To add on the future development mentioned at the end of the article: I worked last year on a prediction model for the big cooperatives buying the crops from the farmers helping them to be better informed about risk (based on wheat type, soil type, tillage and weather conditions) of mycotoxins and to advice their farmers when to spray. So Agtech is still a very unpopular and under appreciated field and hope more engineers would embark on that journey.<p>PS: Happy to add a link but didn’t want to create unnecessary advertising.
Ergot is the most interesting mycotoxin producing fungi
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot</a><p>I wonder if we’ll find out again that some of our wide-spread mental or general health problems are caused by a fungus.
This is very interesting. Anecdotally, I never had a problem with wheat until I moved to Europe. I'd love to see a comparison of fungal toxins in American wheat compared to European wheat. Not that it's easy these days to be aware of where the wheat I'm eating was grown. Modern supply chains are incredibly complex.
Now for the compare:
Organic wheat vs Conventional wheat.. and if you have organic wheat that is "clean" you know the field was adjunct to conventional wheat. Its ugly, but in some aspects conventional is more healthy then organic wheat.<p>My brothers master-professor loved to point that out during field inspections and sampling.
Is there any processing that can reduce mycotoxins in wheat? For corn/maize, which also faces lots of fungus issues, nixtamalization removes the mycotoxins almost entirely.
The article does not mention organic bread and wheat. I hear a lot of chatter from people in agribusiness that it's better to avoid buying it, as it does not receive fungicide treatment and is much more likely to be contaminated with fungal toxins.<p>The safety network is not perfect and gaps occasionally occur, meaning batches of contaminated wheat are eaten.
I wonder how many people think that they have various intolerances or sensitivities to different foods which are in fact caused by improperly cleaned, stored, or prepared foods like this which are actually responses to the contaminants.
I noticed some brands of flour fail to rise in my bread-making machine. I suppose this could be because of fungicides sprayed to avoid the fungus and toxins mentioned in the article.<p>The fungicide might also be killing my yeast. I wonder what's worse from a health standpoint - fungal toxins, or anti-fungal toxins.
It is kind of funny how stupid we are about the use of chemicals. I was just talking to a bio vineyard owner this weekend about why he choses no-chem approach. To my surprise he does that so that his grapes are more(!) resistant to sickness (especially fungus).
A much better grain + microbe combination: I've been fermenting oats for 1-2 days in a mixture of milk-kefir and water for the past few months. It tastes great with frozen berries and does good things for my gut.
It irks me that Western diets feature so much wheat in everything (I'm gluten sensitive so avoid it as much as possible). What really grinds my gears is when traditional non-wheat products (e.g. onion bhajis, tortillas) are made using wheat instead.<p>We should be moving away from monocultures in food, just as in software.