The seafront, though, remains close to normal. The sky shines bright blue in the sharp cold, the beaches glisten a powdery off-white. But the idyll is upset by a strange stillness. The port, which made the city a global outpost, is almost closed. Providing the Russian Empire with access to Europe, and to the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, it saw everything from silk to olives to cocaine flow back in return. It made the people here, if not exactly cosmopolitan, then perennially open to the world. And it enabled a lot of good times. Eventually “living like God in Odesa” became Yiddish slang for having a good time.

Today, however, the city is almost landlocked. Ahead of me, stretching out miles into the sea are hundreds of underwater mines. Somewhere just over the horizon lurks the Russian Navy. Moscow first wanted to conquer Ukraine. It couldn’t. Now it seeks to break the will of its people: as winter bites, rockets and drones pound energy infrastructure across the country; and once more Moscow is jeopardising international food security, by trying to sabotage the country’s grain shipments and further delay their arrival to the millions around the world who need them.

***

Ukraine’s “black soil” (Chernozem) is one of the most potent natural resources on earth. It contains a particular constellation of microelements that make it the most fertile in the world, enabling it to grow a large and varied number of crops, including grain. These are then exported: Ukraine has a 42% share of the world’s sunflower oil exports, 16% of maize exports, and almost 10% of global wheat exports.

Pretty much as soon as Russia launched its invasion, routes in the Azov Sea were closed to merchant ships. The Russians do not respect the civilian/military divide, so it was simply too dangerous for them to sail. In early March, Ukraine had no choice but to suspend its export of meat, sugar, salt, oats, buckwheat, millet, and rye.

Fearful of a global food crisis, international institutions lobbied Russia, which initially ignored them. Eventually, though, the clamour got too much. On July 22, the UN (assisted by Turkey) brokered The Safe Transportation of Grain and Foodstuffs from Ukrainian Ports Document. This slowly began to ease the backlog of 20 million tons of grain and other foodstuffs that had piled up in Ukraine. Finally, Odesa’s great port began to work again. Finally, the grain began to move — in theory.

***

“They totally misunderstood our country; they didn’t understand who we were.” Igor Tkachuk, Deputy Governor of the Odesa Region, is flanked by two of his colleagues from the regional administration in a cafe in the city centre. Together, the men are responsible for making sure the region can continue functioning despite daily attacks.

Tkachuk explains how Russia is continuing to prevent grain from leaving Ukraine. The July deal established a so-called “humanitarian corridor” in the Black Sea for the shipment of grain — with ships searched in Istanbul by Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, and UN inspectors. The point of inspections is, apparently, to search for “unauthorised cargoes and personnel on board vessels inbound to or outbound from the Ukrainian ports”.

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From the outset, Ukraine has complained about Russian inspections of their ships: often ships are waiting “for over a month”, according to the Ukrainian Information Ministry in December. Tkachuk says this is deliberate. “The ports are working; the grain is going on to the ships; we are ready to work. But there are more than 90 grain ships waiting in line in the Bosporus. Four months ago, I was Deputy Head of the port in Chornomorsk [south of Odesa]. I know how this works. They are acting as a break to sabotage the grain deliveries.”

He continues: “The Russians are saying that there are mines in the water — but there are no mines in this corridor. Also, under the terms of the deal, they have the right to inspect a ship before it goes. And they are doing this incredibly slowly. The Turkish inspectors can inspect a ship in three hours — it takes the Russians three days for some reason.”

He is not alone in this view. A few days later, I meet with Oleksiy Goncharenko, MP for the Northwest Odesa region. “The Russians are doing the inspection slowly,” he tells me. “They need a rest, they need to smoke, then a coffee. Then they are ill, and a million other excuses to delay the process. Generally, we have three or four ships going through inspections per day, but during the two days in which Russia wasn’t in the deal, that number was 20 ships.”

He is referring to a 48-hour period, from 29 October, when Russia briefly suspended the grain deal after the Ukrainian bombing of the Crimean Port of Sevastopol. Almost immediately after the event, Putin publicly vowed that if it emerged that “the explosives that blew up the Crimea bridge were sent from Odesa by a grain shipment”, it would “call into question the existence of humanitarian corridors”.

Goncharenko believes this contains a vital lesson for the international community. “It was clear from the first day that Russia would do everything it could to kill the deal; it was looking for any excuse. From the beginning, the Russians never wanted it. They want chaos and inflation; they want the Black Sea to remain closed. So when we attacked their fleet in Sevastopol, they obviously jumped at the opportunity to back out. But it was interesting because it didn’t work. They made a huge song and dance about leaving; [Turkish President] Erdogan said, ‘fine then’ and they came back in just over 48 hours.” He concludes. “This is really important because it shows the world how to deal with Russia.”

Crucially, Goncharenko believes the grain issue will not go away soon. “For a start,” he tells me, the situation “showed the world how important the Black Sea remains. Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, it has been the breadbasket of the world, but many forgot its importance — until it was closed. It’s vital for the world to open the Black Sea, not just for grain, but for all other exports. Right now, only one product is moving.”

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A big threat in his eyes remains the possibility of direct assault and occupation of the ships. And this raises new problems, especially for the continuing supply of grain. From  January 1, 2023, many ship insurers — including those based in America and the UK — stopped offering “war risk” cover across Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, citing losses related to the conflict and from Florida’s Hurricane Ian. Goncharenko believes that, for the moment, this won’t have negative effects on the grain ships, but that we can’t rule out problems arising in future.

He is, however, convinced that the problems around grain will continue. He dismisses talk that Putin is ill or too old. “He is very active; I don’t believe he is ill — look at his recent movements. One day he was in Vladivostok, then in Kaliningrad. For Putin, Ukraine is like Chechnya: the first war was a disaster, so they did it twice. He’s constantly thinking about learning from mistakes. And if he does this, make no mistake: Odesa is Russia’s objective Number One — not Kyiv. He knows he cannot take Kyiv anymore. He believes Odesa to be a Russian city. There are three ‘holy’ Ukrainian cities for him: Sevastopol, Kyiv, and Odesa. He has one and has abandoned the other — we are the only one left.”

I ask him a question that I ask almost everyone I meet here. Britain and the USA went into Iraq without really knowing anything about the country or its people and blundered accordingly. But that was a country on a different continent, whose people spoke a different language and whose culture is strikingly different to ours. How could Russia, as Ukraine’s neighbour, with a shared language and so many cultural traditions, get it all so badly wrong?

Goncharenko pauses and smiles. “Do you know the Mayakovsky poem of 1921, ‘Debt to Ukraine’?” I don’t, and we look it up. “But what do we know/of the face of Ukraine?” the poet asks, before answering: “A Russian’s/cargo of knowledge/is slight… What they know is/Ukrainian borscht,/What they know is/Ukrainian salo./And from the culture/they skimmed the foam.”

“They never really understood us. They just thought they did. And this is why they are in the mess they are,” he concludes. I think back to the beginning of the week when I asked Tkachuk what he thought an already-isolated Russia hoped to gain by delaying grain shipments that were, after all, going to help feed people across the world? “No idea,” he shrugged. “The same thing they hoped to achieve by going to war with us in the first place, I guess.”

The blight that is wheat took root 10,000 years ago, when Triticum aestivum, or bread wheat, was domesticated from wild grasses in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. Initially, the local Neolithics cultivated wheat alongside traditional hunter-gathering and incipient pastoralism (livestock farming). But wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun.

Crop-watching may demand little energy, but it is demanding of time. With fewer hours to hunt and to forage, we settled for a restricted diet. At Abu Hereyra in Syria, archaeology records this shift: when the occupants were hunter-gatherers, they consumed 150 wild plants; as arable farmers, they ate just a handful of crops. Human health deteriorated; the human body changed. Singularly, the jaw shrunk, since the new wheaty diet required less chewing than meat. Human teeth did not reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. The diet of starch — wheat’s principal component — caused cavities. And the dietetic value of wheat, which was anyway only modestly nutritious, has declined by as much as 30% under contemporary industrialised agriculture.

The intriguing question is: if wheat-growing altered our corporeal structure, did it alter our brain? Did the systematic rituals and requirements of planting and harvesting wheat change our brains to make us more docile? Organised? Cooperative? Disconnected from nature? Did it turn us away from animism to praise of Ceres, goddess of grain crops, and then to an abstract, monolithic God of whom we ask our daily bread.

What wheat certainly did do was facilitate the rise of the state. As James C. Scott, co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, explains in Against the Grain, wheat became the best way to tax the people: “The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable’.”

Wheat-fields are fixed and surveillable; livestock moves about. Counting sheep is easy in bed but for a state flunky on an arid hillside, the accurate checking of ovines (which are, anyway, easy to transport, and therefore to hide) is all but impossible. Similarly, communities reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams as their staple were more able to evade taxation since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested when the tax collector has gone home. Such societies rarely developed into states.

But where you have wheat, historically, you have state control or its like. The taxing of wheat enabled the emergence of non-productive elites, who required an armed wing to defend their regime. The food that fuelled the necessary population increase to staff the army, the fist of the state? Wheat. Nutrient poor but energy dense, fodder for the masses, it provided just enough energy and health to work, breed, fight. The early grain states were “population machines” (Scott again), domesticating people as the farmer domesticates the cow herd.

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The most “domesticated” people were slaves, utilised in wheat’s more unpleasant aspects of production. Wheat states were slave states. The Roman writer Lucius Apuleius recorded in Metamorphoses IX the lot of millers:

“Their skins were seamed all over with marks of the lash, their scarred backs were shaded rather than covered with tattered frocks. Some wore only aprons, all were so poorly clothed that their skin was visible through the rents in their rags! Their foreheads were branded with letters, their heads were half-shaved. They had irons on their legs. They were hideously sallow. Their eyes were bleared, sore, and raw, from the smoke of the ovens. They were covered with flour as athletes with dust!”

To prevent the enslaved fleeing the dirty work, law and policing were invoked, even invented. The legal Code of Hammurabi (c1750 BC) has six clauses to punish the escape of slaves.

Western society was eventually organised around the production and consumption of wheat. And so it became the ultimate political tool. Communism’s iconography of a hammer for the proletariat and a wheat-cutting sickle for the peasantry turned out to be one of history’s crueller ironies. The hammer was taken to the workers, the sickle to the peasant. As well as being easy to tax, wheat is easy to confiscate. And since wheat is a subsistence crop, remove it and you have starvation. During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3, Stalin deliberately deprived the country’s population — who lacked sufficient ardour for rule from Moscow — of wheat. Some 3.9 million Ukrainians, about 13% of the population, perished.

Meanwhile Hitler, a few years later, planned to feed the unformed millions of his master race with wheat tended by Ukrainian slaves, or neger, in the Reich’s terminology.

But the tyranny of wheat can be more subtle than the feeding or impoverishing of the masses in totalitarian grain states, old or new. Since the Second World War, the chief agricultural aim of government (and transnational governments such as the EU) has been productivity: quantity over quality. Wheat farming has become a yield-obsessed industry dependent on labour-reducing but expensive technology. Unsurprisingly, it has become a cereal-killer of small, family farms: a brand-new combine harvester can cost £100,000. Farmers who do fork out for one become indentured to an agribusiness complex, which oversees their production of wheat from cultivation to sale.

One example will serve: farmers who participate in the “Climate View” bio-tech programme of chemical giant Monsanto supply harvest data through sensors on combines manufactured by John Deere; Monsanto then sends prescriptions back, telling farmers which product he or she should apply to maximise yield. In his book Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott recounts an interview with an ex-Monsanto executive who “painted a future in which farmers would essentially outsource their decisions to Monsanto”. There is a Latin phrase for farmers in such corporate controlled agriculture: instrumentum vocale. Talking tools. Slaves.

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Really, one becomes slyly indentured. Back in 1976, Monsanto developed the herbicide Roundup. They then genetically engineered wheat cultivars resistant to their own product, eventually mass-producing the Roundup Ready line of seed in 2019. Yes, you read that right: the grains were developed for their ability to cope with a chemical product that Monsanto wanted to flog. So if the farmer buys Roundup Ready seed, then he or she buys the tied-in Roundup herbicid. And Monsanto cashes in twice.

Chemical use in conventional wheat-growing does much for the coffers of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), but it is turning swathes of the UK countryside into a coffin for nature. Wheat is the cause of more environmental problems than you can wave a baguette at. Although the lobbyists and the apologists of agribusiness insist that pesticide use has declined over the last quarter of a century, this is not the case when it comes to wheat. Between 2000 and 2016, average spray passes (applications) over wheat increased from 5.5 to 6.6, while the active substances in sprays went from 14.7 to 20.5. Actually, forget  the mgs, and the ratios. The countryside is doused in chemicals.

According to Cornell University’s Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ), which compares approximate toxicities for pesticides, an EIQ of 7 indicates toxicity to wildlife. The fungicide chlorothalonil, usually bought in the UK as Bravo, has an EIQ of 33; it is widely used on winter and spring wheat. Chlorothalonil is now banned by the EU. Extinction of nature is not confined to the savannah and the jungle. It happens at the cottage door. Five wildflowers — “weeds” to some — associated with cereal and arable farming in the UK are now dead and gone due to chemically addicted  industrialised agriculture: So, farewell, Lamb’s succory, Interrupted brome, Thorowax, Small bur-parsley and Downy hemp-nettle.

The environmental woes of wheat go on and on. Yearly planting requires yearly tilling and this constant churning of earth kills the soil’s living organisms, spumes CO2 from soil-stored carbon, and exacerbates climate change. And I have not even mentioned the negatives of nitrogen as industrial wheat’s mainstay artificial fertiliser, what with its polluting run-offs and its release of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas which, pound for pound, warms the planet 300 times as much as carbon dioxide.

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Of course, wheat has its champions. According to agribusiness’s advocates, industrial wheat production must continue if we are to satisfy the stomachs of a growing global population. There is not a grain of truth in this. Farming already provides more than enough food for the future; the problem is simply that the West wastes a third of its food, and less developed countries lose about the same amount due to poor processing and storage. Anyway, in a world going to fat and type 2 diabetes more carbs from Mother’s Pride sliced white are hardly necessary.

Humanity took a wrong turn with wheat. But all is not lost. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing a rethink of our reliance on oil and gas, this too is the moment to sow seeds of doubt about our dependence on the “golden grain”. Why not grass over swathes of the arable prairies of East Anglia — and Ukraine — and stock them with free-range cattle and sheep? Grass requires no lashings of chemicals, and livestock dung is excellent at restoring soil fertility and biodiversity; a single cow can feed 2.2 million insects per year, which means snacks galore for the birds and the bats.

I know, I know, as every vegan will exclaim: “Cows belch methane”! But it is not the cow, it is the how. An outdoor cow, on established grass, with methane-reducing seaweed supplement and low stocking density, is actually sequestering carbon. So, bovines are less of a climate problem than synthetic clothes, given that trainers alone cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. One can only presume that the Oxford councillors who took the decision recently to go “meat free” are nudists. Or stupid. Or anti-nature. Or all three.

To save the planet, pastoralism is the intelligent solution. The brain is 60% fat, and omega-rich fat from grass-fed meat is excellent for mental health. The sine qua non of free thinking. Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!

“In the old days, we had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are dying of hunger. In the old days, we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us and we have nothing. In the old days, I should have bade you welcome, and given you as my guest chickens and eggs and milk and fine, white bread. Now we have no bread in the house. They are killing us.”

The words are spoken by a Ukrainian peasant to the Welsh Journalist Gareth Jones and duly reported in the Daily Express on 6 April 1933. Jones was the first person to report the truth of the famine that Josef Stalin unleashed on Ukraine when he decided its people were hoarding grain that rightly belonged to the State and duly sent his commissars backed by troops to expropriate (read: steal) it. At least 5 million people died from starvation in the USSR between 1931 and 1934 — including 3.9 million Ukrainians. It was a low point even by the standards of the vertiginously bloody 20th century.

Now, almost a century later, soldiers have once more been sent by Moscow to seize Ukrainian grain. Once more, farmers are killed and their barns and stores looted. And once more, the Ukrainian people are being made to pay for the madness of their neighbouring Tsar.

***

Ukraine is a country cursed by its good luck. It is well-known that it is perennially — and unambiguously — cursed by geography: it sits next to Russia, which has brought it the USSR, Josef Stalin, the gulags and an unsuccessful Cold War. There isn’t really any upside to all this.

Less known is that Ukraine also suffers from its own fecundity. The country is coated in so-called “black soil” (Chernozem), which contains the humus and variety of micro elements that make it the most fertile soil in the world. In it grows massive amounts of barley, wheat, corn, soy, rape seed and sunflowers. Only about 2% of the world’s soil is black soil and about 25% of that is found in Ukraine. The country has around 42 million hectares of agricultural land of which roughly 32 million is cultivated every year — equivalent to roughly one-third of the arable land in the entire European Union. It is an agricultural superpower.

According to former Minister of Agriculture, Roman Leshchenko, “it is no exaggeration to state that Ukraine can feed the world” — and therein lies the problem. Stalin considered Ukraine the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union and when Hitler dreamt up a demented idea of empire based up on the principle of Lebensraum it was control of Ukraine’s black soil that he hoped would feed the Third Reich. In came the Germans; once more Ukrainian blood flowed.

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Since the Russians invaded on 24 February, they have destroyed civilian districts, smashed public infrastructure, and tortured and executed prisoners. They have also stolen farm equipment, shelled food storage sites and stolen thousands of tonnes of grain. It’s systemic and it’s planned and most obvious in the country’s south, where I spent considerable time over the past two months. In both the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts farmers have reported multiple thefts. In the Kherson village of Mala Lepetykha, Russian soldiers reportedly stole 1,500 tons of grain from storage units which they then drove to Crimea.

“It’s very simple,” says Andrey Stavnitser, co-owner and CEO of Ukrainian port operating company TransInvestService. “They’re stealing grain in the areas they have invaded — Mariupol, Kherson Melitopol and so on — which they then take to Crimea, load onto vessels pretending its Russian grain, and then sell. With grain, if you don’t tag it, it’s impossible to tell where it comes from, especially if they mix it with Crimean and Russian grain.”

Then there is the problem that Ukraine cannot export the grain it has. When I first arrived in Odesa last month, I noticed that the city’s most famous sight, the Potemkin steps that connect the harbour to the city, were inaccessible: surrounded by soldiers who had closed the port for fear of Russian attacks. Russia stole Crimea in 2014 and with it the Ukraine’s most important port. Now it has taken Mariupol and, with it, Ukraine’s access to the Azov sea. Now it heads toward Mykolaiv and then eventually, it hopes, Odesa. In the meantime, it is shelling both cities, rendering their ports unusable. Ukraine cannot get its grain out.

This creates a twofold problem. First, Ukraine has 320 million tonnes of grain stuck in the country from last year’s crop, which Stavnitser calculates is costing Ukraine around $15 billion of revenue. To make matters worse, the new crop is ready in late June, which means more will need to be stored if it cannot be sold. But Kyiv usually just sells its grain immediately so it never bothered investing in the appropriate technology for longer-term storage. Now the grain risks going rotten.

Together this creates a second problem that spreads far beyond Ukraine. Several African countries depend on Ukrainian grain. Around 40% of Egyptian milling grain —the grain that is used for bread — comes from Ukraine. If this fails to materialise there won’t be famine but there would likely be widespread hunger. The effect of this on the country, as well as on the region’s political stability, would almost certainly be catastrophic.

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And there are dangers closer to home, too. Just this week, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England warned that Britain faces an “apocalyptic” rise in food prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “[An inflation risk factor] I am going to sound apocalyptic about is food,” he told the Treasury select committee. “Ukraine does have food in store but can’t get it out at the moment.”

In her book Red Famine, the historian Anne Applebaum writes that “long before collectivisation began, the phenomenon of the violent expropriator — a man who brandished a gun, spouted slogans and demanded food — was familiar in Soviet Ukraine.” Now the violent expropriators are back and almost a century later, not only have their goals — the theft of Ukraine’s resources — remained unchanged, but seemingly also their tactics.

The Russian army still fights like the Red Army did during the Second World War. Its tactics remain equally stupid, its brutality equally unchecked. It murders Ukrainian children. It destroys Ukrainian artefacts. It tries to erase all traces of the country’s national identity. No surprise, then, that its incompetence means it has only succeeded in galvanising it. The more Russia stirs memories of the Holodomor the more national feeling it breeds in Ukranians; the more it steals and rapes and kills, the more Ukraine becomes determined to resist — until the end if need be.

But it needs help. While the world buys Russian oil and finances its war, many countries are also buying its grain, some of which is almost certainly stolen from Ukraine. Beginning in March Moscow has struck new deals with Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya. “It is totally unacceptable that anyone can buy grain from Russia because this is fuelling the war,” says Stavnitser. “You cannot protest the war and then go out and do things that only serve to prolong it.”

The next few weeks are likely to prove critical. As Stavnitser concludes: “We all hope the UN succeeds in negotiating humanitarian corridor for grain with Russia and if this happens, we will start exporting last year’s crop fast and also be able to start exporting the new crop in a few weeks’ time. If that doesn’t happen then we will be reduced to using rail and road and some smaller ports and can export only around 1.2 to 1.5 million tonnes [as opposed to 5-6 million]. If this happens then many countries — especially in Africa — will be facing a severe ad urgent food crisis.”