Wheat Grass for Health and Preparedness

The current political and economic events have many of us considering food options that we would have previously dismissed without a second thought.  Wheat grass is one of those things for me.  Never, ever considered it for feeding my family, but I got to wondering….

I didn’t doubt those who claimed it was very healthy.  I just wasn’t sure it was something I or my family would want to eat.  But before getting into how to eat it, let’s just look at the health benefits.

Wheat grass is high in vitamins A, C, and E.[1] [2]  It’s also a respectable source of calcium, magnesium, and iron.  Scientific research on the value of adding wheat grass to the diet is pretty limited.  Breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy who drank ¼ cup of wheat grass juice daily tolerated their treatment better than those who did not (except for those who were made nauseous by the wheat grass juice).[3]  Drinking nearly ½ cup (100 ml) of wheat grass juice daily significantly reduced disease symptoms and rectal bleeding in ulcerative colitis patients.[4]  Wheat grass juice has also been shown to have a protective effect on kidney and liver tissues.[5] [6]

There are numerous other health benefits and medicinal uses (OK, can I just interrupt and say how cranky I am right now?  I’ve been awake since 2:30AM, and not only is it too cold to work in the yard today, but it is now snowing on May 20!), and clearly I should write an article on the topic.  But most of the people promoting the use of wheat grass in the preparedness community are doing so from the point of view of using it as emergency food. 

Because you can just grow the thousands of pounds of wheat you have stored into wheat grass. 

Not so fast there, buddy.

Several years ago when my daughters were actively raising French angora rabbits, we grew fodder for them using wheat. 

(We interrupt this article to provide some quick definitions:  1. Wheat sprouts are the soaked, rinsed, and drained grain that has swelled and just barely begun to produce little rootlets.  2.  Fodder is what has been grown from the sprouted wheat on trays with drainage holes and continuing the rinsing and draining process, without any soil involved, and the resulting sprouts, grass, and grain and fed to animals.  3. Wheat grass is grown from the barely emerged wheat sprouts that have been sprinkled onto and lightly covered with soil.)

Unfortunately, the wheat didn’t always sprout.  And counting on all your wheat being able to sprout is not a good idea.  Soaking a cup or more of wheat kernels and then finding that they won’t sprout just wastes the wheat.  So here’s what to do first.

Just as with any other seeds, you’ll want to do a germination test with every can, bucket, or pouch of wheat that you open (if you are planning to sprout them).  Basically, put ten kernels on a damp paper towel and fold it up.  Put the paper towel in a plastic baggie and set it in a warm place.  Check every day or so for germination.  If the kernels don’t sprout, don’t use this wheat for making wheat grass. 

Now, just because the kernels germinate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to make for good wheat grass.  Some times when the girls and I were growing the fodder, we’d have excellent results that made us feel like foddering geniuses.  And others made me feel like we might not even be qualified to serve in Biden’s administration.

What happened?

Well, it could be in all the soaking and rinsing, whether we were diligent about it.  But honestly, as my experience the past three weeks has shown, it still has a lot to do with the wheat.  It will be affected by how it was stored—temperatures, humidity, and oxygen levels.  And that’s going to vary from one house to the next.  It may also be a factor of the type of wheat. 

Over the past three weeks, I have worked with wheat that I got from five different sources. 

1.  55-year-old hard red wheat from a friend who had stored it outdoors in the summer heat, including in Las Vegas.  I did not expect it to germinate and it did not. 

2.  30-year-old hard red wheat we got from a friend a few years back.  It was commercially packed and ideally stored at the time—nitrogen-flushed in sealed buckets and stored in a basement. No oxygen absorbers or Mylar.  I expected it would germinate.  It did not.

3.  10-year-old hard red wheat from the Home Storage Center, packed in a #10 can with an oxygen absorber and stored in a bedroom or cool basement.  I expected it would germinate and it did.

4.  10-year-old hard white wheat, source unknown.  It was just what was in the bucket I’m currently using.  (When I open a new bucket of wheat, I transfer it to the bucket that has a gamma lid for easy access.  I don’t make a note of where that particular bucket of wheat came from.)  This wheat was stored in buckets in a cool bedroom or basement for the past 10 years.  It did not have oxygen absorbers.  It expected it would germinate and it did.

5.  Newly purchased hard white wheat from WinCo.  I expected it would germinate and it did.

Further experiments were just with wheat from #3 and #4 above.  I soaked 1 cup of each kind of wheat in clean quart jars with identical sprouting lids and did everything side by side at the same time, same temperature of water, same location, same everything. 

And the hard red wheat just grew so much better.  The hard white wheat just sorta limped along the whole time, barely growing at all.  I didn’t expect that at all. 

So if you decide to grow so wheat grass, first make sure it’s going to sprout.  Then run a small test batch first to make sure it’s going to grow well.  You don’t want to be wasting food.

Then you can grow it into grass if you so desire.

You’ll want a clean growing tray with about an inch of soil.  Moisten the soil thoroughly and then sprinkle the sprouted seeds on top.  Cover with plastic wrap or damp newspaper.  Be especially careful not to let the sprouts and soil dry out during these first few days.  The wheat grass will be ready to harvest in 9-10 days. 

How does wheat grass taste?  Do you actually want to do this?

I suspect it tastes something like lawn grass, though I don’t know for sure.  I’ve never been one to eat lawn grass, and I’m not doing it now for the sake of the blog.  I have four large dogs that use the grass regularly.  Please be understanding. 

So the wheat grass tastes fine, I guess.  People say you can use it in place of lettuce for sandwiches, so I gave that a try.  It was ok.  There wasn’t any off or weird taste to my meat-cheese-tomato-wheat grass sandwich, but everything else was chewed up and swallowed while I continued working on the wheat grass.  It was kinda stringy.  I’m not sure I would add wheat sprouts again to my sandwich. 

Of course, most people grow wheat grass to juice it, for health purposes.  And most sources say they try to disguise the taste with other ingredients.  So I take that to mean that it doesn’t taste all that good.  I know the only members of my family who might possibly consider eating wheat grass in a sandwich or drinking wheat grass juice would be Jared and Becky, and they aren’t here to experiment on.  And even then, I don’t think they would do either again. 

But in a crisis, in the middle of winter, if we’re down to the bare basics, we might consider growing some wheat grass for the vitamins and a little change.

Links to related posts:

Basic Food Storage--Sprouting Wheat

Basic Food Storage--Wheat

Basic Food Storage--Wheat:  Using the Whole Berries

 

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[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26156538/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4678994/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17571966/

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11989836/

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34771159/

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32811246/