From breadbasket to the dog bowl

Irrigation equipment in a field of grain at Ehmke Seed, a farm near Healy, Kansas. — Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

WHEAT grows so prodigiously on the Kansas high plains that in 1953 the surplus birthed one of the Cold War’s big ideas: Food for Peace, a federal government programme that delivered the excess bounty to a hungry post-war world.

Conceived by a Kansas farmer and created by President Dwight Eisenhower, Food for Peace has sent sacks of grain stamped “From the American People” to more than four billion people in 150 countries around the world.