FOOD & DRINK

White Sonoran Wheat: An Excerpt from Carolyn Niethammer’s New Book A Desert Feast

The local-food movement is built on flavor, nutrition, and freshness. But it is also built on story and a sense of place. The word “heritage” feeds our longing for a feeling of rootedness. White Sonoran wheat has a great story, and that has led to its charisma. Throughout the country, though, grains have been slower to join the lineup of reintroduced foods than other heritage seeds because unlike a vegetable like a squash, which can be picked and eaten quickly, wheat involves additional processing to become food.

The introduction of spring wheat (also called winter wheat) by the Spanish missionaries in the 1690s was a most welcome addition to the food cycle of local native people. We can assume that the Spanish brought several kinds of wheat seeds, but it was the spring wheat that adapted to local conditions best and made the most impact. By March, the Tohono O’odham granaries of stored foods, such as mesquite, were empty, and the early populations were getting hungry, awaiting the plants that would be available later in the spring. But the various varieties of wheat we now call White Sonora and Pima Club could be planted in the fall or winter in our mild climate and take advantage of the winter rains. Some of the crop was harvested green in the spring, just when the people needed food the most. They prepared the grain by roasting it over coals. The rest was ripe by May, having by then turned into golden fields.

At first the wheat crop didn’t produce as well as the native corn, but over the next hundred years the farmers learned how to grow it more successfully, and the White Sonora and Pima Club wheat yielded twice as much food as did the fields planted with corn.

The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.

By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.

The 1920s and 1930s were the beginning of the Green Revolution, which advocated increasing grain yields through the application of copious amounts of water and high nitrogen fertilizer. White Sonora wheat did not thrive under those conditions. Mill technology also changed, making it more difficult to grind the soft, powdery wheat berries, which tended to absorb water.

The market also changed. Soft wheat varieties like White Sonora are used for crackers, cookies, biscuits, and pie crusts. Bakeries were producing more bread, and what they wanted was the hard-red wheat. As a result, the soft heritage wheats fell out of favor. Then came the closing of many flour mills in Sonora due to a multitude of economic factors. It was a downward spiral, because without a means to get their grain ground, more farmers quit growing it.

In 2012, Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson nonprofit seed bank specializing in arid-land heritage seeds, was awarded a two-year grant from the USDA’s Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to reintroduce into sustained production two heritage grains with historical presence and good potential for adaptation in the arid Southwest: White Sonora wheat and Chapalote flint corn. 

Today the heritage wheats, both White Sonoran and Pima Club, are making a strong comeback due to their sweet flavor, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. Their low gluten content makes them a good choice for people with gluten sensitivity. Specialty bakers advertise breads made with local heritage wheats, and local brewers use them as an ingredient in beer. It’s a welcome rediscovery of a food with a complex and once almost forgotten history.

Carolyn Niethammer’s A Desert Feast (University of Arizona Press, 2020) is available online and at local booksellers.