Some articles
Sep. 10th, 2008 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on "virtual twins" - children about the same age who are raised together but who are not biological siblings. So much attention is paid to twins separated at birth, this is the flip side.
In Studies of Virtual Twins, Nature Wins Again
By SARAH KERSHAW
Ramona, Calif.
AS sisters only four months apart, Julie and Sara Curry grew up being peppered with questions from confused classmates. Your mom was in labor for four months? asked one friend, said Sara, 19. How is it possible? others inquired.
The Curry sisters, college sophomores who live with their parents in this high desert town on the outskirts of San Diego, are what Dr. Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist who is researching behavioral differences among twins, refers to as virtual twins. By her definition, virtual twins are unrelated children born within nine months of each other who enter a family, through birth or adoption, in the first year of life. Since 1991, Dr. Segal has been studying 137 such sets of siblings, whose average age difference is three months.
As scientific subjects, virtual twins provide a rich pool of material for researchers tackling the nature-versus-nurture question. In Dr. Segal’s studies, as in so many involving biological twins, it seems that nature is winning.
Raised together essentially from birth, or at least since infancy, virtual twins may be genetic strangers, but they share an environment from an early point in life.
A twin herself, Dr. Segal runs the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, and is the author of two books on twins. She said her work has shown that virtual twins have less in common in terms of behavior, intelligence and decision-making than fraternal or identical twins, including those reared apart, or even biological siblings several years apart in age. Her research has appeared in publications like the Journal of Educational Psychology over the last few years.
“I expected the virtual twins to be more alike than they were because they had been raised together all their lives,” said Dr. Segal, who has also studied hundreds of pairs of fraternal and identical twins, including dozens reared apart. “Yet they were so much less alike. It gives us another piece of evidence in the whole nature-versus-nurture puzzle.”
While it is difficult to quantify the phenomenon, researchers say that virtual twins are an increasingly common result of Americans having children later in life, facing fertility issues and forming families through a patchwork of channels: adoptions, surrogate births, natural pregnancies and fertility treatments, which can lead to multiple births. Many parents, having struggled with infertility for years, pursue several avenues at once to increase their chances of having at least one child. If two adoptions or an adoption and a pregnancy work out at about the same time, the stage is set for virtual twins.
Peggi Ignagni of Oberlin, Ohio, had been trying to become pregnant for nine years when she and her husband, Tony, applied for a foster-care license, hoping they could adopt an infant after taking him into foster care. They got Nickholas when he was 3 days old but decided to proceed with in vitro fertilization, fearing that they might not be able to keep the boy. The fertility treatment worked, and Ms. Ignagni became pregnant with triplets who were born eight months after Nickholas. She and her husband, who owns a medical device company, now have four 6-year-olds. “At least they were all potty-trained within the same week,” she said.
In the case of the Curry sisters, Sara was adopted at birth by Deborah and Dave Curry, who are both retired from the Navy. The couple had tried having children for almost four years before they arranged for a private adoption. Ms. Curry became pregnant with Julie a month after Sara’s birth mother chose them as parents. When they left the hospital with Sara, they were stopped by a security guard and asked to explain why they were leaving with a newborn when Ms. Curry was obviously still pregnant.
The Currys — he is one of six siblings, she is one of 11 — say the differences between Julie and Sara are striking. They saw fewer differences between themselves and their own siblings, they said. Moreover, the girls became more different as they grew older and were less influenced by their parents, a conclusion that Dr. Segal has drawn through her research on other virtual twins as well. Their genes came to play a larger role in determining their aptitudes and personality traits, Dr. Segal said, adding that the experiences of other virtual twins she has studied provide more evidence of that.
Sara loves horror films but hates extreme sports; Julie likes feel-good films but loves jumping out of planes with a parachute. “I’ll jump off a cliff but I won’t watch ‘Saw,’ ” Julie said, referring to the gore-filled movie.
Sara goes to church; Julie doesn’t. Sara wears six earrings on each ear; Julie rarely wears jewelry. Sara is chatty, Julie quiet. Sara wears glasses, Julie contacts. Sara dresses up; Julie generally dresses down.
The dissimilarities may sound like those that occur among any siblings, but their parents and Dr. Segal, who has studied the sisters at two different times, say the contrast between them seems to go much deeper. In fact, she said the differences she found in general intelligence between the sisters were greater than you would find in most biological siblings, even those of very different ages.
Dr. Segal’s research typically involves interviewing virtual twins when they are at least 4 years old, giving them intelligence tests and having their parents and teachers fill out extensive questionnaires on behavior, their relationship with their sibling and their school, medical and dental histories. So far she has conducted follow-up interviews with 42 of the 137 pairs, including Sara and Julie; there is no age limit for the subjects she is studying.
Unlike some other virtual twins, Sara and Julie were not dressed alike or treated as twins in school. “They are totally different,” Mr. Curry said. “They offset each other.” As the family sat around their dining room table on a recent afternoon, Mr. Curry turned to his daughters and said: “It has to be more nature. You grew up so close, you were together 24-7.” He turned to Sara and said, “She’s a stabilizer to your drama.” And to Julie, “She brings excitement to you.”
“Yeah,” Julie said to her sister, “you bring me out of my shell.”
Some virtual twins in the study, however, have been deliberately raised as twins from birth. Julie Dykstra, a former nurse who lives in Belmont, Mich., had two adoptions come through within the same week. Her sons, now 6, were due on May 1 and May 3. Each was born 8 pounds 2 ounces and 21 inches long, she said, 10 days apart. “I never felt like I didn’t have twins,” she said. “I felt like I was immersed in it.”
They have grown up feeling like twins, and the family has told their school that they are twins.
“They have twin language,” Mrs. Dykstra said. “They know what the other is thinking and going to say before he says it. They met at 13 days and 3 days old.”
Dr. Segal said that while “genetics do not tell the whole story,” even if parents treat their virtual twins as biological twins or if the children show similarities early in life, her research has found that environment still has “minimal or no effect” on them in terms of behavior and intelligence. Virtual twins can seem very similar in their early years, she said, but in the long term a shared environment is not “going to have a lasting impact.”
Mrs. Dykstra and her husband, Todd, a pastor at Maranatha Bible Church, later adopted another set of virtual twins, two girls who are 20 days apart and are now 2. One was adopted from China and did not join the family until she was 10 months old. Mrs. Dykstra said she does not feel the girls are twins because one had been in an orphanage in China and came into the family so much later than the other. She added that the girls are still young. Six months ago the couple adopted another girl at birth, the biological sibling of one of their adopted daughters, and Mrs. Dykstra said she was excited to find out how the three sisters will be different. “We are like a little petri dish,” she said.
Some critics and adoption agencies say that having virtual twins (sometimes called pseudo twins or artificial twins) should be avoided by parents when possible, so that each child receives adequate parental attention. Some say that parents are not being truthful or fair when they attempt to arrange more than one adoption from birth mothers who might not choose them if they knew another infant would be brought into the home within the first year.
“People need to be very well counseled,” said Joyce Maguire Pavao, the chief executive and founder of the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge, Mass., which provides counseling and other services to what the center calls blended families.
“Adoption should be about finding families for children, not about finding children for families,” she said. “In many cases parents are doing this without understanding what the ramifications are. I think it’s fine to do it if people are well aware that doing it may be very difficult.”
But Dr. Segal said that in most cases fate, more than parents’ choices, leads to instances of virtual twins, and that those parents cannot be faulted for covering as many bases as possible, given that so much can go wrong with high-risk pregnancies and adoptions. In her work, she said, she found that parents were happy to have children close in age because it offered the siblings companionship.
Several major twin studies over the last 20 years, particularly those following twins raised by different families, have provided what scientists say is clear evidence that genetics play a greater role than environment in intelligence and a range of personality traits. Dr. Segal’s research, believed to be the first to examine virtual twins as a subset of the twin population, has bolstered the prevailing view through another lens.
Over the last 17 years, Dr. Segal and her researchers have tested verbal and nonverbal abilities in intelligence tests of identical, fraternal and virtual twins. More recently they have conducted other tests that evaluate how subjects make decisions, asking them to answer questions based on how they thought they and their sibling would answer together. She found striking differences among the virtual twins. Among the questions: name a book, a movie and an ice cream flavor, and if your twin was lost in the park, where would you look? That research is scheduled for publication this fall in Personality and Individual Differences, a psychological journal.
Dr. Segal has found that identical twins were the most alike in their thinking, fraternal twins somewhat less so, and virtual twins strikingly different. When it comes to intelligence, for example, her research has found that only 25 percent of the differences between twins — virtual, fraternal or identical — can be accounted for by their environment, 75 percent by genetics.
Not all of the virtual twins in Dr. Segal’s study show intellectual or social disparities. Ginger Relyea, a dance and fitness instructor who lives in Encinitas, Calif., with her husband, Steve, a vice chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, has two 11-year-old boys who are 11 weeks apart. One was adopted, the other born to a surrogate. On recent intelligence tests at school, they scored three points apart. The boys, each with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and each 4 feet 9 1/2 inches tall (though one is 12 pounds heavier), look like fraternal twins.
When they were infants and toddlers, they were often dressed alike, and in early photographs they appear identical. As babies, their personalities were very different: Nathan was a screamer, Dylan quiet. By about a year, they had begun to seem more like twins, Ms. Relyea said, and they reached milestones together, walking within a week of each other, for example.
Until about a year ago, she said, they acted like twins and were treated like twins, but differences have started to emerge. “I prefer freestyle sports, skateboarding and surfing,” said Nathan, the younger of the two. “Dylan tends to be more aggressive. Even though he’s only 3 months older, he takes advantage of the big brother, older, dominant thing.”
Dylan said: “I like the three-month difference. It makes me feel in command.” Nathan concurred: “He likes power,” he said.
But, Nathan added, he stands up to Dylan when he has to. “Some of our biggest arguments are over which is better, shorts or jeans,” he said.
One on locally grown wheat
Flour That Has the Flavor of Home
By INDRANI SEN
Millbrook, N.Y.
SQUINTING in the afternoon sun, Alton Earnhart strolled across his farm here in the Hudson Valley one day last month with Don Lewis, a baker and miller. Rows of wheat swayed to the horizon.
A farmer and a miller surveying fields of russet wheat would not have been an unusual sight here on a late-summer day 200 years ago. Gristmills once dotted the banks of streams and rivers throughout New York, mapping out settlement just as subway stations today chart New York City’s migratory patterns.
Today, nearly all of the nation’s wheat is grown on vast fields and milled in factories in the Midwest. Over the past few years, though, farmers and millers like Mr. Earnhart and Mr. Lewis have begun restoring wheat fields and reviving flour mills around the country.
In New Mexico, a cooperative of Native American and Latino farmers produce a boutique local flour. In Western Massachusetts, a baking couple has persuaded their customers to plant front-lawn wheat patches. In Vermont, a farmer whose homegrown wheat flour was a curiosity when he began growing it in the 1970s now can’t keep up with demand. And in Pennsylvania, a venerable pastry flour brand from the 1800s has been resurrected, made with local organic wheat.
Similar movements have started around the globe, including in Japan, where some udon noodle makers are using local wheat instead of the Australian wheat they had relied upon, and in Israel, where a group of Jewish and Arab farmers are trying to grow native varieties of wheat to supplant the American wheat that dominates the market there.
In New York, a consortium of farmers and bakers called Northeast Organic Wheat is challenging the assumption that the state’s soil and climate make high-quality wheat impossible. “That’s what I heard that frustrated me 10 years ago, you can’t grow it here,” said Mr. Earnhart. “That’s like saying to me, go do it.”
Advocates of local foods have bemoaned the state of mass-produced flour, even from higher-end brands. Midwestern wheat has been bred for uniformity and yield instead of flavor or nutrition, they say, and processed for shelf stability. But avoiding commercial flour has been a challenge.
Against a backdrop of concerns over food and transportation costs and with demand for local food growing, small wheat farmers see an opportunity.
Since 1977, Jack and Anne Lazor have grown wheat and milled flour at their dairy farm in Westfield, Vt. Until three or four years ago, customers showed no interest in the flour, Mr. Lazor said. Last winter, his flour sold out in January.
“It sure is amazing,” he said. “Thirty years later, all of a sudden I feel vindicated. We definitely went down the right road.”
It might take a while to appreciate high-quality, small-batch flours after a lifetime of eating food made with mass-produced flour. Their musky fragrances are often more pronounced, and variations in taste and texture bring a new range of complexity to baked goods, making supermarket flour seem one dimensional by comparison.
“Fresh-ground grains taste entirely different from the flour you buy at the grocery store,” said Mary-Howell Martens, who sells organic feed and seed in Penn Yan, N.Y., and grinds her own flour at home. “Everyone knows that a January tomato that comes from Mexico tastes different than an August tomato taken straight from the vine. It’s the same with grains.”
In New York, Northeast Organic Wheat is holding workshops on threshing, cleaning and milling wheat, and exploring marketing alternatives such as baker-farmer partnerships and farm-share groups, where members pick up a weekly allotment of grains to grind into flour themselves using a small mill. They are also experimenting with older grains grown here when New York was the region’s breadbasket, as well as ancient wheat varieties.
This region is supposedly too rainy for hard red spring wheat, the high-gluten wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the early fall. But some are growing it anyway because it is good for making bread. Others are sticking with the soft white winter wheat, low-gluten grain that’s planted in the fall and harvested in early summer that was traditionally grown here and is generally used for pastry and cake flour.
Mr. Lewis called his first encounter with soft local flour eight years ago a revelation. He was picking up some organic feed for his hens from Mr. Earnhart’s farm, Lightning Tree, when he came upon a barrel of flour that Mr. Earnhart had made with a small mill.
“I stuck my hand in it and I said, oh boy,” Mr. Lewis recalled. “It felt different, it smelled different, it tasted different. It was intriguing.”
Mr. Lewis bought a second-hand milling machine and began grinding Mr. Earnhart’s wheat. From his bakery at Wild Hive Farm, Mr. Lewis now sells bagged flour as well as breads, cookies, scones, biscuits and pastries, all made from local grains.
Creating a market for local wheat takes more than just planting seeds.
Cheryl Maffei and Jonathan Stevens, who own Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, Mass., have persuaded 100 of their customers to grow plots of wheat in their yards. A year ago, when they started seeking local wheat, Ms. Maffei said, their attitude was a tad naïve.
“We thought, we’re bakers, and we want our flour to be local, more local than North Dakota, and all we have to do is ask the farmers to grow it and we’ll buy it,” she recalled.
When she spoke to farmers, though, she found that nobody knew which varieties of wheat would thrive in the area, and the cleaning, milling and storage facilities needed for flour production didn’t exist locally. Ms. Maffei and Mr. Stevens began working with nearby colleges to identify wheat varieties to test, Ms. Maffei said. The customer plots, which were harvested last month, were trial runs and raised consciousness about the wheat. Already, Ms. Maffei said, the three patches they planted at the bakery have brought in curious customers. “They’ve never even seen wheat growing,” she marveled.
But there is a long road ahead. The closest miller who can produce the flour they need is in Quebec. “With our infrastructure here, we also lost the knowledge of wheat and milling and storing,” she said. “So we’re rebuilding it as we go.”
In New York, those who have ventured into wheat farming for flour have been mostly producers of animal feed for the lucrative organic meat market. The state’s wheat supply is small and the weather is unpredictable. Setting up the cleaning, milling, sifting and storage facilities required for a small-scale mill like Wild Hive’s costs at least $30,000, Mr. Lewis said.
And the resulting flour can be finicky, bakers and home cooks have found. Mass-produced flour is tested and often blended for consistent, precise gluten levels. Small-batch flour can vary from season to season, farm to farm and even field to field, with different gluten content, flavor or levels of water absorption. Bakers used to uniform results have trouble adjusting.
Supermarket flour is roller-milled and sifted to remove as much bran and germ as possible, making it shelf-stable for months or years. Most of the local flours are stone-ground, and even the white flours retain some wheat germ and can go rancid within weeks if not frozen, because the oils of the wheat germ oxidize.
Members of the local wheat movement want to shift Americans’ attitudes toward bread. Bakers must learn to adapt their recipes to the qualities of the flour, they say, as people did before mass-produced flour. And consumers used to buying the same loaf every day must adjust their expectations and learn to tolerate some variation.
That is easier said than done, said Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread in Manhattan, who has tried to use small-batch regional flour in her bakery but found it too inconsistent in quality and supply. She likes the principle of a baker responding to the quirks and nuances of flour, she said, but expecting her entire staff to do so on the fly is impractical. And if something goes wrong, a botched batch could mean 400 pounds of dough in the trash.
“Our wholesale customers are restaurants and stores,” Ms. Scherber said. “If you send a flat-looking loaf of bread, they’ll say, we don’t like it.”
Also, the soft wheat flours grown in the Northeast have low gluten and won’t produce the moist, springy crumb that Americans prize in bread.
“It is perfectly fine for building very dense, very grainy Germanic breads,” said Matt Funiciello, the owner of Rock Hill Bakehouse in Moreau, N.Y. The key, said Mr. Funiciello, is to embrace the difference.
“Don’t expect this bread to be similar to what you’ve had before,” he said. “If you open your mind and your palate to it, you’ll realize that, hey, flour tastes like something. Wheat has a flavor that’s unique.”
June Russell, the farm inspections coordinator for Greenmarket, hopes variability might eventually become a selling point for bread, as it has for other foods.
“Our cheese-makers at market will talk about their differences season to season,” Ms. Russell said. “They’ll say, Our milk is really rich right now because the cows are eating this or that. You’ll never hear a baker talk like that, and that’s because everyone is basically getting their flour from the same big system.” She is working with Northeast Organic Wheat, organizing information sessions and questionnaires about their bakers’ needs.
Organizers in New York look to older local wheat movements for inspiration. In New Mexico, for example, the Sangre de Cristo Cooperative, a collective of small-scale wheat growers, produces flour for local bakeries and co-ops.
Craig Mapel, an official with the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, helped start the wheat project in 1994 in the mountains north of Albuquerque. He said wheat had not been grown in the area for 50 years. Farmers in the program now plant more than 400 acres with wheat, Mr. Mapel said, and sell 250,000 to 350,000 pounds of flour a year.
“There have certainly been bumps in the road,” he said. But, he added, “it worked, because they’re still there.”
In 2002, McGeary Organics, a grain merchant, bought a mill built in the 1740s in Annville, Pa., and resurrected the venerable Pennsylvania pastry flour known as Daisy Flour, milling local soft wheat.
“In the 1800s, if you were a self-respecting housewife in Lancaster, Pa., you couldn’t operate unless you had Daisy Flour in your cupboard,” said David Poorbaugh, the company’s president. “We’re all romantics, and that’s part of the reason that we do this. I think we’re lucky if we break even with this old mill.”
Mr. Earnhart, the farmer, hopes local wheat will catch on, but he’s also apprehensive. Greater demand might bring calls for more standardization, he said. He doesn’t want to end up on the same path as large-scale wheat producers.
“The idea that we have to get it so sophisticated that everything is perfect kind of defeats what I think made this unique when we started out,” he said. “One of the things that we have to decide is how far we want to go.”
In Studies of Virtual Twins, Nature Wins Again
By SARAH KERSHAW
Ramona, Calif.
AS sisters only four months apart, Julie and Sara Curry grew up being peppered with questions from confused classmates. Your mom was in labor for four months? asked one friend, said Sara, 19. How is it possible? others inquired.
The Curry sisters, college sophomores who live with their parents in this high desert town on the outskirts of San Diego, are what Dr. Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist who is researching behavioral differences among twins, refers to as virtual twins. By her definition, virtual twins are unrelated children born within nine months of each other who enter a family, through birth or adoption, in the first year of life. Since 1991, Dr. Segal has been studying 137 such sets of siblings, whose average age difference is three months.
As scientific subjects, virtual twins provide a rich pool of material for researchers tackling the nature-versus-nurture question. In Dr. Segal’s studies, as in so many involving biological twins, it seems that nature is winning.
Raised together essentially from birth, or at least since infancy, virtual twins may be genetic strangers, but they share an environment from an early point in life.
A twin herself, Dr. Segal runs the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, and is the author of two books on twins. She said her work has shown that virtual twins have less in common in terms of behavior, intelligence and decision-making than fraternal or identical twins, including those reared apart, or even biological siblings several years apart in age. Her research has appeared in publications like the Journal of Educational Psychology over the last few years.
“I expected the virtual twins to be more alike than they were because they had been raised together all their lives,” said Dr. Segal, who has also studied hundreds of pairs of fraternal and identical twins, including dozens reared apart. “Yet they were so much less alike. It gives us another piece of evidence in the whole nature-versus-nurture puzzle.”
While it is difficult to quantify the phenomenon, researchers say that virtual twins are an increasingly common result of Americans having children later in life, facing fertility issues and forming families through a patchwork of channels: adoptions, surrogate births, natural pregnancies and fertility treatments, which can lead to multiple births. Many parents, having struggled with infertility for years, pursue several avenues at once to increase their chances of having at least one child. If two adoptions or an adoption and a pregnancy work out at about the same time, the stage is set for virtual twins.
Peggi Ignagni of Oberlin, Ohio, had been trying to become pregnant for nine years when she and her husband, Tony, applied for a foster-care license, hoping they could adopt an infant after taking him into foster care. They got Nickholas when he was 3 days old but decided to proceed with in vitro fertilization, fearing that they might not be able to keep the boy. The fertility treatment worked, and Ms. Ignagni became pregnant with triplets who were born eight months after Nickholas. She and her husband, who owns a medical device company, now have four 6-year-olds. “At least they were all potty-trained within the same week,” she said.
In the case of the Curry sisters, Sara was adopted at birth by Deborah and Dave Curry, who are both retired from the Navy. The couple had tried having children for almost four years before they arranged for a private adoption. Ms. Curry became pregnant with Julie a month after Sara’s birth mother chose them as parents. When they left the hospital with Sara, they were stopped by a security guard and asked to explain why they were leaving with a newborn when Ms. Curry was obviously still pregnant.
The Currys — he is one of six siblings, she is one of 11 — say the differences between Julie and Sara are striking. They saw fewer differences between themselves and their own siblings, they said. Moreover, the girls became more different as they grew older and were less influenced by their parents, a conclusion that Dr. Segal has drawn through her research on other virtual twins as well. Their genes came to play a larger role in determining their aptitudes and personality traits, Dr. Segal said, adding that the experiences of other virtual twins she has studied provide more evidence of that.
Sara loves horror films but hates extreme sports; Julie likes feel-good films but loves jumping out of planes with a parachute. “I’ll jump off a cliff but I won’t watch ‘Saw,’ ” Julie said, referring to the gore-filled movie.
Sara goes to church; Julie doesn’t. Sara wears six earrings on each ear; Julie rarely wears jewelry. Sara is chatty, Julie quiet. Sara wears glasses, Julie contacts. Sara dresses up; Julie generally dresses down.
The dissimilarities may sound like those that occur among any siblings, but their parents and Dr. Segal, who has studied the sisters at two different times, say the contrast between them seems to go much deeper. In fact, she said the differences she found in general intelligence between the sisters were greater than you would find in most biological siblings, even those of very different ages.
Dr. Segal’s research typically involves interviewing virtual twins when they are at least 4 years old, giving them intelligence tests and having their parents and teachers fill out extensive questionnaires on behavior, their relationship with their sibling and their school, medical and dental histories. So far she has conducted follow-up interviews with 42 of the 137 pairs, including Sara and Julie; there is no age limit for the subjects she is studying.
Unlike some other virtual twins, Sara and Julie were not dressed alike or treated as twins in school. “They are totally different,” Mr. Curry said. “They offset each other.” As the family sat around their dining room table on a recent afternoon, Mr. Curry turned to his daughters and said: “It has to be more nature. You grew up so close, you were together 24-7.” He turned to Sara and said, “She’s a stabilizer to your drama.” And to Julie, “She brings excitement to you.”
“Yeah,” Julie said to her sister, “you bring me out of my shell.”
Some virtual twins in the study, however, have been deliberately raised as twins from birth. Julie Dykstra, a former nurse who lives in Belmont, Mich., had two adoptions come through within the same week. Her sons, now 6, were due on May 1 and May 3. Each was born 8 pounds 2 ounces and 21 inches long, she said, 10 days apart. “I never felt like I didn’t have twins,” she said. “I felt like I was immersed in it.”
They have grown up feeling like twins, and the family has told their school that they are twins.
“They have twin language,” Mrs. Dykstra said. “They know what the other is thinking and going to say before he says it. They met at 13 days and 3 days old.”
Dr. Segal said that while “genetics do not tell the whole story,” even if parents treat their virtual twins as biological twins or if the children show similarities early in life, her research has found that environment still has “minimal or no effect” on them in terms of behavior and intelligence. Virtual twins can seem very similar in their early years, she said, but in the long term a shared environment is not “going to have a lasting impact.”
Mrs. Dykstra and her husband, Todd, a pastor at Maranatha Bible Church, later adopted another set of virtual twins, two girls who are 20 days apart and are now 2. One was adopted from China and did not join the family until she was 10 months old. Mrs. Dykstra said she does not feel the girls are twins because one had been in an orphanage in China and came into the family so much later than the other. She added that the girls are still young. Six months ago the couple adopted another girl at birth, the biological sibling of one of their adopted daughters, and Mrs. Dykstra said she was excited to find out how the three sisters will be different. “We are like a little petri dish,” she said.
Some critics and adoption agencies say that having virtual twins (sometimes called pseudo twins or artificial twins) should be avoided by parents when possible, so that each child receives adequate parental attention. Some say that parents are not being truthful or fair when they attempt to arrange more than one adoption from birth mothers who might not choose them if they knew another infant would be brought into the home within the first year.
“People need to be very well counseled,” said Joyce Maguire Pavao, the chief executive and founder of the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge, Mass., which provides counseling and other services to what the center calls blended families.
“Adoption should be about finding families for children, not about finding children for families,” she said. “In many cases parents are doing this without understanding what the ramifications are. I think it’s fine to do it if people are well aware that doing it may be very difficult.”
But Dr. Segal said that in most cases fate, more than parents’ choices, leads to instances of virtual twins, and that those parents cannot be faulted for covering as many bases as possible, given that so much can go wrong with high-risk pregnancies and adoptions. In her work, she said, she found that parents were happy to have children close in age because it offered the siblings companionship.
Several major twin studies over the last 20 years, particularly those following twins raised by different families, have provided what scientists say is clear evidence that genetics play a greater role than environment in intelligence and a range of personality traits. Dr. Segal’s research, believed to be the first to examine virtual twins as a subset of the twin population, has bolstered the prevailing view through another lens.
Over the last 17 years, Dr. Segal and her researchers have tested verbal and nonverbal abilities in intelligence tests of identical, fraternal and virtual twins. More recently they have conducted other tests that evaluate how subjects make decisions, asking them to answer questions based on how they thought they and their sibling would answer together. She found striking differences among the virtual twins. Among the questions: name a book, a movie and an ice cream flavor, and if your twin was lost in the park, where would you look? That research is scheduled for publication this fall in Personality and Individual Differences, a psychological journal.
Dr. Segal has found that identical twins were the most alike in their thinking, fraternal twins somewhat less so, and virtual twins strikingly different. When it comes to intelligence, for example, her research has found that only 25 percent of the differences between twins — virtual, fraternal or identical — can be accounted for by their environment, 75 percent by genetics.
Not all of the virtual twins in Dr. Segal’s study show intellectual or social disparities. Ginger Relyea, a dance and fitness instructor who lives in Encinitas, Calif., with her husband, Steve, a vice chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, has two 11-year-old boys who are 11 weeks apart. One was adopted, the other born to a surrogate. On recent intelligence tests at school, they scored three points apart. The boys, each with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and each 4 feet 9 1/2 inches tall (though one is 12 pounds heavier), look like fraternal twins.
When they were infants and toddlers, they were often dressed alike, and in early photographs they appear identical. As babies, their personalities were very different: Nathan was a screamer, Dylan quiet. By about a year, they had begun to seem more like twins, Ms. Relyea said, and they reached milestones together, walking within a week of each other, for example.
Until about a year ago, she said, they acted like twins and were treated like twins, but differences have started to emerge. “I prefer freestyle sports, skateboarding and surfing,” said Nathan, the younger of the two. “Dylan tends to be more aggressive. Even though he’s only 3 months older, he takes advantage of the big brother, older, dominant thing.”
Dylan said: “I like the three-month difference. It makes me feel in command.” Nathan concurred: “He likes power,” he said.
But, Nathan added, he stands up to Dylan when he has to. “Some of our biggest arguments are over which is better, shorts or jeans,” he said.
One on locally grown wheat
Flour That Has the Flavor of Home
By INDRANI SEN
Millbrook, N.Y.
SQUINTING in the afternoon sun, Alton Earnhart strolled across his farm here in the Hudson Valley one day last month with Don Lewis, a baker and miller. Rows of wheat swayed to the horizon.
A farmer and a miller surveying fields of russet wheat would not have been an unusual sight here on a late-summer day 200 years ago. Gristmills once dotted the banks of streams and rivers throughout New York, mapping out settlement just as subway stations today chart New York City’s migratory patterns.
Today, nearly all of the nation’s wheat is grown on vast fields and milled in factories in the Midwest. Over the past few years, though, farmers and millers like Mr. Earnhart and Mr. Lewis have begun restoring wheat fields and reviving flour mills around the country.
In New Mexico, a cooperative of Native American and Latino farmers produce a boutique local flour. In Western Massachusetts, a baking couple has persuaded their customers to plant front-lawn wheat patches. In Vermont, a farmer whose homegrown wheat flour was a curiosity when he began growing it in the 1970s now can’t keep up with demand. And in Pennsylvania, a venerable pastry flour brand from the 1800s has been resurrected, made with local organic wheat.
Similar movements have started around the globe, including in Japan, where some udon noodle makers are using local wheat instead of the Australian wheat they had relied upon, and in Israel, where a group of Jewish and Arab farmers are trying to grow native varieties of wheat to supplant the American wheat that dominates the market there.
In New York, a consortium of farmers and bakers called Northeast Organic Wheat is challenging the assumption that the state’s soil and climate make high-quality wheat impossible. “That’s what I heard that frustrated me 10 years ago, you can’t grow it here,” said Mr. Earnhart. “That’s like saying to me, go do it.”
Advocates of local foods have bemoaned the state of mass-produced flour, even from higher-end brands. Midwestern wheat has been bred for uniformity and yield instead of flavor or nutrition, they say, and processed for shelf stability. But avoiding commercial flour has been a challenge.
Against a backdrop of concerns over food and transportation costs and with demand for local food growing, small wheat farmers see an opportunity.
Since 1977, Jack and Anne Lazor have grown wheat and milled flour at their dairy farm in Westfield, Vt. Until three or four years ago, customers showed no interest in the flour, Mr. Lazor said. Last winter, his flour sold out in January.
“It sure is amazing,” he said. “Thirty years later, all of a sudden I feel vindicated. We definitely went down the right road.”
It might take a while to appreciate high-quality, small-batch flours after a lifetime of eating food made with mass-produced flour. Their musky fragrances are often more pronounced, and variations in taste and texture bring a new range of complexity to baked goods, making supermarket flour seem one dimensional by comparison.
“Fresh-ground grains taste entirely different from the flour you buy at the grocery store,” said Mary-Howell Martens, who sells organic feed and seed in Penn Yan, N.Y., and grinds her own flour at home. “Everyone knows that a January tomato that comes from Mexico tastes different than an August tomato taken straight from the vine. It’s the same with grains.”
In New York, Northeast Organic Wheat is holding workshops on threshing, cleaning and milling wheat, and exploring marketing alternatives such as baker-farmer partnerships and farm-share groups, where members pick up a weekly allotment of grains to grind into flour themselves using a small mill. They are also experimenting with older grains grown here when New York was the region’s breadbasket, as well as ancient wheat varieties.
This region is supposedly too rainy for hard red spring wheat, the high-gluten wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the early fall. But some are growing it anyway because it is good for making bread. Others are sticking with the soft white winter wheat, low-gluten grain that’s planted in the fall and harvested in early summer that was traditionally grown here and is generally used for pastry and cake flour.
Mr. Lewis called his first encounter with soft local flour eight years ago a revelation. He was picking up some organic feed for his hens from Mr. Earnhart’s farm, Lightning Tree, when he came upon a barrel of flour that Mr. Earnhart had made with a small mill.
“I stuck my hand in it and I said, oh boy,” Mr. Lewis recalled. “It felt different, it smelled different, it tasted different. It was intriguing.”
Mr. Lewis bought a second-hand milling machine and began grinding Mr. Earnhart’s wheat. From his bakery at Wild Hive Farm, Mr. Lewis now sells bagged flour as well as breads, cookies, scones, biscuits and pastries, all made from local grains.
Creating a market for local wheat takes more than just planting seeds.
Cheryl Maffei and Jonathan Stevens, who own Hungry Ghost Bread in Northampton, Mass., have persuaded 100 of their customers to grow plots of wheat in their yards. A year ago, when they started seeking local wheat, Ms. Maffei said, their attitude was a tad naïve.
“We thought, we’re bakers, and we want our flour to be local, more local than North Dakota, and all we have to do is ask the farmers to grow it and we’ll buy it,” she recalled.
When she spoke to farmers, though, she found that nobody knew which varieties of wheat would thrive in the area, and the cleaning, milling and storage facilities needed for flour production didn’t exist locally. Ms. Maffei and Mr. Stevens began working with nearby colleges to identify wheat varieties to test, Ms. Maffei said. The customer plots, which were harvested last month, were trial runs and raised consciousness about the wheat. Already, Ms. Maffei said, the three patches they planted at the bakery have brought in curious customers. “They’ve never even seen wheat growing,” she marveled.
But there is a long road ahead. The closest miller who can produce the flour they need is in Quebec. “With our infrastructure here, we also lost the knowledge of wheat and milling and storing,” she said. “So we’re rebuilding it as we go.”
In New York, those who have ventured into wheat farming for flour have been mostly producers of animal feed for the lucrative organic meat market. The state’s wheat supply is small and the weather is unpredictable. Setting up the cleaning, milling, sifting and storage facilities required for a small-scale mill like Wild Hive’s costs at least $30,000, Mr. Lewis said.
And the resulting flour can be finicky, bakers and home cooks have found. Mass-produced flour is tested and often blended for consistent, precise gluten levels. Small-batch flour can vary from season to season, farm to farm and even field to field, with different gluten content, flavor or levels of water absorption. Bakers used to uniform results have trouble adjusting.
Supermarket flour is roller-milled and sifted to remove as much bran and germ as possible, making it shelf-stable for months or years. Most of the local flours are stone-ground, and even the white flours retain some wheat germ and can go rancid within weeks if not frozen, because the oils of the wheat germ oxidize.
Members of the local wheat movement want to shift Americans’ attitudes toward bread. Bakers must learn to adapt their recipes to the qualities of the flour, they say, as people did before mass-produced flour. And consumers used to buying the same loaf every day must adjust their expectations and learn to tolerate some variation.
That is easier said than done, said Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread in Manhattan, who has tried to use small-batch regional flour in her bakery but found it too inconsistent in quality and supply. She likes the principle of a baker responding to the quirks and nuances of flour, she said, but expecting her entire staff to do so on the fly is impractical. And if something goes wrong, a botched batch could mean 400 pounds of dough in the trash.
“Our wholesale customers are restaurants and stores,” Ms. Scherber said. “If you send a flat-looking loaf of bread, they’ll say, we don’t like it.”
Also, the soft wheat flours grown in the Northeast have low gluten and won’t produce the moist, springy crumb that Americans prize in bread.
“It is perfectly fine for building very dense, very grainy Germanic breads,” said Matt Funiciello, the owner of Rock Hill Bakehouse in Moreau, N.Y. The key, said Mr. Funiciello, is to embrace the difference.
“Don’t expect this bread to be similar to what you’ve had before,” he said. “If you open your mind and your palate to it, you’ll realize that, hey, flour tastes like something. Wheat has a flavor that’s unique.”
June Russell, the farm inspections coordinator for Greenmarket, hopes variability might eventually become a selling point for bread, as it has for other foods.
“Our cheese-makers at market will talk about their differences season to season,” Ms. Russell said. “They’ll say, Our milk is really rich right now because the cows are eating this or that. You’ll never hear a baker talk like that, and that’s because everyone is basically getting their flour from the same big system.” She is working with Northeast Organic Wheat, organizing information sessions and questionnaires about their bakers’ needs.
Organizers in New York look to older local wheat movements for inspiration. In New Mexico, for example, the Sangre de Cristo Cooperative, a collective of small-scale wheat growers, produces flour for local bakeries and co-ops.
Craig Mapel, an official with the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, helped start the wheat project in 1994 in the mountains north of Albuquerque. He said wheat had not been grown in the area for 50 years. Farmers in the program now plant more than 400 acres with wheat, Mr. Mapel said, and sell 250,000 to 350,000 pounds of flour a year.
“There have certainly been bumps in the road,” he said. But, he added, “it worked, because they’re still there.”
In 2002, McGeary Organics, a grain merchant, bought a mill built in the 1740s in Annville, Pa., and resurrected the venerable Pennsylvania pastry flour known as Daisy Flour, milling local soft wheat.
“In the 1800s, if you were a self-respecting housewife in Lancaster, Pa., you couldn’t operate unless you had Daisy Flour in your cupboard,” said David Poorbaugh, the company’s president. “We’re all romantics, and that’s part of the reason that we do this. I think we’re lucky if we break even with this old mill.”
Mr. Earnhart, the farmer, hopes local wheat will catch on, but he’s also apprehensive. Greater demand might bring calls for more standardization, he said. He doesn’t want to end up on the same path as large-scale wheat producers.
“The idea that we have to get it so sophisticated that everything is perfect kind of defeats what I think made this unique when we started out,” he said. “One of the things that we have to decide is how far we want to go.”
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 02:10 am (UTC)I heavily espouse local products.
Date: 2008-09-12 06:00 am (UTC)Our local food co-op had a "hundred-mile" article consisting of a menu with essay, and they questioned how local you had to get--for instance, the bakery 60 miles away that mills its own flour....but buys the wheat berries from Eastern WA, which is about four hundred miles across the mountains.
That said, their menu was very heavy on the tomatoes. (Salad with tomatoes and a choice of either lasagne or ratatouille for main course, both with tomato sauce.)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-11 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-12 02:10 am (UTC)I heavily espouse local products.
Date: 2008-09-12 06:00 am (UTC)Our local food co-op had a "hundred-mile" article consisting of a menu with essay, and they questioned how local you had to get--for instance, the bakery 60 miles away that mills its own flour....but buys the wheat berries from Eastern WA, which is about four hundred miles across the mountains.
That said, their menu was very heavy on the tomatoes. (Salad with tomatoes and a choice of either lasagne or ratatouille for main course, both with tomato sauce.)