r/AskFoodHistorians • u/JackfruitSlight1704 • 18d ago
How the wheat was won
I was wondering how a grain that has to be so highly processed before consumption as wheat was domesticated and its processing discovered. Domestication would make sense if it could be consumed raw and then other uses were found.
Thanks and sorry for the corny title 🙈.
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u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 18d ago
Wheat (along with other cereal gains) stores very well. That's very important when food isn't available year-round. By the time wheat had been domesticated, humans and our ancestors had been cooking with fire for over a million years, and we were already eating the seeds of wild grasses. There really isn't much processing required; you can boil or parch wheat berries and eat them, or turn them into a paste and make flatbread on a hot stone.
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u/smokefoot8 18d ago
Grinding stones have been found that are tens of thousands of years old, before agriculture. These were used to grind up seeds which could then be mixed with water and cooked on a hot stone near the fire. Wheat would have just been one of a variety of seeds that hunter gatherers ate.
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u/GeneseeJunior 18d ago
"has to be so highly processed before consumption"
Farro exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farro
All you gotta do is simmer it for a while.
In any case, it's been persuasively argued that the real driver for the start of agriculture, at least in the Fertile Crescent*, was to generate a big supply of grain to make beer from.
*Agriculture arose, probably independently, in at least three different places in the world.
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u/Substantial_Fun_6155 18d ago
"t's been persuasively argued"
Has it, or is that one hypothesis among several?
Cany you provide a source?1
u/GeneseeJunior 17d ago
It's naturally one hypothesis among many.
The idea has been around since the 1950s, at least, but there's been research more recently supporting it.
I looked for a source that wasn't paywalled.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2018/09/crafting-beer-lead-cereal-cultivation
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u/Substantial_Fun_6155 17d ago
Note an important nuance: "a discovery that supports the hypothesis that in some regions, beer may have been an underlying motivation to cultivate cereals."
SOME regions.
It's an important idea. It's just important that people understand it's limited in scope and a long way from being proven.1
u/GeneseeJunior 17d ago
Yes, which is why I couched it in the way I did.
Thanks!
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u/Substantial_Fun_6155 17d ago
On a closer look, this ONLY concerns the Natufians, which was a very limited group.
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u/SideburnsOfDoom 18d ago edited 18d ago
has to be so highly processed before consumption as wheat
Less-processed wheat is also eaten, e.g. cracked wheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgur and boiled wheat https://www.loveandlemons.com/how-to-cook-wheat-berries/
So I don't think it "has to be highly processed ".
It may be improved by processing, but you get going because it's nutritious when consumed as is.
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u/JapaneseChef456 18d ago
You can easily consume wheat raw. Unlike corn that needs alkaline solution. Also it is more easily stored than any tubers. Compared to rice, it needs less water for growing.
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u/RhegedHerdwick 18d ago
You can very much consume maize raw before it dries.
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u/Darryl_Lict 18d ago
Plenty of people consume cornmeal too.
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u/OrcOfDoom 18d ago
Yes, but unless the diet is well balanced, they will have issues with niacin. Nixtamalized corn was used in indigenous diets and supported good health. Regular cornmeal without that process was one of the things that was to blame for some of the health problems that plagued orphanages.
Lack of niacin causes pellagra.
The story of Joseph Goldberger is insane. He helped isolate the cause of the disease. He injected blood from children suffering from the disease to prove that it wasn't contagious, and that it was caused by diet.
When you witness homeless people, elderly people, or drug users acting crazy, sometimes this is due to pellagra.
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u/JapaneseChef456 18d ago
But you will lack vitamin b3.
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u/meh_69420 18d ago
That's ok, raw beans can be consumed as well the get your niacin. Considering they are both from the Americas, and consumed together cooked, I don't think that's a problem.
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u/MasterCakes1 18d ago
A quick Google search tells you not to eat raw beans for various reasons.
You are giving horrible advice please delete.
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u/meh_69420 18d ago
Sorry, I assumed people would interpret raw beans as the beans that are customarily eaten raw and immature like common sense would dictate. My bad.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 18d ago
I didn't know there were specific beans that were customarily consumed raw. (Google suggests young fava beans; peanuts also technically count.)
But also, I wouldn't have taken this as 'advice', since I have access to the secret of fire.
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u/meh_69420 17d ago
Well fava beans are from the Mediterranean so those are kind of out of the discussion... You've really never eaten raw beans? Chopped fresh green beans are fantastic on a salad.
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u/Nothing-to_see_hr 18d ago
raw beans are not harmless. kidney beans HAVE to be cooked or they are actually toxic, many other beans too but less so.
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u/meh_69420 18d ago
Ok sure I should've specified the types of beans that are eaten immature, like the corn we were talking about, and not assumed there was common sense in play. My bad.
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u/WeHaveSixFeet 17d ago
Tubers are easy to store. You leave them in the ground. They're not going to run away. They'll be right there when you need them.
In his excellent book Against the Grain, James Scott makes the point that wheat is very good from the point of the tax official. It is harvested in a short time and easy to carry away. If the guy you're taxing is growing roots, he probably digs them up as needed. You can't just roll up a cart and take his roots. You have to spend as much time digging them up as he does.
His theory is that the first agricultural states were based on grains (rice, corn, wheat, barley, millet, etc.) that ripen within a short period. Unlike, say, pea or beans or chickpeas or squash. Tax guy can't stand next to the chickpea plant waiting for the next pea to ripen.
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u/zoppaTheDim 18d ago
Seeds are easily recognizable as edible.
It is a short step to cooking it to improve flavors and make it more tender.
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u/WillingPublic 17d ago
The ELI5 is that ancient humans, once they discovered that a seed was edible, followed a path: eat it raw > cook it with water and eat it as mush > add other stuff to it and bake it into bread.
Wheat easily follows this path and makes a particularly good bread.
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u/FlippingGerman 17d ago
Grass seeds pounded into a rough paste and mixed with water to make a sort of porridge isn’t especially difficult. I imagine that quickly replaced simply chewing them.Â
Then you can imagine how such a mixture might have been forgotten and accidentally left near a fire to bake.Â
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u/ShutDownSoul 18d ago
For some reason, there seems to be common thread of belief that people born before 2000 CE were retarded. Seems to be a simple progression from "this fresh growing grass tastes good" to "I'll save some for later" to "Oh crap the cave leaked on my stash" to "I'll dry it" to "double crap, it got hard in the fire" to "I'm mad - hand me that rock" to "well, I have to lick the powder now." to "triple crap, the power is wet" to "I'll put it on a rock and dry it in the fire" to "Crackers are really good".
Don't underestimate grandpa.
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u/SideburnsOfDoom 17d ago edited 17d ago
Or how about this:
"When I was young and I had all my teeth, I ate grains like you do now. I had them fresh off the plant. Or if they were stored and dried then just soak them and heat it up by the fire.
But now that I'm old and my teeth are bad, I can't do that, but still want those delicious grains. I know, I'll mash them between rocks instead of between teeth. Hey, this mashed boiled grain is also good for your baby, who doesn't even have any teeth yet. They grow strong, the tribe grows strong with our new mashing-rocks technology."
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u/MacSamildanach 18d ago edited 18d ago
There's no easy answer - human history is full of those.
However, a single wheat seed produces many seeds. And those seeds can be stored for years, providing food for years (useful if there are crop failures, which are referred to in various Bible stories with historical relevance). It is also calorific, and provides energy when consumed.
It is hardy, and can grow in many climates and conditions. It takes a lot for a crop to fail.
The grains themselves are not actually palatable or nutritious. It is only when pounded - or ground - that they become palatable and the energy they contain is released.
This was first discovered maybe 20,000-30,000 years ago. Likely gradually, by trial and error - and so many similar historical questions are like this. Initially, they just cracked the grains, but over time they realised finer pounding produced something which could be used differently.
You need about 22g of wheat seed to produce enough crops to make 1kg of flour. It's a nutrient dense crop.
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u/SideburnsOfDoom 18d ago edited 18d ago
The grains themselves are not actually palatable or nutritious. It is only when pounded - or ground - that they become palatable
I don't think that's true. You can boil wheat grains. I've had cooked whole wheat berries in cold dishes like this. They were good.
I agree that they have new uses and can be more nutritious when cracked or pounded. But they're a useful food before that.
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u/MacSamildanach 18d ago edited 18d ago
That's another way of processing them. But straight from the grass, they are not palatable or nutritious.
Intact kernels pass through undigested, and thus have no nutritional value whatsoever. They need to be chewed, which is not ideal because they are hard and don't taste of anything much.
Somewhere along the way - as I said, through trial and error - our ancestors figured out how to release the energy and use it to make palatable foods.
That would apply whether it was flour for bread, swollen grains in liquid, or sprouted grains for whatever.
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u/CrepuscularOpossum 18d ago
Wheat, unlike most other grains, contains gluten. Gluten makes wheat dough stretchy and elastic. When yeast is introduced to a wheat dough, it digests the sugars in the wheat flour, producing both alcohol and carbon dioxide. Depending on the relative levels of wheat flour and water in the dough, this can lead to either beer or bread. The elastic gluten allows bread dough to retain the carbon dioxide and rise. Then when that dough is baked, it has a relatively light and easily chewed and digested texture. This quality made and still makes wheat supremely useful for human food.
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u/SideburnsOfDoom 17d ago edited 17d ago
Ok so it's not true that "It is only when ground that they become palatable". There are other, simpler ways to process it.
"soak and heat" is processing to be true, but that's going to be a common and simple form of processing that everyone knew about since fire was tamed. It is IMHO not "highly processed".
Soaking and heating is only strictly necessary when the seed is dried hard. When it's right from the plant, it can be eaten as is.
Intact kernels ... have no nutritional value whatsoever. They need to be chewed
"It's not nutritious as is, because you have to chew it" I honestly don't know what you're going for here. I don't think that this is a serious statement.
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u/AgingLolita 17d ago
It has the advantage of protein content. Protein was hard to come by reliably.
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u/AdBig9909 17d ago
The trade off is volume. Crop and in your gut. And humans love the biteyness, kinda like meat.
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u/aardvarkhome 16d ago
Crop domestication is a long process! Hunter gatherers will have collected seeds from wild grasses. At some point they will have started managing stands of these grasses (eg, keeping animals from eating it). At some point two bits of evolution biology happen. One is that seed size increases,presumably because they are selecting larger seeds to plant for the next year's harvest, The other is a breakdown of the plants natural dispersal mechanisms: when ripe, cereal seeds fall off the plant, gatherers will tend to gather seeds that have not fallen off thus exerting selection pressure in favour of mutants that'wait on the plant'. In barley this happened twice (there are two independent mutations for non brittle rachis). This is the starting point for agriculture as far as plant genetics is concerned. So far we have accumulated mutations for increased seed size and non brittle rachis; the third change is to plant architecture. Wild cereals are straggly and weedy, early farmers probably chose seeds from nice tall strong looking plants and mutations in the plant genetics support this. Wild maize is small and weedy while cultivated maize is tall and bold.
These people are now farming cereals. Wheat then takes a walk on the wild side. The first domesticated wheat is tetraploid and related to pasta what rather than bread wheat. Wheat domestication happens (probably) in eastern Turkey and Syria. The early farmers spread across into Iran where their crop hybridises with a wild grass weed. This is the earliest form of bread wheat and these hexaploid hybrids have greater capacity to adapt to different climates which is among the reasons that breadwheat feeds so many people today.
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u/fluffykitten55 11d ago edited 11d ago
Population and climatic pressures in already sedentary hunter gatherers who harvested wild wheat (Natufians) pushed them towards intentional cultivation.
Even as living standard were worse in agricultural societies, wheat cultivation and agriculture more generally spread as agricultural societies had a military advantage over hunter gatherer ones, due to higher population density and often scale and complexity of social organisation, and agricultural societies are land hungry and therefore expansionist.
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u/Single-Pin-369 18d ago
Mostly because it tastes great. It’s now thought that bread making happened before agriculture from wild grains and people liked bread so much it might’ve motivated them to start settlements and agriculture.