If you read this blog regularly, then you know that I love words as much as I love food. You might know that I love words so much that when I was little, instead of collecting birds’ nets or dolls or board games like my friends, I collected homonyms. I made lists of rhyming names for twins, triplets, quintuplets. Think Chloe, Joey, and Zoe. Or Harry, Cari, Barry, Gary, and Larry. I wrote everything down in a spiral notebook that I kept on my bedside table.

I still think about words a lot, and so you probably will not be surprised to learn that I am always looking to words for clues about our relationship to food. I’m especially interested in clues that might help me to understand the dramatic changes of the past couple hundred years. This week, I thought it would be interesting to look at words connected with the harvesting of grain.

I have written in the past about the fact that I believe the characterization of low-grain diets as “low-carb” demonstrates some confusion about carbs in general. But I think it also displays a recognition, on some level, that grains are somehow different from the rest of the carbs (fruit, vegetables, beans). Too many people have noticed for themselves that decreasing their intake of grain often makes their pants fit better. And rather quickly at that. Why would that be, and what does it mean?

The first thing to know about grain is that preparing it for consumption is back-breaking work. It’s nothing like picking oranges or pears, which I happen to know from personal experience can also be pretty tiring. But grain harvesting is in a different category. The second thing I noticed is that many words associated with grain harvesting — sheaving, threshing, winnowing —  are no longer in common usage. Basically, most of us don’t even know what they mean anymore. There’s an important clue.

Let’s assume you’ve grown a plot of winter wheat, and the grain has matured, and harvest time has arrived. Pruners, a sickle, or a scythe will be required in order to sweep across and cut the stalks, allowing them to fall to the ground. Then the stalks, or sheaves, will need to be gathered up into a teepee-shaped “shock” to dry for a week or so. Vincent Van Gogh painted many famous pictures of sheaves of grain drying in the fields.

The next step is to thresh the wheat. Notice that the word “thresh” is very similar to “thrash.” Threshing is the process of loosening the grain or seed from the husk and straw, and it consists of beating stalks so that the grains (e.g., wheat berries) become separated and fall away. Stalks can be beaten with a wooden stick or baseball bat, banged against the side of a bucket or can, laid upon a sheet and stepped on vigorously, or rubbed vigorously with the hands.

Then comes winnowing. To winnow is to toss grain into the wind so that the light chaff blows away as the heavier grain falls to the ground. Chaff refers to the worthless plant straw and seed heads. The expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff” expresses the idea of separating what is valuable, like the grain, from what is less so, like the straw.

You can remember what winnowing is once you learn that it is related to windwian, Old English for wind. During winnowing, threshed grain is poured from one container to another in front of a fan or other wind source. In the past, farmers used winnowing baskets, winnowing forks or shovels, or even a whole winnowing barn whose floor consisted of holes exactly the right size for wheat berries and other grains to fall through into the level below while retaining the chaff. Winnowing also has the benefit of removing pests from stored grain.

Only after these steps have all been completed is grain ready to be milled into flour. Like all the steps above, kneading dough and milling the flour from which the dough is made are also labor-intensive. Prior to the invention of the combine harvester (so named because it combines several tasks into one) and the bread machine, bread making required an extraordinary effort when you think about it. One clue to how disconnected we have become from this process is that we don’t even know what most of these words mean anymore.

So why did humans do it? Why did we engage in back-breaking work and what made it so worthwhile? Well first all, we were hungry. And it was a fact of life that some foods required a lot more work than others. A relatively short time ago in evolutionary terms, if you wanted grain you had to work for it. But then you were rewarded with that slice of bread. As well as pancakes, biscuits, baguettes, muffins, croissants, and pie crusts.

In contrast to the way most of us arrive at a loaf of bread now, it was earned through perseverance and effort, hard work over months and months. We earned our bread, and that is the difference.