A few weeks back I was shocked, SHOCKED, to find out that we’d never written about sugar in this column.
几周前，当我发现我们从来没有在这个专栏里写过关于糖的文章时，我感到震惊，十分震惊。
We immediately righted this historic wrong. But then one of my colleagues tapped me on the shoulder and told me that we’d also never written about wheat.
我们立即纠正了这一“历史性”错误。但后来，我的一位同事拍了拍我的肩膀，告诉我，我们也从未写过关于小麦的文章。
“Whaaaat?” I said. “No, wheat”, they said. So here we all are.
“什么？”我说。“没 有 小 麦”，他们说。所以这就是了。
Wheat joined the Minecraft family back at the very dawn of time. 小麦在很早的时候就加入了我的世界大家庭。
Well, February 6, 2010, to be exact, which to be honest feels like a million years ago at this point.
确切地说，是2010年2月6日，说实话，那个时候感觉像是一百万年前。
It was included in a patch released during the Indev phase of the game’s development that added the entire farming system, including the hoe, farmland, seeds, and bread.
它包含在游戏开发的Indev阶段发布的版本中，该版本添加了整个农场系统，包括锄头、农田、种子和面包。
It also very slightly changed the texture of feathers. Important stuff.
重要的是，它还轻微地改变了羽毛的纹理。
There are quite a lot of ways to get your hands on wheat.
有很多方法可以获得小麦。
The classic way is through farming - plant some seeds in tilled, irrigated farmland, wait a while, then bash it to bits (I believe the technical name for this is “harvesting”).
经典的方法是通过耕作——在用锄头耕过的、灌溉的农田里种一些种子，等一会儿，然后把它们破坏（我相信这的技术名称是“收获”）。
If you wait long enough, then you’ll get wheat. But you can also find wheat in various chests, steal it from a village’s farmland, craft it out of hay bales, and even trade it from foxes for other food items.
如果你等得足够长，那么你就会得到小麦。但你也可以在各种箱子里找到小麦，从村庄的农田里偷走它，用干草包制作小麦，甚至击杀狐狸获得小麦和其他食物。
Wheat is a versatile item. When you hold it in your hand, it’ll attract nearby cows, sheep, goats, and mooshrooms – and they’ll follow you as long as you don’t go too far away.
小麦是一种有很多功能的物品。当你手里拿着它时，它会吸引附近的牛、绵羊、山羊和哞菇——只要你不要走得太远，它们就会跟着你。
You can use it to breed these same animals also, as well as heal horses and llamas.
你也可以用它来繁殖这些相同的动物，以及治愈马匹和羊驼。
That’s not all – wheat is also an ingredient in bread, cake, cookies, and hay bales.
这还不是全部——小麦也是面包、蛋糕、饼干和干草块的合成配方。
You can trade it with farmer villagers for emeralds. And you can pop it in a composter to get compost.
你可以用小麦与农民村民换取绿宝石。你也可以把它放进堆肥桶里来堆肥。 Image credit:Yann Forget // CC BY-SA 3.0
In the real world, wheat is one of the most important plants on our planet.
在现实世界中，小麦是我们地球上最重要的植物之一。
Wheat covers about 220 million hectares of the Earth’s surface, and the world trade in wheat is bigger than all other crops combined.
小麦覆盖地球表面约2.2亿公顷，世界小麦贸易量比所有其他作物的总和还要大。
Its popularity is down to its high protein content – which allows it to be fairly nutritious compared to other cereals, providing about 20% of the recommended daily intake of lots of valuable vitamins.
它的受欢迎的原因归根于其高蛋白质含量——与其他谷物相比，它具有相当营养，提供了约20%的推荐每日摄入量的大量有营养价值的维生素。
Technically speaking, wheat is a type of grass, but humans have been growing it for food since around 10,000BC, and it has changed dramatically in that time.
从科学上讲，小麦是一种草，但人类自公元前10,000年左右以来一直在种植小麦作为食物，并且当时发生了巨大变化。
Over the millennia, the grains have got much much larger and easier to harvest - and the protein content has increased.
几千年来，谷物变得更大，更容易收获，蛋白质含量也增加了。
That protein, which is called “gluten”, allows a mixture of wheat flour and water to get stretchy, which in turn allows for bubbles of gas to get trapped inside when it ferments. Bake that gassy, watery, wheaty mixture and you get something magical – bread!
这种被称为“麸质”的蛋白质允许小麦粉和水的混合物变得有弹性，这反过来又允许气体气泡在发酵时被困在里面。烘烤那种有气体、水状、小麦状的混合物，你就会得到一些神奇的东西——面包！
Wheat is also a major ingredient in biscuits, pancakes, pasta, noodles, pies, pastries, cakes, cereals, muffins, gravy, beer, vodka, and pizza.
小麦也是饼干、煎饼、意大利面、面条、馅饼、糕点、蛋糕、谷物、松饼、肉汁、啤酒、伏特加和披萨的主要成分。
Quite honestly, it’s hard to imagine a world without wheat. So let’s not do that. Let’s go play Minecraft instead.
老实说，很难想象一个没有小麦的世界。因此，我们不要这样做，我们去玩我的世界吧。
发表于 2022-4-24 19:51:25
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