During the pandemic, one of the first things to be swept off supermarket shelves was flour. Alongside tinned tomatoes, pasta and loo roll, flour suddenly became a hot commodity. Retail flour sales were up 145% and so despite the fact that the UK never actually ran out of wheat (industrial millers lacked supermarket-sized bags for their flour rather than the wheat itself) the unsettling sight of empty shelves persisted.

For many shoppers, this was the first time they had even considered buying flour from anywhere except their local supermarket. The fact that there even was such a thing as local flour mills came to many as a surprise. While lots of consumers think about the provenance of fresh food, few would consider the origins of dried goods like flour.

Flour in a supermarket is almost studiously anonymous. Each bag smells the same, looks the same and has the same protein content. This is because flour has to meet very strict standards in the UK to be accepted by industrial mills. Wheat which passes the required checks is all mixed together, so it can’t even be traced back to its field. Unlike most foods, the name of the game in flour has for decades been consistency rather than flavour or provenance. The only distinguishing marker you will ever see on supermarket flour is the occasional declaration that it’s ‘British’, and given that 80% of flour milled in the UK is from British farms, that isn’t much of a claim.

Most wheat in the UK is grown as a monocrop, the exact same wheat sown across thousands of hectares of land. This means that while British wheat will all have the same strengths – good protein content and yield – it also all has the same weaknesses. It’s wheat that thrives together and dies together. As a result, the much sought-after consistency that allows wheat to be processed and baked highly predictably has a huge drawback: it’s not resilient to climate change. And in 2020, a year that brought unseasonal rains and droughts as well as a pandemic, the British wheat harvest dropped by 40%.

Fortunately, many scientists and farmers have been trying to answer the thorny question of how to improve the resilience of wheat for decades. One potential solution comes in the form of ‘population’ wheat. This is the name for wheat that is grown in a hugely diverse variety, rather than as a monoculture. One pioneer in research into diversifying British wheat was Professor Martin Wolfe. Prof. Wolfe spent decades as a plant pathologist before, during his ‘retirement’,  beginning to cross breed wheat at his and his wife Anne’s organic agroforestry farm, Wakelyns. 

Population wheat can never have the consistently high yield or protein content that wheat monocultures can. However, it makes up for this in resilience – an increasingly valuable asset in a rapidly warming world.

Having spent over ten years working in patisserie in restaurants and hotels in London, Henrietta Inman began working at Wakelyns in summer 2020. She told me the story of how the ‘YQ’ ORC Wakelyns population wheat (the particular variety developed at Wakelyns with the Organic Research Centre and the John Innes Centre, ‘YQ’ standing for ‘Yield and Quality’) went from being an experiment to bread after Prof. Wolfe met co-founder of Hodmedods Josiah Meldrum, who in turn introduced baker Kimberley Bell to the flour.

‘Martin told Josiah about the YQ wheat, this incredible, diverse thing growing in the field. As opposed to all of the fields that surround Wakelyns and all of the fields that you see in most of the world’s landscape, the YQ is high and low and the ears and heads are all different. And because Josiah was very interested in how the food we eat can impact our ecosystems, he suddenly said we’ve got to get bakers working with this wheat.’

Prof. Wolfe had tried to get bakers interested in the past but without much luck. Bakers expect flour to be standard just as millers do. But the same diversity which makes YQ so resilient also means it varies from batch to batch, and has less protein than regular bread flour. Kimberley Bell at Small Food Bakery, however, persisted, experimented and spread the word.

‘Most bakers use quite a warm water temperature but Kim found that with the YQ, because it’s quite a delicate, fragile wheat, those higher temperatures when proving and mixing meant that the strands of gluten couldn’t form; they kept on ripping. We mix the YQ at around 20°C or 21°C. She created the formula and from there inspired lots of people to use it.’

Henrietta explained to me that she really learnt to bake bread while at Wakelyns. ‘I didn’t do much bread, so I went to learn to bake with the YQ at Small Food Bakery the same summer that I was working at Wakelyns. It changed my life.’

Although the main purpose of YQ was resilience, it’s also incredibly exciting to bake with. Henrietta explained that while industrial commodity flour may be predictable, it’s not always enjoyable. ‘That lack of life [in industrial wheat] translates into how it is ingested, how it touches our tongues and every part of our body. It’s not really making us feel alive or doing anything for our senses. It’s very bland. The system we have is killing the soil but it’s not really making us live as well. It’s not really very joyful and flavourful and uplifting.’

The work at Wakelyns is just one example of the way British wheat is changing. Wildfarmed’s flour has to be grown in line with its ‘Wildfarmed Regenerative Standards’ which according to Georgie Pruden, Food Solutions Manager at Wildfarmed, includes growing ‘multiple varieties of wheat amongst other crops, such as clover, phacelia or beans, that add all important nutrients back into the soil.’ Gilchester Organics in Northumberland is focusing on ancient grains and Field Bakery at Gothelney Farm is milling population wheats with a New American Stone Mill which helps preserve the wheats' nutrition. The U.K. Grain Lab – another project of Kimerley Bell’s, who curated the first event in 2017 and has since been joined by Isabel Kelly – hosts talks and workshops to help bring the UK’s various wheat enthusiasts together in one place. Art projects like The Body Lab and The Sheffield Wheat Experiment, podcasts mini series like Cereal and Good Bread and so much more have exploded in recent years.

Henrietta Inman knows though that progress will be slow, pointing to a huge range of factors from lack of access to food to food education to increasing inequality.

‘Because of the cost of living crisis and everything, people are forced to buy what they can afford and that’s it. They don’t have time to think ‘what is this bread?’ or question it really. Changing habits is quite a lengthy process, it takes a long time and it’s not just buying habits, spending habits and time habits but what our taste buds have become used to.’

Developing wheat which is not just resilient to climate change but also actively helping to repair the soil is a delicious solution to a thorny problem. And although changing the way we grow wheat as a nation will take time, it’s an investment worth making. And a great excuse to eat more bread along the way.