100 | MAY 18 • 2023 

FOOD

T

here are three festivals from the 
biblical era — Sukkot, Passover and 
Shavuot — when the first fruits of 
the season were offered as gifts to God. This 
year, Shavuot begins at sundown Thursday, 
May 25, and concludes at nightfall May 27.
Shavuot falls 49 days — or seven weeks 
— after Passover and historically marks the 
time of the first wheat harvest, when the 
grain is full size, but not yet dried. Wheat 
was brought to the temple at the culmination 
of the season’s first crop in the form of two 
loaves of bread. Shavuot is also known as the 
Festival of Reaping, which is the reason the 
Torah gives us for observing. Today, we cele-
brate with two meals during the holiday and 
include dishes that feature wheat. 
Wheat harvest offerings continued 
through the destruction of the Second 
Temple. Without a holy place to bring the 
harvests, the focus of Shavuot ultimate-
ly shifted to commemorate when Moses 
received the Ten Commandments at Mount 
Sinai. 
That’s the story I remember hearing in 
Sunday school over 50 years ago anyway. 
Wheat is one of the earliest grains, culti-
vated over 10,000 years ago, and a mainstay 
of the economy in ancient Israel. Once our 
ancestors ground it into flour, the harvest 
became shelf stable and portable. The ability 
to travel with a secure source of food gave 

rise to migration and the expansion of agri-
cultural practices into new geographic loca-
tions. Wheat is still one of the largest crops 
on Earth, grown in 128 countries, including 
Israel. It is second only to rice and corn.
Wheat is a cross between three different 
grass grains and is one of the most import-
ant plants known to humans. According to 
a study published by Science Direct, it cur-
rently provides one-fifth of the calories and 
protein of the human diet and is essential 
for food security and political stability. The 
demand for wheat over time has only grown 
as the world’s population increases, even 
without more space to grow it. 
Weather catastrophes, wars and climate 
change are making it harder to grow these 
crops and distribute them globally. To keep 
up with demand, scientists around the world 
continually work to find ways to increase its 
yield and production. While genetic modifi-
cations and cross breeding were successful in 
the short term, the long-term environmental 
effects have become undeniable. 
Critics of the 1950’s Green Revolution, 
the technological initiative to combat global 
hunger by increasing crop yields and pro-
duction, feel it’s responsible for large-scale 
monocultures, water depletion, deforesta-
tion, an increase in greenhouse gas emis-
sions, and the overuse of pesticides and 
fertilizers. 

To reverse the damage, Israel’s Volcani 
Center launched the Land of Wheat 
Initiative in 2015. The Land of Wheat 
Initiative is the birthchild of Roi Ben-David, 
along with Einav Mayzlish-Gati and Bizi 
Goldberg, both independent consultants 
from the Plant Gene Bank in traditional 
wheat varieties. 
In a story by ISRAEL21c, they explain that 
their mission is to restore and preserve seeds 
of heritage wheat, like the ones grown by our 
ancestors. They collect native wheat strains 
and study them to keep it a prosperous com-
modity for our future generations. 
Israeli visionaries have understood for 
decades the need for conservation and began 
to save native seeds early on. The Israeli 
Agricultural Resources Center sent Israeli 
genetic wheat material to seed banks around 
the world for storage. Mayzlish-Gati, head of 
the Israel Plant Gene Bank, tells ISRAEL21c 
that the Russian collector Nikolai Vavilov 
took a wide range of local varieties back with 
him to St. Petersburg in 1926. The collection 
is now back in Israel, as are many of the 
other samples previously sent around the 
world. 
Thanks to such foresight, Israel now holds 
a large range of unique local species that 
might have otherwise become extinct. Their 
collection, one of the largest in the world, 
includes over 900 wheat lines that date back 

Ancient wheat strains revitalized for a taste of our ancestors’ Shavuot. 
Seeds Of Hope

MICHELLE KOBERNICK CONTRIBUTING WRITER

