farro

The Near East and the neighbouring Mediterranean, where wild ancestors were domesticated into the hulled wheats and grown for hundreds of years as a staple, some of the earliest domesticated plants; in Italian farro is the collective name for the hulled wheats, einkorn, emmer and spelt, and above all for emmer, Triticum dicoccum, grown since time immemorial in the traditional farro areas of the Apennines

A staple of the Roman diet, progressively abandoned for white, easily threshed bread wheat until it survived only in marginal mountain areas, mostly as fodder; kept as human food in the local tradition of two areas, Garfagnana and Valnerina, Garfagnana's pearled grain going into soups and salty cakes and the crushed farricello of Umbria and Lazio into soups; spreading again across central Italy from the 1980s as a specialty food; protected as the Farro della Garfagnana IGP, emmer from the local population grown between 300 and 1,000 metres without chemical fertilisers

Farro is not one grain but three, and the one central Italy kept is emmer: in Italy the name covers einkorn, emmer and spelt, but emmer is the one farmed in the Apennines since time immemorial, spelt arriving only in the 1970s with German and Swiss amateurs. It survived because the land was too poor for modern wheat: it held on only in marginal mountain areas, mostly as fodder, in farming systems where poor conditions held back bread and durum wheat. Poverty preserved it. By the 1990s the old food of the poor had become exclusive and fashionable, sold on an image of naturalness, and buyers paid more for it than for any other wheat, while a farmer selling the raw grain took none of that added value.