“The Blue Plate”: A story of family, soil, bread and the ecosystem ...Middle East

This book was a finalist for the 2025 Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.

The Excited Skin of the Planet

Our family knew her simply as Neva. 

It was February of 1935, in the depths of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Just two weeks earlier the legal description for her farm in Wray, Colorado, had appeared in the tax delinquency list in the Wray Gazette. I can picture her scissoring out the newspaper article that doomed her farm, underlining those fateful words, and mailing it to her son and daughter-in-law living in southwest Nebraska, including a flannel onesie she had sewn for their infant daughter. Desperate, perhaps she included a note asking, “Is there anything at all that I can do? Are you able to help?” Her taciturn son Guy may have simply written back, “Dear Mother, I will come to be there with you on that day.” 

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This woman, Ruth Geneva Lathrop Heilman, was my great-grandmother, her son Guy and daughter-in-law Helen were my grandparents, and their infant daughter, Jo Ann, was my mother. I picture Neva and Guy navigating the dirty snowdrifts with the cold chapping their cheeks to climb the stone steps into the Yuma County courthouse in Wray, the county seat. Perhaps they found a place in the back of the room, standing in solidarity with others there in silent protest to witness the loss of their homes and farms. I can imagine this attempt in the final hour to preserve some sense of dignity when their eastern Colorado farm was put on the auction block. As I believe she bitterly understood at the time, her loss paralleled the story of her soil. And, as scientists are beginning to understand, more than eighty years later, my great-grandmother Neva’s story is as old as agriculture itself. 

At courthouse tax lien auctions, the people with the money sat or stood near the front. During the Dust Bowl they would have been investors or agents for investment groups from Denver and Cheyenne, perhaps even from Chicago. It was a gallows moment when a piece of people’s lives went on the block, and some without a direct stake in the auction gathered there just for the perverse entertainment value of seeing how pitifully low other people’s lives would sell for. Simply paying the taxes was beyond the reach of many people who owned farms and homes during a time when money barely circulated. 

“The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos”

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The auction began with the undeveloped lots and elm- and cottonwood-shaded clapboard and brick homes in Wray and the Colorado town of Yuma. The land and buildings lay dusty and empty, their occupants gone to California, back East, to the grave, or simply vanished. Some sold, but most property went into the stack to be offered up at the next auction. Eventually the auctioneer turned to the delinquent taxes on farmland, and the agents and buyers readied themselves. Agriculture had once been financially strong in the region. Investors still remembered the spectacular profits people had made growing wheat during and after the WWI years. Where should they invest their money? Stocks had become unmentionable horrors. Banks had failed throughout the country. Anybody with cash flow invested in farmland.

I imagine the tightening in Neva’s throat, the anger and frustration and sheer hopelessness making her head pound as the clerk read the legal description for her 160 dryland acres southwest of town. The numbers for township and range, section and quarter echoed through the space, and then the bidding began. It was brief. The tax lien sold to a man from Denver. 

She would have to sell to pay off the lien. Her farm was gone. 

My family and I have pieced together from county land records, newspaper archives, interviews with county clerks and recorder staff, and family memories how Neva lost her farm during the Dust Bowl, the story of which Timothy Egan cataloged in his epic history The Worst Hard Time. My grandparents shared little about that bitter period in their lives, and so we are left to speculate on some of the details. However we account for it, my great-grandmother Neva had a very rough go of it. She moved to town to make her living as a seamstress and was never the same. 

Neva died a few years before I was born, so we never knew each other. I imagine her standing amidst the greening wheat on a dewy spring morning, the song of nesting meadowlarks in her ears and a cup of strong coffee in her hands. I can see her calculating that if hail didn’t thresh the wheat into the ground, grasshoppers didn’t devour the field, and errant prairie fires didn’t burn the wheat as it cured in the midsummer sun, she could harvest her grain and make a profit. 

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I also imagine her distraught and staggering through her field during a late-October dust storm—a scarf covering her nose and mouth, wind-driven sand pelting her eyes, the omnipresent taste of dust invading everything. Before her eyes the gale stripped from her any optimism she once had as it raked the soil from around the hapless germinating wheat seedlings in one half of her field, and simultaneously buried the seedlings in the other half. 

This is a story about my great-grandmother Neva, and it’s a story about the soil under her wheat field on the dry western edge of the Great Plains. It is also a story about bread and the ecosystem legacy of the Great Plains, which has been a breadbasket for much of the world for more than a century. Like so many stories about the carbon footprint of food, the sheer deliciousness on our plates and in our mouths obscures wheat’s heavy carbon burden. And yet, emerging from the dry dust of tragedy are beautiful stories of hope and renewal. I don’t believe Neva could have known this, but she and other farmers growing grain during her generation on the Great Plains released one of the greatest pulses of carbon emissions in recorded history. 

Fortunately, the same ecosystem legacy that led to that carbon pulse now holds promise for a new vanguard of farmers working to claw some of that carbon back. This is their story as well. Fine threads connect everything we eat back to the soil, and bread provides one of the cleanest lines. 

Think of all the foods made with grains that we eat in our lives: bread, tortillas, crackers, noodles, pretzels, cooked grains, baked desserts, the list goes on. Humans devote more land to growing grains for these foods than any other class of crops. A complex logistical umbilical cord connects them to the food factories supplying us. Bakeries are everywhere. In some cities, every neighborhood has at least one bakery. Most extended families have at least one home baker in their midst making cookies, cakes, loaves, or what have you. 

I’ve experienced the magic of baking nearly everywhere I’ve traveled. In Guatemala City I came across a tortilleria cranking out tortillas and pupusas to a waiting, happy mob. In Nagpur, India, a tiny shop with an impatient crowd outside produced dangerously hot stacks of freshly baked naan smeared with ghee and a smattering of herbs. In Frankfurt, I once stood under an umbrella outside a bakery during a freezing downpour, the tangy perfume of baking rye somehow cutting through the weather and holding me and two dozen others in place as the line crept forward. At a university in Ethiopia, I came across a fragrant metal-sided kitchen filled with bakers devoted to producing piles and piles of pancake-like, spicy-sour injera for the students’ next meal, with lines of student workers carrying the rolled pancakes in baskets to the dining hall next door. 

The scent of cooking grains holds a unique magic, whether toasted or baked, steamed or boiled, and I wonder what the moment was like the first time one of our ancestors gathered ripe grains from a field of grasses, ground them into a powder, mixed in some water, and cooked the dough on a hot rock next to a fire. What I would give to have witnessed the olfactory moment humans first experienced the aroma of baking bread! It must have been glorious. 

Such is the influence that grains have in our lives. Cultures across the world domesticated indigenous grains wherever they could be grown. There may be as many recipes for them as there are cultures and grains and cooking methods. Whether the grain is rice, wheat, teff, amaranth, oats, rye, barley, maize, sorghum, millet, quinoa, or some other fantastic and local crop—all are dietary staples where they are grown. Outside of the marine fish-and-mammal-eating cultures and livestock-herding cultures, humans consume more calories from grains than any other class of foods. Domesticating grains appears to have changed us—our bodies, our minds, our culture—and archaeological evidence hints that it was the process of domesticating grains that led to the invention of agriculture. Through it, humans changed the world. 

The clearest example of this for me is my home. I am a child of the Great Plains. From my work, I’ve come to learn that through agriculture, humans transformed the North American Great Plains perhaps more than any other great ecosystem in recent history. In that nearly total transformation, farming and ranching acted independently to warm the climate through the seemingly wholesome act of growing food. How we choose to grow food in the future—and what we choose to eat—starts for me with understanding my great-grandmother’s farm and the story of her soil. 

And though bread and grains have some of the lowest carbon footprints on average of any food—about a pound and a half of CO2e for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas—the fact is that humans eat more of it than any other food. Under the guidelines of today’s carbon accounting practices, bread’s carbon footprint does not account for the centuries-long legacy of depleted soils and soil carbon loss. These impacts aren’t unique to growing grains but dominate grain-producing regions more than perhaps any other crop. If those soil carbon losses are included, bread’s carbon footprint would be much higher. 

Ironically, farmers and scientists have shown that we can grow grains on depleted soils in a way that can be carbon negative— drawing more carbon from the atmosphere to rebuild soil carbon stocks than are emitted as trace gases in other parts of the growing process—and reverse some of the effects of climate change. More than anything having to do with bread, this simple fact makes Neva’s story even more compelling. 

Mark Easter is the author of the award-winning popular science book “The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos,” which explores the question: “Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?” Easter is an ecologist and greenhouse gas accountant who has researched the carbon emissions from food, forestry, and fiber in academia and private industry for nearly three decades. He is a long-time resident of Fort Collins, where he loves to read, work in his garden, cook, hike, backcountry ski, and spend time with his wife and their Australian Shepherd, Bonny.

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