How to Feed the World: Cereals and Our Daily Bread
A Plan for 8 Billion People and Beyond — Part 5
In the first four parts of this series, we’ve looked at the crude outlines of our food crisis; now, it is time to turn to solutions. Much like at the dawn of civilization, two plants stand out; cereals and legumes, and we’ll look at them separately.
The Cradle of Humanity
Domestication of cereal grasses is one of the marks of the beginning of our civilization. Planned agriculture provided a stable source of nutrition which liberated people from mere survival and allowed them to allocate their time to other pursuits. There would be no poetry, no art, and certainly no engineering without a stable food source such as cereal grains.
Ancient peoples recognized that importance. In Euro-Atlantic tradition, the word cereals originate in the Roman god Ceres, a goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility, and maternity (and note, a female!). Another great cradle of humanity, ancient China, holds the Five Grains as the absolute foundation of civilization and human existence.
