Rice requires hours just to filter out all the stones from it.
Wheat is easier to grow and requires less water. The first farmers in the Middle East became farmers almost acidentally. When they transported the wheat, the dropped crop started growing more and closer to where they were processing it. Eventually some of them decided they would rather grow the wheat than being part of a nomadic tribe. This will eventually lead to a population boom where women would have children every year rather than every four years.
Ok great but how did they figure out you could EAT IT if you did a shitload of seemingly random shit to it that you don’t have to do with, like, any other crop?
You don’t have to do all of that to eat it, you just have to do all of that to make bread. You can make bread from oats, you can also process it less and make porridge.
All you need to do to make wheat edible is soak it in water to make it soft enough to chew. Wheat in water is “gruel”.
You can improve upon it by boiling, which will make porridge, or baking, which will dehydrate the gruel into a primitive bread. The drained, starchy liquid, if left to sit for awhile, will become a primitive ale. Pre-grinding makes it easier to eat.
Every dietary use is an evolutionary progression from soaking wheat in water.
Yup, it’s not so much that wheat requires all of this processing, it just makes it tastier and easier to eat.
I reckon that after inventing farming, people probably just had a lot more time on their hands, so they sat around trying to come up with ways to avoid having to eat the same boring gruel every day.
Interesting!
Are you saying wheat domesticated early man?
It’s more accurate to say all plants have always domesticated humans. We came after them, we depend on them to survive, we’re required to consume their waste to live, so we can’t live without them. They, however, have the option of consuming our waste to live, but are perfectly capable of living without us, and will likely continue to do so after we’re extinct.
It’s not a novel observation
To be fair, I’m one of the 10,000, so it was novel to me!
Does this mean we were conned into accidentally domesticating cats?
I thought cats domesticated themselves
The number of people who have no clue how much processing goes into making rice edible is hilarious.
I am not old but even I remember my mom spending hours filtering all the stone from rice.
Or just to grow it. Rice is stupid hard compared to wheat.
As well as regional factors. They both grow in totally different environments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X1930082X
I remember reading about this concept and how rice growing cultures differ from wheat growing. Our agricultural past has had long lasting impacts.
Thanks for sharing, that was an interesting read.
We are genetically built by the decisions our ancestors made. As far as I know everybody can eat cereal grain, that was a massive challenge for our ancestors who until then we’re meat eaters. I can eat dairy products, a lot of people from other areas cannot, like my wife who is from Asia.
Off topic, but I find it fascinating, animals create their own vitamin c but humans don’t. I read it’s from an evolutionary mutation where our genes for vit c got turned off.
Be hooman, eat much seed. Seed good. Wheat like seed. Wheat good. Rock smash seed, easy eat seed.
Rain make smash seed taste funny. Fire make rain smash seed tastey. Society.
It’s actually been theorized that beer was a driving factor for humanity discovering agriculture.
There’s also a theory (maybe the same as you mentioned) that says man settled down because they had to stay in one place for the whole brewing process.
Historical giggling intensifies.
It’s pretty simple, really. Rice doesn’t grow everywhere.
Can confirm. I’m currently at Tim Horton’s and there’s no rice growing.
But there is bread available, isn’t there? I rest my case.
Is the Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings playing though?
Wheat doesn’t actually require all that much. Soak it in water, and it becomes gruel. Let gruel sit around for awhile, the liquid becomes a rudimentary ale. Boil off the liquid, you have a rudimentary bread. Want to make it easier to eat? Grind it before you add the water.
Every other use is an evolution of those basic concepts.
You can boil wheat too. Ancient peoples used to make porridge
And by “porridge” you mean “beer”.
Booze was the real motivator.
Guy: look at all this wheat I grew!
Fella; Wow, we could make so many bread!
Guy: Yes… Ah… Bread
Beer is just old porridge
And porridge is just incomplete beer.
Thank you! I was looking for this comment before posting about it. Almost every grain can be cooked in large amounts of boiling water, like pasta.
Anon is not thinking enough about beer
Counterpoint: sake.
I don’t think sake could serve the role beer did, historically. Certainly in medieval Europe, they made what today would be considered a weak beer to drink for basic hydration. That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.
I’m pretty sure if you tried that with sake, you’d die
That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.
Actually, the alcohol in beer isn’t concentrated enough to kill off most microbes. Even yeast doesn’t die off until you start getting >13%, and there’s varieties of yeast that can tolerate twice that concentration.
The reason why beer was safer to drink than water is because the brewing process requires it to be boiled. Beer was preferrable to boiled water due to taste and because it provided an extra source of calories
Sir and/or Madam,
Have you heard the good word about maize (corn)? 🌽
WHAT UP MOTHER SHUCKERS
I live amongst yankees now. I’d even take some huitlacoche.
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Devil crop.
We have tried to grind, dry, ferment, bake, broil, boil, and fry everything on the face of the earth. Countless times. Humans have had the same brainpower for ages, just not the same knowledge base.
wheat makes beer
beer yeast and wheat makes bread
wheat made pasta
wheat grows well in colder climates.
Wheat is a bit of a weed so it’s grown on more marginal land while more profitable (finicky) plants are grown in the better land.
This weirdly makes wheat more vulnerable to climate change.
In California, native Americans made acorn porridge. They collected the acorns, shelled and roasted them, ground it into a flour, then leached it because it’s full of bitter tannins, and then they can cook the leached acorn meal into a porridge. It is crazy and multiple steps to get there. Mind blowing stuff.
Chaffing it, and then grinding it and adding water aren’t exactly rocket science. Also you didn’t have any smartphones to keep you from being bored.
The ignorance around rice is what gets me on this one. It’s almost troll level.
Don’t mind me, just gonna go and internally scream “STONES” for 3 minutes straight over there.
Rice needs just as much processing. Do you think the rice you buy in the store is what it’s like in the field?
I always heard it needs more, which is why East Asian societies -notably China - achieved big cities early on and a more collective philosophy, whereas Europe ended up having a more individualist philosophy.
This phenomenon is even stronger with (most types of) Maize (excluding sweet corn). It requires heavy processing to be turned into glucose sirup or anything resembling edible food. By default, the grains are extremely durable and very difficult to digest.
But this is essentially what protects it from insects and fungus. Because the grains are so hard to digest by default, they can only be eaten by humans who have the tools to heavily process them before eating; for everyone else it’s essentially uninteresting as a food source and that prevents mold and insects.
What type of corn are you referring to? I’m not familiar with the history of corn, but what you’re saying doesn’t match my experiences with any variety
Dent corn is used as livestock feed, and is generally considered the less edible version. Sweet corn can be eaten by humans raw. Basically every variety I’ve ever seen can be eaten if boiled long enough
Sweet corn is a mutation that was only really cultivated in the late 1700s. Before that dent and flint corn were the norm. These corns require nixtamalization to soft the corn and then need boiling, grinding, and cooking to make something like tortillas.
Yeah, the effect is stronger for dent corn.
Dent corn can last upwards of 20 years when stored correctly.
I’m not sure what that number is for other cereals but i guess it’s less long.
Corn (Maize) is a selected grass. (Teosinte) Wheat is also a grass (Emmer) which hasn’t been nearly as modified.
The american indigenous people cultivated and developed corn over 10,000 some years. An ear of corn can be boiled and eaten. Wheat? Not so much.
Have you not heard of corn on the cob? Just pull off the husk, boil, and eat.
I can’t tell if this is in jest or ignorance.
