Have you ever thought that a powerful and ancient plant influences every meal? Whether it's breakfast buns, fried dough sticks, sandwiches, croissants, noodles, pasta, dumplings, pizza, tea-time biscuits, cream puffs, doughnuts... etc

Almost every country's culinary culture includes several classic wheat-based dishes.

With its simple and versatile nature, wheat, along with the toil and wisdom of our ancestors, has evolved alongside human civilization for thousands of years, becoming the prosperous staple it is today. This inevitably leads one to explore its mysteries - wheat.

As people pursue the myriad forms of wheat, wheat quietly changes human society. So, where did wheat, this crop that changed how humans live, originate? What historical changes has it undergone to reach its current scale? Looking ahead, what new directions might wheat take in its development?

Wheat - the crop that changed human survival

Wheat is the product of humans domesticating their wild ancestors during the Neolithic Age, with a cultivation history of over 10,000 years.

As wheat entered human society, it changed people's way of life - gathering and hunting were no longer the primary sources of food; agriculture became more reliable and stable.

With its strong adaptability, Wheat is widely distributed worldwide, from inland to coastal areas, from basins to plateaus. Wheat is mainly cultivated between the latitudes of 67 degrees north and 45 degrees south, especially in the Eurasian continent and North America, where its cultivation area accounts for about 90% of the world's wheat cultivation area.

The Impact of Wheat on the World

Over 35% of the global population relies on wheat as a staple food, with international wheat production exceeding 760 million tons in 2020.

Due to its ease of storage and transportation, wheat is one of the leading commodity grains, occupying a significant share of international grain trade. As one of the world's three major cereals, wheat provides 20% of the world's protein and energy needs, making increasing wheat production crucial for global food security.

Wheat grains are rich in carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and various beneficial mineral elements for the human body. Easy to process and store, wheat is not only the primary raw material for various staple and non-staple foods in most countries but also the leading reserve food and a significant grain variety in the international grain trade.

Asia and Europe are not only major wheat-producing continents but also major wheat-consuming continents. Asia has a shortage of wheat production and needs to import, while Africa has deficient wheat production but relatively high consumption, necessitating large imports.

Although North America and Oceania's production is not very high, their consumption proportion is low, with most of the wheat used for export. South America's production and consumption are roughly balanced, with this supply-demand structure determining wheat's characteristic of being globally tradable.

Future Directions in Wheat Research

According to experts' estimates, the global population is expected to reach 9.9 billion by 2050, requiring wheat production to grow by over 2% annually to meet population growth needs. However, in the past 20 years, annual growth has only been 1.2%. Addressing this challenge, current wheat research faces:

1. How to fully exploit and clone excellent genes using wheat germplasm resources and wheat reference genome information, and fully utilize them in breeding.

2. How to accelerate the breeding of wheat varieties and shorten the wheat breeding process.

3. How to cope with the impact of global climate change on wheat.

4. Increasing wheat production without increasing nitrogen fertilizer application, achieving green wheat production and development.

Wheat is closely related to human civilization; it is a witness to ancient cultures and a participant in modern society.

Today, with the continuous efforts of researchers, wheat production has dramatically increased, with finer taste and richer nutrition.

Wheat can play a more significant role in addressing global food security and help achieve the vision of zero hunger and poverty.