Introduction: Wheat is one of the most produced cereal grain worldwide, it is amongst the top three most produced crop following corn and rice. Wheat has an extremely large scope of use since it is divided into various classes. These uses range from animal feed (livestock), alcoholic beverages, biofuel to daily-consumed human foods such as bread and pasta. High nutritional value is the reason behind wheat’s popularity: containing a large amount of carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins and protein. Other plant-derived foods lack one major nutritional value that is found in wheat, which is gluten protein. Gluten protein enables the formation of small gas cells that are filled with carbon dioxide within the dough hence causing it to “rise”. This process
Self-pollination is another characteristic wheat possess that simplifies the facilitation of selection. All of these features were crucial to early societies and contributed heavily to the reliance on wheat as a staple food and its expansion. Other plants such as maize and rice are amongst the three largest calories that feed the world (with wheat being the 3rd of course). Wheat has been regarded as the staple food for human civilizations for a substantial period of time. However, in recent decades wheat has lost its reign as the world’s primary staple food, the yield weight (but not crop area covered) of maize as well as rice has overtaken that of wheat. In the golden age of genetic modification (1998) maize and rice were now genetically able to overtake wheat in terms of feeding the world. In the year 2000, just after the technological advances in the genetic modifications of maize and rice, wheat accounted for 20% on average of the worldwide calorie consumption. European countries contributed a lot to this statistic, as wheat accounted for 30% of their consumed calorie
The graph above shows a detailed info-graphic for worldwide calorie consumption. Origins: Historical evidence suggests that the origin of wheat cultivation was in southwestern Asia about ten thousand years ago (Neolithic Revolution), with ancient crop remains being found in the Fertile Crescent or what we now know as the countries Israel, southeastern Turkey, Syria and Jordan. This view is supported by two pieces of historical evidence: (1) the geographical distributions of wild progenitors of related species intersect in this region. (2) Seeds of these related species have occurred in early archeological sites of this region. At the dawn of wheat cultivation, farmers were encouraged to pursue this crop due to high yielding and the fact that this crop was highly sustainable. The process of selection through domestication gave birth to the wide variety of classes that wheat crop family. The first types of cultivated wheat were emmer and einkorn (These were Tetraploids and Diploids respectively). Emmer, Einkorn and Hexaploids were clearly developed through the domestication done by natural