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Picture of loaf/and loads of other wheat products.
Today
The main wheat exporting areas are North Americas. We import around £225 million worth of wheat (& export nearly twice as much) mainly from there. Increasingly we are producing more bread making wheat - thought impossible a few decades back.
Origin
Africa's Earliest 'Farmers' Grew Cereals in The Lush Sahara 10,000 Years Ago. Before the Sahara became the arid and inhospitable desert it is today, humans thrived there - even cultivating and storing wild grains. This discovery marks the earliest evidence of the farming of cereal seeds in Africa.
Wheat has been cultivated since 10,000 BC and was the first agriculture that involved irrigation and was in Mesopotamia – round today's Iran/Iraq- the fertile crescent. The Greeks - several hundred years BC develpoed on the basis of good access to wheat - from Russia.Then/there came the - presumably accidental, transition from gruel to risen bread using naturally occurring yeast. The hard wheat (high in gluten) was difficult to grow - requiring exacting conditions, hence they relied on wheat from the likes of the 'black earth' in the Ukraine. Rome later became dependent on wheat - imported from Egypt. It would have started as Einkorn wheat but this was overtaken by Emmer wheat
Emmer wheat is small grained high in protein nd gluten, it easy to thresh (link) but needed to be cleaned by hand - that is where the first farm/food slaves came in to pick up the inedible chaff and spikes. Emmer wheat was developed in the Mediterranean to an even harder wheat called Durum (Durum means 'hard' in Latin), It was bred into a form that has twice the number of chromosomes.It is famously used in pasta. It is low in gluten and thus not good for bread making, So while a lot is used for that, other flour has to be added to get the bread to rise.
This movement of wheat to Europe was along with methods of tillage – ie it's growth needed labour too. Hyams, also around Wye in the 1960s and credited with bringing the vine back to Britain, wrote in ‘Soil & Civilisation': “The first step of civilisation was soil exploitation” nd he did look at role of labour. This is how he put it.
Many of the stories on this site involve colonialists 'stealing' seeds from one country to take to another and grow them in completely different conditions which are much more profitable. However wheat is a bit different, in that the crop has been imposed on many countries to grow thus making wheat such a ubiquitous crop and wheat in just about all parts of our eating culture.
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