cultivars, AC Barrie, became the most commonly grown wheat
in Canada between 1998 and 2005, while another, Lillian, was
the most grown variety for four years. The list goes on and on.
During our extended interview, I couldn’t resist asking
DePauw for his opinion on gluten, the much-maligned wheat
component blamed these days for numerous dietary ailments in
influential books like
Wheat Belly
and
Grain Brain
.
At its simplest, DePauw said, gluten is a combination of two
wheat proteins that are highly prized in cooking for their elastic
properties.
“They form a protienaceous starch matrix, so you can make
pizzas with it, or stretch it this way and that to make noodles,”
he said. “When you put yeast with it, it helps trap carbon
dioxide bubbles to make bread rise.”
Humans have eaten gluten since wheat was first cultivated in
the Fertile Crescent nearly 10,000 years ago, DePauw said, and
largely without incident. And while the wheat in gluten hasn’t
changed much since then, the ways we use it have.
“We are not consuming wheat as it was made, or processed
even, 100 years ago,” he said. “Industrial bakeries didn’t exist 100
years ago, and processed food ready to obtain in grocery stores
is a very recent phenomenon, really in the last 50 or 60 years.”
During food processing, gluten is added to virtually all
ready-to-eat products, which take advantage of its physical and
elastic properties. It is even added to things like potato chips,
DePauw said, and many other products that haven’t traditionally
contained any wheat at all.
“Finding gluten in all these food products is something new,”
he said.
DePauw shared the story of Winnipeg-based food scientist
Nancy Ames, who has been experimenting with new recipes
for barley tortillas. In small batches, they would hold their round
shape, but Ames ran into problems when producing them
on a larger scale. When winding through the production line,
DePauw said, centripetal forces would cause them to break.
“So these poor little tortillas, when they’d been going around
the corner, the outer side would speed up and tear,” he said.
“So to solve the problem, they put a little gluten in it.
“So the long and the short of it is, since so much processed
food is using gluten in the manufacturing process, the gluten
load in our lives has increased,” he explained. “It is a natural
component, but we are just eating so much of it.”
So what are DePauw’s top three all-time favourite wheat-
based foods?
Spring
2015
Grains
West
24
Enjoying another passion—choreographed ballroom dancing with
wife Elsa Marie.
Selecting wheat lines for lab work.
