#CARLA BARTOLUCCI ILLNESS FULL#

The “greatest thing about it,” she adds, “is that it actually tastes really, really good: milky, almost buttery” - and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it has 30 percent more protein and 15 percent less starch than commercial wheat. “Einkorn has been a gift to our family,” says Bartolucci, one they are honored to share. Jovial Foods, the company Bartolucci and Viola founded in 2010, is now the largest grower of einkorn in the world with more than 3,000 acres planted. And when they made the joyous discovery that Giulia could indeed tolerate einkorn, they planted still more.

So they worked with local farmers to plant some. In 2009, when the dedicated parents stumbled upon a group of Italian researchers working to save the grain they hoped would be a healthy option for their daughter, there were less than 200 acres of einkorn left worldwide. Ancient einkorn, the only wheat that has never been hybridized, was abandoned some 5,000 years ago, Bartolucci says, because, in short, it offers only one fifth the yield of other wheats. So what happened? Why haven’t we grown up with einkorn-rich products on the shelves at Stop & Shop? As with many things in life, it comes down to money.

In fact, Bartolucci reports, when “Ötzi the Iceman” was discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 after being preserved in a glacier for more than 5,000 years, einkorn grains were found on his fur “coat” and among the contents of his stomach. Archaeological findings show that humans in western Asia’s Fertile Crescent gathered wild einkorn during the Paleolithic Era tens of thousands of years ago, and that when the first farmers thought to begin planting einkorn seeds, the crop nourished the planet’s first civilizations. Never underestimate the force of nature that is a parent’s love.Įinkorn is indeed an ancient, almost mythical grain. The result? Little Giulia’s mom and dad helped save an ancient grain called einkorn from the brink of extinction and changed the course of their daughter’s life/health in the process. Maybe there was a different type of wheat we had never heard of.” And so the pair, who met in Bologna in the 1980s, where the Connecticut College student studying Italian was introduced to a handsome Italian studying agriculture, decided to do some research. “Giulia did not have celiac disease,” explains Bartolucci, but was diagnosed with a “sensitivity” to gluten, “so my husband and I felt like maybe there was something out there that she could tolerate.

#CARLA BARTOLUCCI ILLNESS FULL#

“I didn’t want hers to be a life ‘without.’ I wanted her to have a full life.” And a full life, as far as this family of robust Italian heritage was concerned, should include the opportunity to savor a wide array of dishes made from Earth’s bountiful offerings. “But I didn’t want her to have to do that,” Bartolucci says.

Years upon years of stomach disturbances, asthma, headaches and even hair loss followed, until a doctor told Bartolucci that if Giulia eliminated gluten from her diet, her symptoms would disappear. When New London native Carla Bartolucci had her first child in 2000, a daughter she and husband Rodolfo Viola christened Giulia, she “seemed to be sick from the moment she was born,” Bartolucci remembers.

Carla bartolucci illness