Farm to Table Pasta

April 1, 2015  

Wellington County, Kansas

Walking in the winter wheat fields of Sumner County, Kansas, the wheat capital of the United States, may not have the amber waves of grain so important in “America the Beautiful” much longer. Richard Barrett, a thirty-year veteran of wheat farming has 600 acres under till this year and his genetically modified organism (GMO) crop looks promising. If he starts to bring it to market next week as planned, it will be the first of Explorer Seed’s Wheataroni 3.0, the first field-grown pasta. On Barrett’s acres instead of even rows of wheat kernels little curls of beige dried macaroni peek out from the head of each stalk.

 

A spokesman at the seed trade association noted that this will be a boon for consumers and farmers. “We all love to cut out the middle men. With the emergence of GMO pasta the Noodle Giants – Barilla, Mueller, give way to a more direct relationship of farm to table.” We see real environmental benefits too: less diesel used to haul grain to storage, less electricity to grind, mix and shape wheat for pasta. Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Ed Stewart visited the Barrett farm last week and commented, “This revolutionizes farming. One day our children will say, ‘this is the best thing since field-grown spaghetti!’”

“What good is wheat anyway except as bread or pasta?” Asked Elizabeth Perroni, leader of the team of microbiologists at Explorer who worked on this project since 2002. In an interview Perroni added, “So we thought we would skip some steps for the consumer. We tried to engineer a field-grown muffin but that, that my friend, is the cold fusion of GMO crops.” The stalks couldn’t take the weight and try as we might, repurposing the wheat plant to include bits of cocoa or poppy seeds is phenomenally complex.”  

 

The research team turned to pasta instead of fully baked goods, perhaps recognizing that Americans buy well over two billion dollars’ worth of dried pasta each year. Working with secrecy worthy of a defense contractor, the Pioneer scientists, code named Semolina Team 6, engineered several varieties of durum wheat into some of the simpler past shapes: penne, vermicelli, fusilli, farfalle and alphabets.

The cappelini and spaghetti tended to fall off the husk. The long pastas also broke into small pieces during test harvests using combines. But the shorter and thicker walled shapes proved rugged enough to go from field to combine, through some fan-aided chaff separation, and then right in to a box.

Back on Barrett’s land, the fourth generation Kansas farmer sees this in the sweep of human history: “We domesticated wheat 9,000 years ago and dried commercial pasta only became widely available in the twentieth century, but in the twenty-first century we have simplified this for all man-kind. I feel proud to be a part of it.”