wheat – Science teacher

(That we are here at all is the miracle.)

Classroom wheat berries — Wheat plant close-up, grown on the class windowsill.

Transubstantiation is a Catholic concept, and a somewhat late one, not appearing until the 1200s or so. Catholic doctrine holds that the Holy Communion bread becomes the body of Christ during Mass, though the bread keeps its bread-like qualities..

I teach high school biology in a public school, so transubstantiation does not come up much in class. We do talk about photosynthesis, however, and if you follow the particles involved, a form of transubstantiation does happen, just not in the mystical sense.

One year in class I decided that we should all plant wheat, then take the few wheat berries we managed to grow on the classroom windowsills, grind them up, and mix them with enough store-bought flour to make a loaf of bread.

So far, so good.

Half a loaf of bread on a wooden cutting board. — Home baked bread

Before breaking the bread in class, I asked the students to tell me where the stuff of the bread came from. They (mostly) knew it came from carbon dioxide in the air.

I then asked them where the carbon dioxide came from.

It came from them.

And where was it before it left their bodies? I meant literally, immediately before it left whatever cell they wanted to imagine deep in the dark depths of their flesh.

And that’s where science banged a little too close to mortality; most of that bread got left uneaten that day.

We are, literally, what we eat. Eating is a transubstantive process. The atoms we eat do not change, they just get rearranged. Every part of you that is you (and meant to be you) came from your mother or your food.

Oh, we got some stray lead and a few zillion pieces of microplastics embedded in us, true, but those are accidental.

I don’t want to hear that plants make food out of sunlight. Because they don’t

Plants make food out of us. They need sunlight to do all the fancy work of sewing together carbon dioxide and bits of water, but most of the stuff that makes a plant a plant came from carbon dioxide.

Not dirt. Not sunlight.

The stuff of us.

Bakers love to write about their bread singing as the loaf cools. Steam whistles through the crust, the crust crackles as it shifts. It sounds poetic. It is poetic.

I was born reasonably deaf. I cannot hear my bread sing, but I do not miss what I never knew, no more than you miss the colors a honeybee sees that humans cannot.

A loaf just out of the oven is dead. The yeast have been cooked after doing the work, reason enough to pray as you slide your dough into the oven.

Wheat berries are alive. If you plant one, it will grow into a wheat plant.

If you split one open (easier said than done) you can see a tiny wheat embryo waiting to be bathed in water, to activate its enzymes, to awaken from its slumber and become a thriving, multicellular organism.

When I grind the wheat berries to make fresh flour, I can hear the cracking of the hulls. I doubt (but do not know for sure) that wheat berries are unaware of their end, but still remind myself that the grains going into the hopper are alive, and the dust we collect and call flour is not.

We know something, but not a lot, about life, but we know this much—everything alive here and now comes from countless generations of life over billions of years, life begetting life begetting life, a connected strand that once broken cannot be put back together again.

We are not so different from plants as we might believe—we share DNA, we share mitochondria, we share critical enzymes, we share a thread of life drawn from a common ancestor.

If a cooling loaf of bread sings, the cracking bodies of wheat berries reflects the cracking of bones, of life. The wheat is not aware, of course, but it is dead just the same, as unaware as I will be when I am dead.

Category: wheat

On transubstantiation

Cracking wheat