much of the profit was going to chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. He was also troubled by the lack of quality in traditional food and also by the push to reduce the number of small farms.

He began to experiment with organic farming. He found that like life itself, all things agriculture are related. He began to work for more control of his product – which eventually meant setting up his own mills to grind grain for himself and his neighbors, starting Montana’s first wind farm, and producing high oleic safflower oil. While he first envisioned the oil powering his farm’s diesel engines, he soon realized that it was a better more nutritious type of edible oil, creating contracts to ‘rent’ the oil to food companies such as the University of Montana and then having the used oil return to his farm.

One of his most far-reaching experiments was attempting to grow a sample of ‘King Tut’s Wheat’, a supposedly ancient seed given to him at a county fair in 1964. Over many years, he found it could be grown on his dryland farm (no irrigation), and produced a high protein, high nutrition product that research showed reduced inflammation and was tolerated by many of those suffering from modern day ‘gluten intolerance’. He believes that this intolerance is the product of the unbalanced genetical modifications that make wheat more hearty, greater yield but less nutritious. This wheat is now grown by numerous farms as Kamut wheat. Kamut is a variety of Khorasan wheat, known in some parts of the Middle East as ‘the prophet’s wheat’ – the prophet is not Mohammed but Noah. Kamut is a trademark guaranteeing that the product is organic and not crossed with other varieties.

His guiding principle has become the ‘triple bottom line’: "not just profit but also value to people and planet. This was a revolutionary concept for businesses that had previously externalized costs like environmental damage and health problems for workers exposed to toxins. But even sustainability-oriented businesses still tended to see these three bottom lines as separate goals, and given their overriding obligations to their shareholders, profit frequently trumped people and planet.” P 198

Fascinating book – much ‘food for thought’. In the summary chapters, he gives an easy way to start: on your next trip to the grocery store, add two organic items to your cart and let it grow from there. ( )