Spelt It Out

Spelt is not wheat, or maybe it is, but what's important to food marketers is that the Food and Drug Administration calls it wheat. So it's wheat.

The FDA has demanded that Newman's Own Organics state clearly on its packages of spelt pretzels that they contain wheat. The company has agreed to comply.

Currently, the packages say that spelt is "an entirely different species" from wheat. That is 100 percent accurate.

The FDA agrees but still concludes that spelt is wheat, because both are of the genus Triticum and can trigger the same allergies.

It all comes down to definitions, both popular and technical. Newman's Own and the FDA agree that spelt is not wheat. But the book Economic Botany: Plants in Our World calls it "spelt wheat" and categorizes spelt in the same way it does durum wheat—which everybody thinks of as wheat. Most people, however, would not know that spelt and wheat are so similar.

The confusion comes partly thanks to the marketing of spelt products in health-food stores over the past few decades. Spelt is an ancient grain native to southern Europe and western Asia. It has been sold as an "alternative" product that is healthier and tastier than wheat. That has given it cache, deserved or not, among the extra-crunchy set, but with food allergies of all kinds on the rise, the marketing of spelt-based products has had to change.