Mankind: The Story of All of Us TV - Jacob Bronowski TV - Paul Watson - Willa Cather -
Now an acre of land can feed a hundred times as many people as hunting and gathering. A new crop conquers the globe – wheat. Mankind: The Story of All of Us I, History Channel 2012
Before 8,000 B.C. wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 2/13: The Harvest of the Seasons, BBC 1973
We’re close to losing our essential diversity. Look at our wheat crops – we rely on a handful of grain crops and plants that we’ve refined and bred over hundreds of years. Paul Watson
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. Willa Cather, My Ántonia