Julia Child asked, “How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?”

The trouble began with the creation of Wonder Bread in the 1920. It was soft and white, and it was pre-sliced for convenience.

Out went the kind of bread with plenty of whole grains and fiber. But we were still likely to get some protein because, as President James A. Garfield once said, “Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter.”

The refined grains a lot of us now consume have made a big difference in our nutrition, and not for the better as the health police tell us. For millennia people made bread and other products with whole grains as a foundation, such as wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley, rye, and others, but after grain leaves the fields, a lot happens to it these days.

Hard and soft wheats, spring and winter wheats are cultivated in the San Luis Valley. Hard wheat, which has more gluten, is shipped to mills to make the bread flour that most of us buy in loaves or in bags on grocer’s shelves, and some of the products are better than others on a scale from ten down to one, the stuff that Julia Child said tasted like Kleenex. (In the San Luis Valley, our agricultural crops are hay and alfalfa followed by potatoes, barley, and wheat in that order of acreage.)

While I was writing last week about flour mills in the Valley, I could not help but think about the kind of flour that the Gosar families mill and how they do it at theirs north of Monte Vista. They produce good old organic, stone ground, whole wheat flour.

Our early millers here used water power instead of electricity, and the whole process depended on the water supply to turn the heavy stones that ground their flour. Later millers could operate their machinery with electricity, as the Gosars do too. The Gosars use a hammer mill, powered by electricity instead of water of course, to grind flour finer as I understand it.

Even before electricity, though, there were other processes, like Lafayette Head’s roller mill back in the 1860s. Later, tall elevators and mills like the one in Alamosa came in during the 1890s.

At first, when Greg Gosar’s grandfather arrived in Wyoming from Yugoslavia in 1900, much of the grain that was grown in the Mountain West was still used for stone-ground flour, unless it was shipped in on the railroad. In the Midwest, some commercial mills were producing what they called Hungarian stone-ground flour, but cereal companies like Kellogg and Post came in around 1900.

Eventually they gave us the boxes of breakfast cereals and many of those other processed foods that line rows of shelves at grocery stores. They also gave the world tycoons like Marjory Merryweather Post with her Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.

The more modest Gosars, though, stick with their organic, stone-ground flour that they bag and distribute with the label Mountain Mama Flour Mill. Locally their products are readily found at the Valley Food Coop and a few other stores, and it is marketed to food stores and bakeries elsewhere in the region. Their organic flour is highly recommended for bread, pasta, and pastry.

As we all know, another of the Gosars’ products is sausage. Served in several restaurants and stores and at special events around the Valley, this has become a popular item on many menus.