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through many vectors, he said, but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace, and joy as through a growing field of wheat.
    A few years after meeting Klaas at Laverstoke, I stood in the middle of one of his wheat fields in Penn Yan, New York, and saw what Kennedy meant. I had never been to Penn Yan—didn’t even know it existed until I met Klaas—and though it’s only forty-five minutes from downtown Ithaca and the hubbub of Cornell University, it feels more like central Kansas than upstate New York.
    The scene reminded me of a painting I once saw in grade school. A crew of seamen, sailing at a time when conventional wisdom had it that the world was flat, quaked with fear and knelt in prayer as their ship slowly approached the edge of the horizon. Their expressions of despair would be appropriate if you found yourself about to fall off the face of the earth, but I had trouble sympathizing. To my adolescent mind, the men looked a little silly, their fear exaggerated.
    And yet from the vantage of that wheat field, I thought maybe those menhad been on to something. The idea that the world is
not
flat seemed, at that moment, sort of radical. I raked my gaze back and forth, enormity and abundance in every direction. The rain had just cleared, and the air was still thick with odor and color. To the east, beyond Klaas’s fields, I could see his neighbor’s fields—a figure of a man on a tractor was no larger than a grasshopper—and, beyond this, his neighbor’s neighbor’s fields, until eventually the grass just dropped off into a kind of oblivion.
    Klaas leaned over, broke off a stalk of emmer wheat, and brought it to his mouth for a taste. He chewed thoughtfully, separating the wheat kernel from its chaff and rolling it around in his mouth. Klaas’s features sometimes seem to have outgrown his frame. His hands flap around like empty ski gloves when he speaks, and his shoulders are so wide you’re tempted to inspect the back of his jacket to make sure he didn’t leave the coat hanger in. He embodies a particular brand of solidness—the German immigrant farmer who plowed our country’s midsection with nothing more than grit and determination. And yet Klaas is an irrepressibly cheerful man, generous and humble.
    I asked Klaas why he found it important to grow wheat. He paused to examine another stalk. “The nice thing about wheat is how it’s tied to Western civilization, to the cradle of civilization. The history of wheat is the history of a sociable crop.”
    He was right. For centuries, wheat was a community builder, a grain whose benefits were reaped only through cooperation and effective social organization—farmers grew it, millers ground it, and bakers turned it into sustenance and pleasure. In his book
Seeds, Sex & Civilization,
Peter Thompson says all three of the world’s great grains—wheat, corn, and rice—provided the foundations for civilization. But, he wrote, “whereas the foundations provided by maize and rice were sufficient to build walls,” wheat’s inherently communal qualities “provided the keystones of arches to support the edifices of urban civilizations.”
    The story of wheat is the story of who we are.
    Klaas broke off a kernel and held it in his big hand. “This is probably what someone was threshing when Ruth showed up,” he said, adding that emmer was one of the first domesticated crops. He shook his head. “It humbles me just holding it.”
    God may or may not communicate through wheat, but for sure
we
communicate by carpeting so much of our landscape with grain. The middle of the wheat field in Penn Yan was insignificant—a mere nursery compared with the Corn Belt of the Midwest, or the plowed-up prairie of the Plains. Today more than 80 percent of American farmland is in grain production—corn, wheat, and rice, mostly. Wheat—which, worldwide, covers more acreage than any other crop—is planted on fifty-six million acres in the United States. Vegetables and fruits, by