food crops basics: cereals
cereals : cereals are the seeds of grasses (Poaceae). There are many many cereals of note: wheat, rice, and maize(corn) spring to mind … chances are, you are a member of one (or more) cultures that have an ancient, deep relationship with one or more of those three cereals. There are also others like barley, millet, sorghum, and oats that are mega important in their own right, but those three are standouts for sure. There are also many plants which are farmed and used in a way similar to cereals, such as quinoa, but these are not grasses and so are “pseudo"cereals (just a different kind of plant than true cereals).
Generally, cereals are farmed for their grains which are smallish, hard, dry fruits, which are easy to store compared to other starchy plants like plantain, especially before refrigeration. Kept out the way of mice and wet, they’d last … probably why humans liked hanging out with semiferal cats, which eventually became the domestic cats we have to this day.
Cereals are some of the crops we farm the most of, and also some of the crops we have been farming for as long as farming has been a thing that we do. Our relationship with cereals is truly ancient and is sometimes pointed to as a point in which hierarchical, ownership-based systems began1...
not 100% on that one TBH.
Why not? Well it makes sense that farming cereals would require a different social organization than hunter-gathering, because of the work needed to cultivate, harvest, and process cereals, and also that the benefits of long-term storage can become an issue if you are having to carry that grain around with you as opposed to keeping it in a granary/silo building. However, these things do not require hierarchy, ownership, so on. Processing grains can be hard work, but made easy or even enjoyable as a community activity, sitting around with your friends and family grinding grain and gossiping, something people do with all sorts of activities including milling grain. We also see examples of cultures that cultivated cereals as staples that have other systems, such as domestic & kin-based systems where extended families work community to cultivate cereals2. Look to maize in the Americas for many examples.
Maize itself is worth bringing up because there is, so much, here.
Maize is a domesticated descendant of wild teosinte, and really interesting stuff is done to unpick the patterns of maize domestication taking place 5000 to 9000 years ago. This includes looking at lakebeds to see pollen and phytolith presence (both vary by shape, and phytoliths are microscopic structures that persist after a plant decays), fossil records, and checking pottery and human remains for maize components3. Regardless of how these understandings shift and change, the fact remains that these people over centuries cultivated teosinte into maize, carefully selecting the best cereals to propagate ...
look at this. This is a profound link to many folks’ ancestors, and a way of extending hope forward, selective breeding for crops that are better and forming culture around this practice.
& much like the very people who formed this relationship with maize, the plant itself bears the wounds of colonization. It lays bare how much of a lie the "benefits” of Western civilization are … none of this makes life better for humanity, it exists to make a select few people at the top of the pile very, very wealthy & powerful. & there is no limit to their greed.
maize has become a menace in the hands of industrial agriculture and capitalist firms.
You may have seen the news about corn sweat, aka transpiration, where plants (like humans) excrete water which evaporates & carries heat away from the body. in sufficiently “sweaty” circumstances, it boosts humidity, in turn making sweat a less effective cooling strategy. The sheer scale of industrial corn agriculture, grown in monocultures without shade of trees, results in massive corn-sweating increasing the humidity and making it harder to cool down.
& other than that. Generally, when monetary value is the metric through which things are measured & prioritized, things that sell well get prioritized over things that are good. Crops that look nice & taste sweet & are addictive & can be used for animal feed, biofuel, and ultraprocessed food become the crops to grow, pushing out others. Things like “having essential nutrients” fall by the wayside, leading to circumstances where people have sufficient caloric intake but insufficient nutrition4. Maize is no exception here. In many cases, its cultivation is for use as corn syrup to cut costs in the production of sweet things (cheaper than sugar), or corn to bulk out flour, or corn to feed animals in CAFOs rather than allowing animals to graze naturally on plant matter we can’t digest. An amazing plant with an ancient history beaten down into the fuel for a whole lot of problems and very few people getting very rich. We see the same with other cereals for certain, but maize is certainly a notable case.
like maize, wheat has also been very-much implicated in some nastiness. 19th century California experienced the onset of Western-style agriculture in tandem with capitalism and industrial agriculture (unlike other places which had been farming for a long while prior) ... agriculture in the state sprinted headlong into commodity/cash-crop growing rather than subsistence, massive monocultures of wine grapes and wheat, tended to with concrete dams, harvesters, caterpillar-tread tractors ... inundating the world with wheat that turned massive profits from its uses in brewing and animal feed5. it was a model to follow for anyone who wanted to turn a big profit, even though monocultures aren't resilient against weather events and tend not to provide the nutrition that people need. other places worldwide cranked up their industrial wheat farming, and wheat-feeding of animals, hurtling towards highly industrialized modern "conventional" crop-farming and CAFOs.
not all more-recent cereal farming is fucked up & evil, though. Many many people continue traditional practices, and many experiment with mixing a range of knowledge to try and cultivate these important plants in a more sustainable way. For example, Alternate Wet and Dry Irrigation (AWDI) for rice farming is an iteration of rice-paddy farming where the paddies are allowed to intermittently dry out rather than be continuously flooded, reducing water demands and risk of contamination from polluted water6. The staple status of these plants means that successful breeding for better nutrition can have a big impact, kind of like how contemporary furikake made a huge difference by adding nutritional bonuses to otherwise just plain rice. and while it makes “conventional” harvesting machinery less useable, cereals can of course be farmed in polycultures with other plants.
rice itself is similarly ancient and entangled in human history, with wild rice species and evidence of rice domestication spanning multiple continents. Wild rice is harvested by indigenous folks while domesticated rice is raised by many indigenous groups as well. The wild-domestic rice boundary is fuzzy, with wild rice being cultivated (it’s “wild” rice in that it hasn’t been through the incredibly long process of domestication), with wild rice being crossbred with domestic rice, with ancestral early-domestication rice being carried down multiple parallel domestication processes in different places, by different people7. Rice has been used to make so, so much, and is the basis for an immense diversity of cultures.
fascinating stuff with a lot of history and a lot of hope.
So mentioned before that the dry nature of the grain made it viable for storage w/o technologies/processing moreso than other starches. but there are potentially other reasons that grains became So Important, since these plants can take a lot of effort to turn into food (ever seen how many steps it takes to turn wheat into bread?) after all.
here is a brief aside to the “drunken monkey” hypothesis of human evolution. Human evolution is of course a very. Hmm. subject at times. For example the similar-sounding “stoned ape” hypothesis which notes the overlap between ancestral human lineages and psilocybin mushrooms, and says that perhaps the reason we have such weird brains is we took a lot of shrooms and those brain-changes gave rise to Human Intellect (literally going “what drugs were you on when you came up with this lol” to the Entire Human Species). Despite name similarities, drunken monkey is different.
so you know how sometimes animals will eat fruit that’s a bit rotten and they get drunk? Fruit-eating animals are somewhat known for this.
so humans are apes and we are thought to have descended from an arboreal ape living in the forests of Africa. many of our close sibling-species still live there, still living in the trees (chimps and bonobos). They are omnivores and frugivores, and humans are also omnivores with a lot of frugivore-vibes (teeth setup, loving sweets, being able to get scurvy with insufficient fruit+vegetable intake). being a frugivore makes sense when you live in the trees in a habitat that’s close to the equator, where there isn’t a wintertime with cold weather & short daylight hours that restrict plant growth and damage large, soft fruits. Sometimes, there isn’t enough fruit, and so other foods are eaten instead (leaves, bugs, meat, so on).
of course, this fruit-based diet is a bit more troublesome moving away from the equator and living on the ground. The drunken monkey hypothesis points to our love of alcohol and our relatively-high ability to digest it as a suggestion that maybe, we could live on the ground in areas with poorer fruit conditions by eating fallen fruit on the ground, rotting, becoming alcoholic8. Alcohol is a poison, but we can take a pretty big amount of it. It has a pungent smell as well and a lot of people find that smell nice. for a frugivore ape living on the ground, it would be really beneficial if we could eat rotten fruit off the ground, and also beneficial if we were attracted to the smell of rotting fruit and therefore able to find it more easily.
why am I talking about alcohol here? gestures vaguely at beer, sake, chicha morada, other grain alcohols … part of the reason wheat, grapes, and apples all took off in the early California economy is that they're the basis for alcohol5.
we’ve been brewing alcohol from grains for a really long time, with some thinking we figured out how to make beer before bread. Before we knew how to treat water, weak beer was a safer option than water, which I wouldn’t be surprised affected us much like starting to cook meat – wasting less energy on being sick and full of parasites, we have more energy for reproduction, invention, thinking (& brain size), art, music, so on … as disastrous as alcohol can be, it’s another ancient human Thing We Do and another way our lives & the lives of cereals are woven together.
humans & cereal grasses, the grains of Poaceae, we go way back and have shaped one another. These are ancient species-transcendent interrelationships fostered over centuries and centuries. these relationships and rituals are subjugated, much like so many humans, under an exploitative hierarchy meant to distill the variety of life and experience into a single unit measure, Monetary Value.
Take a moment to say thanks to cereals, have some bread, flatbread, pasta, tortilla, rice, rice noodle, oats … we are old friends and have been since before , gestures vaguely again, all of this bullshit.
...and I only talked about three cereals here. Prior to the domination of wheat, maize, and domestic white rices, we used to have a lot more cereal complexity in our diets, on average. Other cereals are absolutely still around and cultivated. This absolutely only scrapes the surface of those three cereals as well. Again this is food crops basics and there is so much more, I absolutely encourage looking around and seeing what you can find yourself!
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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check out my reading list while you're here :)
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1 ) Nowak, M. Do We Finally Know What the Neolithic Is? Open Archaeology 2022, 8(1).
2 ) Storey, R., & Widmer, R. J. The Pre-Columbian Economy. Latin American Studies Association, 2001.
3 ) Bonzani, R. M., & Oyuela-Caycedo, A. The Gift of the Variation and Dispersion of Maize(). In Histories of Maize, Academic Press, 2006.
4 ) Scharff, L. B., Saltenis, V. L. R., Jensen, P. E., Baekelandt, A., Burgess, A. J., Burow, M., Ceriotti, A., Cohan, J.-P., Geu-Flores, F., Halkier, B. A., Haslam, R. P., Inzé, D., Klein Lankhorst, R., Murchie, E. H., Napier, J. A., Nacry, P., Parry, M. A. J., Santino, A., Scarano, A., Sparvoli, F., Wilhelm, R., & Pribil, M. Prospects to improve the nutritional quality of crops. Food and Energy Security 2022, 11(1):e327.
5 ) Harris, M. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. 2022.
6 ) Chapagain, T., & Riseman, A. Achieving More with Less Water: Alternate Wet and Dry Irrigation (AWDI) as an Alternative to the Conventional Water Management Practices in Rice Farming. Journal of Agricultural Science 2011, 3(3):3-13.
7 ) Sweeney, M., & McCouch, S. The Complex History of the Domestication of Rice. Annals of Botany 2007, 100(5):951–957.
8 ) Dudley, R., & Maro, A. Human Evolution and Dietary Ethanol. Nutrients 2021, 13(7):2419.
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images:
image of grains, Miquel Pujol on Wikimedia ; teosinte vs. maize, by T. Ryan Gregory, via Vassar’s Real Archaeology Blog ; waxwing image taken from an Anchorage Daily News article
