Short answers, pulled from the story.
The archaeological record suggests wheat was first cultivated in the regions of the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BC. Hunter-gatherers in West Asia had harvested wild wheats long before that, perhaps as early as 21,000 BC, though wild wheat formed only a minor part of their diet.
In 2024, world wheat production was 799 million tonnes, making it the second most-produced cereal after maize. That year it was grown on 219.5 million hectares, more land than any other food crop, and world trade in wheat is greater than that of all other crops combined.
The main wheat species include the hexaploid common or bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) and spelt, the tetraploid durum and emmer, and the diploid einkorn. Other well-known types include Khorasan, also called Kamut, named for a historical region in modern-day Afghanistan and northeast Iran.
In genetically susceptible people, wheat gluten can trigger coeliac disease, which affects about 1 percent of the general population in developed countries and is treated only by a strict lifelong gluten-free diet. Wheat can also trigger non-coeliac gluten sensitivity, gluten ataxia, and dermatitis herpetiformis.
Dwarfing genes, first used in Japan's Norin 10 wheat developed in the 1930s, diverted carbon toward seed production and reduced lodging, becoming major factors in the Green Revolution in Mexico and Asia led by Norman Borlaug. By 1997-81 percent of the developing world's wheat area was planted to semi-dwarf wheats.
Vincent van Gogh painted his Wheat Fields series between 1885 and 1890, including Wheatfield with Crows, one of his last paintings. Thomas Hart Benton painted Wheat in 1967, and in 1982 Agnes Denes grew a two-acre wheat field at Battery Park in Manhattan as an act of protest.