Gluten Free Oats

 

I’ll put my farmers hard hat on here and put my head over the parapet.

Oats in themselves are gluten-free, but the problem is cross contamination in the fields. Walk past any field of wheat and you’ll often see wild oats growing above the wheat. They have seeded accidentally and they are called “volunteers” by many farmers. (I think this is where the expression sowing wild oats comes from.)

With a field of oats, that may have been used for wheat or barley you may well get the same problem of self seeding of unwanted crop, but here because the wheat is shorter than the oats, you can’t see them. So when the oats are harvested there is a variable amount of wheat or barley in the oats.

With a good farmer proud of his crop, this level will be probably be below a few parts per million, so it would be acceptable to many coeliacs. I can eat porridge in most cases, but I don’t as I’m not that struck on it.

So would organic oats be better?

I will infuriate many here, by saying that in my view they may not be. The reason is that when a non-organic farmer is putting a new crop into a field, he will use a strong spray to kill the remains of the previous wheat or barley. This may reduce the cross contamination. Other practices such as good crop management and probably leaving a wide border around the field would also help.

So they would certainly be more gluten-free if it was a good farmer, who might even be growing oats for seed. In that case he would want to make sure that the levels of contamination with wheat or barley were extraordinarily low. They get a premium price from that.

So as in many things provenance is everything.

And that’s the problem with oats.

How do you find out which field on which farm they were grown? And what was in the field before they planted oats?

Aside - After writing this I found a company that produces gluten-free oats called Gluten Free Oats.

Read how they do it.

I suspect in Wyoming, where they have a lot of space, they can do it. But it will be much more difficult proposition in a crowded country like the UK, where agriculture is just that more intense.