On Food and Cooking

Grains, or Cereals These words are near
synonyms. The cereals (from Ceres, the
Roman goddess of agriculture) are plants in
the grass family, the Gramineae, whose
members produce edible and nutritious seeds,
the grains. But cereal is also used to mean
their seeds and products made from them —
as in “breakfast cereals” — and the plants are
sometimes called grains. The cereals and
other grasses are creatures of the open plain or
high-altitude steppe, areas too dry for trees.
They live and die in a season or two, and are
easily gathered and handled. They grow in
densely packed stands that crowd out
competition, and produce many small seeds,
relying on numbers rather than chemical
defenses to ensure that some offspring will
survive. These characteristics made the
grasses ideal for agriculture. With our help,
they have come to cover vast areas of the
globe.
Wheat, barley, oats, and rye have been the