A Yarmouth entrepreneur has turned a family dietary challenge into a passion: to educate consumers about a little known sub-species of wheat with a funny name. Keith Shortall stopped by the Spelt Right bakery on the Royal River in Yarmouth, which for baker Beth George is more than just a business.

It looks like any other bakery, with large mixing machines, industrial-sized bags of flour, and containers of salt, and oil and other ingredients on shelves and counters. It has a great view of the Royal River on two sides. In fact, the river runs right through the basement.

The swift currents power several turbines that provide electricity to this old mill building in Yarmouth, which houses a number of businesses, including Spelt Right, which former attorney Beth George and her husband founded in 2007, and have operated at this site for about two-and-a-half years.

The career switch from the courtroom to the kitchen began when George noticed that so many of her young clients with behavioral problems were being treated with drugs.

"I did represent children for about ten years, and in that I saw a lot of issues with children in terms of behavioral issues in school--a lot of kids in special ed, a lot of kids being diagnosed with multiple disorders, and it just started bothering me," George says. "I said, 'What's going on? Why are so many kids having so much trouble?' And most of them, the recommendation being that they be put on some type of psychotropic drug. And I just thought there must be alternatives to that. And then what happened was, it hit home."

George says her son, who was around five or six at the time, was showing similar signs--behavioral problems, hyperactivity and shutting down. She says the family went through the special ed process, and other evaluations but was skeptical of the answers they were getting, and so decided to focus on diet.

George says it became clear that her son had food senstivities, and developed digestive problems when he ate certain wheat products.

"You know, we'd say, 'Hey let's go out to eat, we'll get pasta,' and the poor kid would always get sick," she says. "And I was busy and I was irritated and I thought he was getting sick to agitate me, and the poor kid just couldn't digest this stuff. And someone suggested to us that we might want to try spelt."

George says she believes that replacing wheat with spelt in her son's diet made a tremendous difference in her son's life. Being an attorney, she dove into researching spelt and discovered that it actually doesn't have any less gluten than standard wheat flour.

"That's a misunderstanding with spelt," she says. "It actually has a lot of protein and the protein is the gluten. So it has a lot of protein in it, but it's a weak gluten, the molecular structure of it--if you mix it too much it falls apart. If you look at a spelt bread, it's not going to rise as much as a wheat bread, the molecular structure is weaker so it has a tighter crumb."

Head baker Kip Thiele has carefully mixed a batch of spelt dough for bagels, which are shaped by a hand-fed machine. "We feed in the dough when it's ready, after it's rested, the dough goes into the top and the paddles inside cut off the actual pieces of dough and actually shapes them round so we don't have to do it by hand, so we get much more production for the time involved."

As the uncooked dough rings emerge from the machine, Beth George spritzes and gently dredges them in a tray of sesame seeds, and sets them on large baking sheets.

The bakery, which supplies stores throughout the New England and eastern New York, including Hannaford, and Whole Foods, can turn out about 15,000 bagels a week. Demand for spelt products, says George, is growing, even though it's more expensive, and, she acknowledges, presents some obstacles.

"The obstacle is it's inconvenient--it is an inconvenient grain," she says. As its history bears out. Originating in Mesopotamia some 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, spelt made its way into Europe in the Middle Ages, and came to the United States at around the time of the Civil War, brought in by Swiss and German immigrants.

But George says spelt ran into trouble after the turn of the century. "There's a hull on spelt and that hull got stuck, so the grain really was just ignored. And why not?" she says. "I mean, why have a grain that's inconvenient when you can grow wheat that you don't have to de-hull, that doesn't get stuck in the harvesters, and it wasn't until 1987 that the owner of Purity Foods brought spelt in from Germany to the United States because he thought there would be interest in the grain."

"My spelt wish would be that it would be a household word, people would understand what spelt is," George says. "They woudn't say 'Fish?' or 'Svelt?' 'What is it, do you have a spelling comany?' That they understand that it's this grain, that it's great to vary your diet with different grains and that Spelt Right becomes the brand that people think of with spelt. That's my wish--and I'm on my way."

Keith Shortall: "Good luck."

Beth George: "Thanks."

Beth George is the owner and operator of Spelt Right bakery in Yarmouth.