Bayram Umut

While there are so many kinds of bakery products, one cannot help but think about the raw material of these products. How much do we know the value of wheat, which is the raw material of thousands of bakery products from bread to baklava, pastry, pasta, semolina bulgur, biscuits and cakes? 

One cannot help but wonder whether there is a need for awareness call for this because awareness and empathy remind us of life, blessing and everything in the universe. Can we humans discern the difference between looking and seeing?

Wheat is the first element in terms of the flavor it gives people and the blessing of the energy source it adds. If there were no wheat, the first loser would be the food industry such as bakers and pastry. In order to understand the life journey of wheat, I, as a bread and cake worker, would like to share awareness by revealing the invisible or what we do not want to see.

As a bread and bakery product master, I know very well what wheat suffers. I can even say that when I think about what it goes through I feel the same. I find the proverb 'half the world knows not how the other half lives' very valuable for understanding wheat.

If we understand the pains wheat goes through until it becomes a delicious morsel for us, then maybe we will value it more. When we look at today, it is a fact that we do not understand wheat, just as half the world knows not how the other half lives. The best time we understand the value of wheat is when we human beings are hungry. That's why I can say that awareness and empathy are gratitude for all blessings. 

Wheat and man are both seeds. Both thrive in the dark. The one who clings to the field becomes an ear, and the one who clings to the mother's field (womb) becomes a human. Of course, this is only the beginning. It is the first step to life. Life is always up and down like the cardiac rhythm. Life is not always a feast for all living things and their blessings. Making life a feast is to use the mind with effort, empathy, awareness, to notice the difference and to make sense of it. 

The birth and beginning of the life of wheat are extremely difficult. It experiences the pain of all kinds of troubles while struggling with wild herbs and animals as well as natural events such as snow, rain, wind, storm, cold, heat, flood and drought in the field. Its biggest fear is to be eaten by a bird and an insect before it can sprout. Wheat seeds that survive these challenging processes become wheat ears. But it still can't dodge the harvester. Harvester comes and cuts the wheat and straw, like cutting the navel cord of a child in the womb. 

Now both of them start life with a novel experience and excitement. Just like human beings cannot choose their hometown, mother, father, gender, race or color at the beginning of life, the wheat germ cannot choose the soil, geography and climate in which it will germinate and come to life. However, once they start to sprout, they both make great efforts to hold on to life. They can never turn back again.

The life journey of wheat goes on like this. The journey of the wheat grains that get rid of their ears actually starts to get separated in the mills. Once the wheat grains are cleaned in the mill and they suppose that they are just relaxed, they set out on a new path. However, they are unaware that in the mills they will crave for the pain they have suffered in the fields. We grind and separate the tiny grain of wheat so much that we extract 8 different products from a grain of wheat. These are Coarse Bran, Fine Bran, Rozman, Germ, Gluten, Starch, Flour and Whole Wheat Flour. 

Of course, these are the outcome of labor, effort and pain. Wheat is crushed in the mill and human in life and they both reach perfection. The effort and purpose of existence of wheat are not to make people taste all the pain it suffers, but to add flavor to their lives and to be a source of energy. The respect that human beings have for wheat and flour and the "blessing" value they give to it is very meaningful and valuable, but not sincere.

If it was sincere, it would not manipulate the genes of all blessings. A person has enough to eat, but because of rapacity, it consumes both itself and its character in order to earn more. We spend for our health, which we put at risk with our own hands, everything we earn greedily. That is, greed costs dearly. 

Like all other blessings, wheat also overcomes so many troubles and difficulties in the journey of life and levels up to flour. It continues its journey by kneading, crushing, cutting, folding in the hands of various masters and machines, and takes various shapes for phyllo dough and other bakery products with rolling pins. Although being sinless, they are thrown into the oven and cooked in a blazing fire.

As a master who knows very well the stages that the wheat grain goes through in the process from being planted as a seed in the field until it reaches our tables, I think empathetically. What would I do if all this had happened to me? I say that I would either lose my character or my life, I could not stand it. I would know my place that I am a human being. I would live the feast by taking the lesson we need to take from life. 

This grueling and challenging test of wheat actually does not end there. It doesn't lose anything in substance. But it transforms from shape to shape and gives us flavor and energy in return for all the pain it has experienced. Right here, it kicks me where it hurts. I take a leaf out of all successful people's books and do the same for this blessing and I thank God endlessly and say I am grateful that I was created human. Mankind's relationship with grain, particularly with wheat, is as old as the history of humanity. 

High-quality products are made with high-quality raw materials. Humans obtain the necessary nutrients from plant and animal foodstuffs in order to survive and maintain their social functions. We have a life journey, a personal or material development journey by discovering grain together with every substance that exists on our planet. Wheat is a blessing that human beings cannot give up even a single day. 78 percent of rich countries and 98 percent of poor countries consume wheat.