Finally, last Sunday, I set up the new friction shifters on the downtube of my old Raleigh bicycle. It’s a long story, with a happyish ending.

Ancient grains used to be rare and hard to find not because they contained some magical secret for a long and fulfilled life, but because they take a lot more work than modern wheats. Instead of the wheat berry popping free after a gentle rubbing, they need to be bashed and pounded. Now, of course...

Cultivation is not the same as domestication. Domestication involves changes that do the plant no good in the wild, but that make it more useful to the people who cultivate it. Seeds that don’t disperse, for example, and that aren’t all that well protected from pests and diseases. In this episode,...

A single cell of modern bread wheat contains more than five times the DNA of a human cell, in a much more complicated arrangement. As a result, it has taken a fair old while to decode wheat’s genome. Having done so, though, the DNA confirms what plant scientists have long suspected; bread wheat is...

Back in 2018, archaeologists celebrated the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how they found those crumbs? The bread they came from was a fine, mixed grain loaf that might well have been a special dish at a feast. It is even possible that bread was the fir...