Questions Regarding Cereal Grains

Delvestius

Banned
My question is to anyone who knows much about the diet of the world: What cereal grains are used by what parts of the world?

Now, most of them are obvious; The Americas used maize, East and South Asia are dependent on rice, and Europe mostly used wheat and barley.

The areas I am not so sure of are Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. I know that both rice and wheat are staples of the middle east, but I'm wondering as to which one is more depended on, or if they're used in largely the same amounts.

Additionally, would like to know to what degrees certain cultures made use of millet, sorghum, rye and barley, and if any have depended mostly on these over wheat, rice and corn. Thanks!
 

FDW

Banned
My question is to anyone who knows much about the diet of the world: What cereal grains are used by what parts of the world?

Now, most of them are obvious; The Americas used maize, East and South Asia are dependent on rice, and Europe mostly used wheat and barley.

The areas I am not so sure of are Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. I know that both rice and wheat are staples of the middle east, but I'm wondering as to which one is more depended on, or if they're used in largely the same amounts.

Additionally, would like to know to what degrees certain cultures made use of millet, sorghum, rye and barley, and if any have depended mostly on these over wheat, rice and corn. Thanks!

Millet is used most in India and Africa. Wheat has also been heavily used in (and is generally associated with) Northern China, while rice is associated with Southern China (though there's a large degree of overlap these days)

Rye is almost entirely European in terms of usage.
 
I've actually been doing a lot of reading on this topic, too. Unfortunately, I still seem to know very little about it. What I know is that millet is supposed to have been much more prevalent in prehistory than it is now, even being more common than rice in prehistoric China. Millet does extremely well under drought conditions, so it's used extensively in sub-Saharan Africa today. I have no idea about the history of millet in Africa, though.
 
For China, millet was the big crop for the people of Shang and Zhou. At the same time, I'm pretty sure rice was already the main crop of southern China, but those areas weren't part of Chinese civilization yet. Rice was for the aristocrats.

Barley, wheat, and rice were present, but minor. I'm pretty sure wheat was more common during the Zhou times than before, but I don't think it was as significant as millet. During Tang times, I'm not sure on statistics for each, but crops were divided into wheat, millet, or barley in the north and rice in the south. During Song times, rice cultivation in the north increased.

For Japan, I'm pretty sure that rice was mainly a food for the elite for a long time, but I'm not sure whether it was millet or barley that the average person ate.
 

Delvestius

Banned
For Japan, I'm pretty sure that rice was mainly a food for the elite for a long time, but I'm not sure whether it was millet or barley that the average person ate.

In the film "Seven Samurai", the villagers have given raiders all of their rice, and so they were forced to live off their barley. Since they had to pay the samurai in barley, they all ate millet. Such things as "We will go blind if we just eat millet!" and a samurai saying "I tasted the millet you eat, it is terrible" lead me to think millet was only used as a feed crop or last resort..
 
Buckwheat (Technically a psuedocereal) seems to have been particularly well used in East Asia, especially in cold and mountainous regions such as Tibet and parts of Northern China; Soba noodles in Japan, for example, are a common food made from it. The Americas similarly had the psuediocereals Quinoa (In the Andes) and Amaranth (In Mesoamerica). Teff is mostly used in the Horn of Africa, particularly Ethiopia, and seems to have little spread otherwise.
 
For East Africa, there's teff, which is familiar to anyone who has dined at an Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant as the spongy, sour-tasting flatbread called injera upon which stewed dishes are eaten. It is also consumed in Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen, and to a lesser degree, in border areas of Sudan, but hasn't spread much elsewhere.

West Africa has its own strain of rice that originated in the Sahel.

Another cereal that didn't spread much is oats, which were confined mainly to Europe before the colonization of the New World. In Scotland and Ireland, oats were actually preferable over wheat as the principle grain for the climate. Of course, we know that oats were spread throughout northern and central Europe (an integral component to traditional Swiss muesli).

We also can't overlook wild rice, the pseudo-cereal that prevailed among the indigenous people of the northern Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada beyond the fruitful limits of maize cultivation.

Native Americans in the eastern part of the United States also had a number of local pseudo-cereals, like lambsquarters, little barley, and maygrass, that phased out when the introduction of maize gave them an easier, larger yield later on. Lambsquarters was a variety of goosefoot, related to Andean quinoa, which was dried and ground into flour. A subspecies of the same plant, called huazontle, was also cultivated in Mesoamerica but primarily for its leafy greens rather than its grain.
 
...Of course, for some cultures, root vegetables and other starches were preferable to grains as the staple carbohydrates - Cassava (manioc or yuca) was preferred over maize in the Caribbean, Amazon, and other tropical regions of the Americas where humidity caused maize and its derivatives to spoil very quickly. Taro or cocoyam was widespread throughout the tropical regions of the Old World, from Sub-Saharan Africa to the South Pacific Islands. Potatoes were a staple food throughout the Andes highlands - A rare example of a root vegetable serving as a staple starch outside of a tropical climate. Turnips were a lesser staple in many mild Old World climates as well, including the British Isles, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central and East Asia.

Other important non-grain starches were sago (important in Papua and nearby parts of Indonesia, but found elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent), breadfruit (Papua, Polynesia, and other Pacific Islands, but also grown in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean), yams (Sub-Saharan Africa all the way to Japan), sweet potatoes (Central America, Amazonia, the Caribbean, and curiously, Pre-Columbian Polynesia), and bananas and plantains.
 

Delvestius

Banned
Thanks for all that info, that's gonna help alot!

The reason I'm asking is because right now I'm going over the staple crops and diet of various cultures in my conworld... My favorite one I got so far is a squat corn-like plant that has the characteristics of a cactus, used by the people of the southern continent, which while dry and arid, is well watered with many nile-like rivers.
 
We also can't overlook wild rice, the pseudo-cereal that prevailed among the indigenous people of the northern Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada beyond the fruitful limits of maize cultivation.
<picky>Wild rice is actually closely related to rice, so it is not a pseudo-cereal, unless rice is, too.</picky> Last time looked up the taxonomy of grasses, Oryza and Zizania were nested close to each other, compared to wheat and rye, for instance.
 
Sorghum is extremely important in Sub-Saharan Africa along with millet especially in areas with unpredictable rainfall like the Sahel.

Millet was the food that the poor people ate in Japan before modern times. Looking at the lack of foods that make use of it, barley wasn't used very much except in making miso.
 

FDW

Banned
Sorghum is extremely important in Sub-Saharan Africa along with millet especially in areas with unpredictable rainfall like the Sahel.

Millet was the food that the poor people ate in Japan before modern times. Looking at the lack of foods that make use of it, barley wasn't used very much except in making miso.

And Tea too.
 
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