Grain by Grain by Bob Quinn

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Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs and Healthy Food
By Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle
Island Press

Bob Quinn, whose forays with organic wheat led him to start the heirloom grain company, Kamut International, spoke at the 2025 Wise Tra­ditions conference. Attending his lively talk on kamut, I winced as he relived getting “busy with life and failing to realize the trap farmers were getting led into,” because my husband and I also once followed the Pied Piper spiraling down the trap. However, he also spoke of organic farmers’ joy and enthusiasm as they continually learn from their decisions. He says sharing (not hoarding) information helps everyone “float more boats.”

The invigorating tone of this kindly, cow­boy-hat-wearing gentleman comes through in his 2019 book Grain by Grain. He opines that we are doing the same thing with the American population that his “chemical farming neighbors are doing to their soil: spending more and more money in a losing battle to treat symptoms when we ought to be focused on addressing the root cause of the problem.” Consider diabetes. In 1958, diabetics were 1 percent of the population; as of 2019, one in ten Americans had diabetes.

Quinn revisits the simple word “value,” discussing how brand strategists have traded away real value (that is, quality) and replaced it with “cheap.” Cheap stuff, cheap food. Even so, more Americans require food assistance. In 1972, ten million were reliant on food stamps; by 2019, the number was close to forty-five million.

Along the way, marketers also reshaped American producers into American consumers. That realization struck me hard when I realized that soybeans—the darling of farming in the 1980s and ‘90s—did just that to the Midwest farmer. No longer were we feeding our families, much less the world! And as farmers turned into consumers, their economic status diminished.

Quinn drives home the point that value liter­ally has been subtracted and stripped away—no bran, no germ, no soil health and no profit for farmers. The purveyors of value-subtracted products deliberately conceal the nature of their production and processing, but consumers also participate: ”No one wants to know how the sausage is made.” The end result is a commod­ity mentality in which grower, buyer and seller are disconnected from on-the-ground realities.

Quinn was horrified to learn that peaches, picked hard and green, were gassed, creating tasteless and potentially harmful fruit. Even “progressive” farmers injected peaches with synthetic nitrogen, assuming plants don’t know the difference. We now know that this synthetic blast is no substitute for nitrogen provided by symbiotic organisms and is actually lethal to those vital microorganisms.

I wish I had read this book prior to the grasshoppers’ obliteration of our hay harvest in 2024. Quinn claims that if one surrounds the field with the biological agent Nosema locustae, the grasshoppers will eat their dead infected brethren and perish. He used wheat bran coated with it, spread by hand. A farmer might lose about fifty feet around the edge of the field, but not the whole field. We lost the whole field.

The Kamut trademark is Quinn’s guaran­tee that his wheat involves no hybridization, chemicals or adulteration. No value has been subtracted. The amount he brought to the con­ference did not equal the amount of interest in his product. I have been using it to make deli­cious sourdough bread with a crunchier texture than traditional wheat.

As of 2019, Quinn had not arrived at the same conclusions about Pasteur and germ theory as those espoused by WAPF. But who among us has not had to revise our understanding since 2019? In his talk, he also mentioned the Keeling Curve (a record of atmospheric CO2 concentra­tion referenced by “climate change” narratives). Overall, however, I learned from and enjoyed both talk and book, and his product tastes good. Both thumbs are up!

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