Wheat has been the foundational crop of Western civilisation for 10,000 years — its colour at harvest is one of the most primordially familiar sights in temperate human cultures. As a named colour, wheat reflects the deep agricultural roots of colour perception: humanity's most important colours were named for the most important things.

Warm, abundant, and reassuring. Wheat is yellow stripped of its intensity and grounded in the earth — it carries the associations of harvest, abundance, and the particular quality of late summer light on ripe fields. Associated with comfort, provision, and the enduring cycle of agricultural life.

Van Gogh's wheat field paintings — particularly "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890), possibly his last painting before his death — gave wheat-gold a particular emotional resonance in art history. The colour of ripe wheat also appears in many national flags (the yellow of the Ukrainian flag represents wheat fields; the gold in many African flags similarly references agricultural abundance). "Amber waves of grain" in "America the Beautiful" invokes the same colour as a symbol of national prosperity.