50 Fun Facts About Grains

Which Roman goddess of grain crops shares her name with the largest object in the asteroid belt?

Ceres also gave English the word cereal, through her Latin adjective cerealis, meaning of grain.

Which everyday British measurement still rises in barleycorns, an old English unit equal to a third of an inch?

Shoe sizes in the UK climb one barleycorn at a time, a unit medieval law fixed at three dry, round grains of barley to the inch.

Which breakfast cereal, launched by C. W. Post in 1897, contains neither of the two foods in its name?

Grape-Nuts is baked from wheat and barley flour, and one story says Post believed the baking produced what he called grape sugar.

Which Japanese dish, defined by its vinegared rice, has a name that literally means sour-tasting?

Sushi is defined by its seasoned rice, so slices of raw fish served with no rice at all are a different dish, sashimi.

Which seed, from a relative of rhubarb and sorrel, is ground into flour for Japanese soba noodles?

Buckwheat is no wheat at all: the name comes from its seeds, which look like small versions of those of the beech tree.

Which American snack is named after a 19th-century Presbyterian minister who preached whole-grain bread and temperance?

Graham cracker recipes grew out of the coarse flour Sylvester Graham championed, and his followers, the Grahamites, formed an early American vegetarian movement.

Which Andean seed, a relative of spinach, did the United Nations honor with its own international year in 2013?

Quinoa was nicknamed chisiya mama, the mother of all grains, by the Incas, and the UN credited Andean peoples with preserving it.

Which American spirit must by law be made from at least 51 percent maize and aged in new charred oak?

Bourbon was declared a distinctive product of the United States by Congress in 1964, and it may be made in any state, not only Kentucky.

Which farm machine reaps, threshes and winnows a grain crop in a single pass across the field?

Combine harvester is a name for a machine that combines those jobs; Hiram Moore patented the first in the United States in 1835.

Which maize snack did Chicago inventor Charles Cretors popularize in the 1890s with steam-powered street carts?

Popcorn kernels keep their moisture sealed inside a tough hull until the steam pressure bursts them to 20 to 50 times their original size.

Which protein network, found in wheat, barley and rye, gives bread dough the stretch that lets it rise?

Gluten traps the carbon dioxide bubbles that yeast gives off, holding a loaf's shape and giving the crumb its chew.

Which starchy part of a wheat kernel is the only one left once the bran and germ are milled away?

Endosperm is the seed's own food store, and in barley it supplies the sugars that brewers ferment into beer.

True cereals such as wheat, rice and maize all belong to which plant family, known to botanists as Poaceae?

Grasses are the most economically important plant family on Earth, and the same family takes in bamboo and garden lawns.

Which North African staple of tiny steamed semolina granules joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2020?

Couscous won its listing through a joint bid by four neighbors: Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary joked that which grain was fed to horses in England but to people in Scotland?

Oats were a mainstay of the Scottish diet as porridge and oatcakes, and stables still feed them to horses that need extra energy.

Which biblical figure, sold into slavery by his brothers, stored up Egypt's grain before seven years of famine?

Joseph won the job by reading Pharaoh's dream, in which seven thin heads of grain swallowed seven plump ones.

Which word for the dry husks blown from threshed grain during winnowing also means anything seen as worthless?

Chaff is so light that farmers traditionally tossed their grain into a breeze and let the wind carry the husks away.

Which Japanese drink is often called rice wine although it is brewed from starch, much as beer is?

Sake needs its starch turned into sugar before yeast can make alcohol, and unlike beer it runs both steps at the same time in one tank.

Maize was domesticated about 9,000 years ago from a wild plant called teosinte in the south of which modern country?

Mexico is where farmers turned teosinte into maize, and the crop's genome still draws most of its variation from that wild ancestor.

Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which early center of farming?

The Fertile Crescent also gave early farmers lentils, peas and chickpeas, plus the wild ancestors of cows, goats, sheep and pigs.

Which American agronomist won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for high-yield dwarf wheat that drove the Green Revolution?

Norman Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, and his first test country went from importing wheat to exporting it by 1963.

Which genetically engineered grain was developed to fight vitamin A deficiency?

Golden rice gets its color from beta-carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A; Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer spent eight years engineering it.

Which long-grain aromatic rice of India and Pakistan has a name that means fragrant?

Basmati grains carry about twelve times more of a natural aroma compound than other rice varieties, which is where the famous scent comes from.

Which Italian rice, named after a town in the Po Valley of Piedmont, is the classic choice for risotto?

Arborio grains are unusually high in amylopectin starch, which is why they cook up firm, creamy and chewy.

Which Italian dish is a porridge of boiled cornmeal that was historically made from other grains?

Polenta was for centuries tied to the lower classes, for whom a bowl of cornmeal mush was an everyday essential.

Which dense, dark rye bread from Westphalia is traditionally baked at low heat for many hours?

Pumpernickel was a German word for a lout before it named a loaf, and North American versions are lighter and baked far faster.

Which cold breakfast dish did Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner devise around 1900 for hospital patients?

Muesli started out as Birchermüesli, named for its creator, and the word itself is a Swiss German diminutive meaning mush.

Which Michigan city, home of Kellogg's and the founding city of Post cereals, is nicknamed Cereal City?

Battle Creek's cereal trade grew out of its Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium, where W. K. Kellogg worked for his brother before striking out on his own.

Which US state became a wheat powerhouse after German-Russian Mennonites brought winter wheat there in the 19th century?

Kansas owes its wheat fame partly to Bernhard Warkentin, who organized mills there and imported seed from Ukraine to meet demand.

Jasmine rice, a fragrant long-grain variety known at home as hom mali, is tied above all to which Asian country?

Thailand's hom mali gives off a scent likened to pandan leaves, and it fades so fast that connoisseurs seek out each year's new crop.

Which wheat species, whose Latin name means hard, supplies the semolina in almost all commercially made dry pasta?

Durum is the hardest of all wheats to mill, which suits coarse semolina far better than fine baking flour.

Which Middle Eastern staple of parboiled, dried and cracked wheat is a main ingredient of tabbouleh salad and kibbeh?

Bulgur makes a porridge much like frumenty, the cracked-wheat dish that was a staple of medieval cooking.

Which tiny Ethiopian grain, whose name may come from an Amharic word meaning lost, is made into injera flatbread?

Teff seeds measure less than a millimeter across, easy to lose indeed, and farmers have grown the crop since at least 1000 BC.

Which word describes grain, usually barley, that is soaked until it sprouts and then dried with hot air for brewing?

Malt develops the enzymes that turn a grain's starch into sugar, and it also flavors vinegar, milkshakes and bagels.

Which thiamine-deficiency disease, linked to diets of polished white rice, may be named from Sinhalese for I cannot?

Beriberi met its first successful prevention in the mid-1880s, the work of Japanese navy doctor Takaki Kanehiro.

Which autoimmune condition damages the lining of the small intestine when a person eats wheat, barley or rye?

Celiac disease has no cure, so the only treatment is to cut those grains out of the diet for life.

Paella, a rice dish named after the wide shallow pan it is cooked in, comes originally from which Spanish region?

Valencia's signature dish took its modern form in the mid-19th century, in the countryside around the Albufera lagoon beside the city.

Which Norwegian Arctic archipelago holds a mountain vault of backup seeds for wheat, rice and the world's other crops?

Svalbard was picked because its island of Spitsbergen has no tectonic activity and its permafrost helps keep the seeds cold.

Which unit, once a dry measure of eight gallons, is still used to trade wheat and maize on American commodity markets?

Bushel now stands for a set weight rather than a volume on those markets: 60 pounds for wheat and 56 for maize.

The Three Sisters of Indigenous American farming are maize, climbing beans and which crop planted between the mounds?

Squash leaves shade the soil to keep it moist and weed-free, while the beans climb the maize stalks and fix nitrogen.

Which niacin-deficiency disease, tied to diets built on maize, became epidemic in the American South in the early 1900s?

Pellagra spared the peoples who first grew maize, because they cooked the grain with lime or ash, which makes its nutrients available.

Which fungus that infects rye caused the medieval poisoning known as holy fire or Saint Anthony's fire?

Ergot poisoning was named for the monks of the Order of St. Anthony, who devoted themselves to nursing its victims.

Which Mesoamerican process cooks maize in limewater, loosening the hulls so the ground kernels form masa dough?

Nixtamalization also raises the grain's nutritional value and cuts some of its mold toxins by up to 97 to 100 percent.

Which hybrid grain, first bred in 19th-century Scotland and Germany, is a cross between wheat and rye?

Triticale blends its parents' Latin names, Triticum and Secale, and was bred to pair the yield of one with the hardiness of the other.

Which heat-tolerant cereal native to Africa has tall sweet varieties that are pressed to make a sugar-rich syrup?

Sorghum shrugs off drought and poor soil, which has made it a staple for rural people in arid and semi-arid regions.

Which group of small-seeded cereals, whose pearl type is the most widely grown, is a staple in India and Niger?

Millet is almost entirely a crop of developing countries, which account for 97 percent of the world's output.

Which grain-like seed, a staple the Aztecs used in religious ceremonies, was banned by the Spanish conquistadors?

Amaranth outlived the ban and still goes into a festival candy called alegría, the Spanish word for joy.

Which part of Germany adopted the 1516 beer purity law that allowed only water, barley and hops as ingredients?

Bavaria's law never mentions yeast, which brewers of the day seem to have treated as a fixture of the process and not an ingredient.

Which term does the UN food agency reserve for legumes harvested solely for dry seed, such as lentils and chickpeas?

Pulses go back to the dawn of farming: four of the eight Neolithic founder crops were lentil, pea, chickpea and bitter vetch.

Paddy, the English word for a flooded rice field, comes from which language's word for the rice plant?

Paddy fields go by a different name in Malay, sawah, while padi there covers both the plant and its unhusked grain.