Yeah makes sense, thats always kind of how I thought it went down. Can’t be picky about your calories, can ya, great great great great great great great granpappy Cruxifux.

You can boil whole grain wheat down into porridge. It's not the go-to use for wheat now, but the rice cooking method still provides a nutritious meal.

Insects, cats, random mushrooms, anything when you're hungry enough.

In the conditions in which they made it, porridge was often also beer(ish).

You can also just straight up eat it. Yeah, you'll get runny shits from eating excessive amounts of fiber, but that's probably the first way it was eaten

Yup, it’s not so much that wheat requires all of this processing, it just makes it tastier and easier to eat.

I reckon that after inventing farming, people probably just had a lot more time on their hands, so they sat around trying to come up with ways to avoid having to eat the same boring gruel every day.

Interesting!

To be fair, I’m one of the 10,000, so it was novel to me!

I thought cats domesticated themselves

Source: Grandparents that grew up on a plot of land (read: hunk of rock) on the west coast and lived off sustenance farming (which includes a significant amount of fishing) as late as the 1930's.

Sure, berries and some other foraging products was part of their diet, but not a very significant one. It was mostly whatever would grow on that plot. Mostly potatoes and onions, with some other minor stuff. While berries are abundant, picking them gives you a lot fewer calories per man-hour than fishing, so fishing takes priority.

Nobody stops you from trying it you can afford it, I hope you can it's pretty sad otherwise

Tbf, most grains have way more gluten in them than they used to, though wheat is by far the worst offender. This is because they've been bred for industrial purposes. If you have a grain with a lot of gluten it'll rise more, so you can use less wheat (aka reduce cost) while keeping the size of the loaf the same

That's because its 2026, and not 1326. It would have definitely qualified as bread in the middle ages, and probably way before.

American-pilled.

If you look at a lot of other breads outside of the US, particularly German breads, they tend to be a lot more crumbly.

The high gluten breads you're used to came about from industrial bread makers wanting their bread to rise more so they could use less grain per loaf while keeping the size the same

Nope. Think we had wheat on occasion but I don't recall feeling strongly about it. It's something I've started doing more in recent years and I was a fan from the start. You can prepare it in various ways, like cooking it in a broth makes it absorb the flavours. Or you could just boil it with salt like you'd boil pasta, in which case it's not that different in terms of flavour.

I've been wanting to try that for years

Sake is basically the same thing as beer (grain(starch)-based alcohol), I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be possible to brew a weaker sake.

But the thing is, they never really needed something to serve the role of beer (i.e. an alcoholic drink for safe hydration), because east asians figured out that boiling makes water safe quite a bit earlier that europeans (or they just drank boiled drinks despite not knowing that that's one of the effects).

That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.

Actually, the alcohol in beer isn't concentrated enough to kill off most microbes. Even yeast doesn't die off until you start getting >13%, and there's varieties of yeast that can tolerate twice that concentration.

The reason why beer was safer to drink than water is because the brewing process requires it to be boiled. Beer was preferrable to boiled water due to taste and because it provided an extra source of calories

And porridge is just incomplete beer.

It needs more processing - most of history it needed hand harvesting because it's grown in flooded paddies, and it needs washing and milling after harvesting - but still it is the most efficient grain for calories per acre.

Wheat needs less processing, provides less calories per acre, but also has iron and other nutritious goodness.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

I remember reading about this concept and how rice growing cultures differ from wheat growing. Our agricultural past has had long lasting impacts.

There are varieties of rice that don’t require flooded fields. They’re called upland rice. They have issues with weeds and pest control that regular rice doesn’t have, but these varieties still manage to feed about a hundred million people.

Just because that's what you see on photos doesn't mean it's the only way to grow it, it just means it's the most efficient way. I had a quick look and found multiple sources corroborating GPs information: rice doesn't need to be under centimeters of water, it's only done to improve yield (by combatting weeds and pests).

Actually flooding rice drowns it.

Unfortunately the traditional system for growing rice has prevented realisation of plants' natural potential by transplanting them too late, by spacing them too closely, and by cutting off the oxygen supply to their roots by continuous flooding of paddies. SRI changes practices that are thousands of years old to bring out rice plants’ significant possibilities for greater yield.

source

I mean, everything in life requires cooperation, but that’s not the point. Rice took twice as many labor hours as wheat and required more irrigation. According to Shenshi Nongshu, “if one is short of labor, it is best to grow wheat”. Also studies have shown that in China people in historically rice farming areas behave more collectively than those in wheat regions. Not all grasses behave the same way and need the same things, especially with how much we’ve bred them to our needs.

Oh interesting, I haven’t heard of that. I’ll have too look into it, thanks!

Sweet corn is also harder to store if harvested at a flavorful stage. Up until canning became widespread, there was no easy way to store corn without drying it out.

My point being that corn only needs to be boiled to be easy to eat. Going around like it's completely inedible is ridiculous.

And your second "point" is a complete red herring. It applies to almost any crop outside of its harvest season. Those vegetables you're buying at the grocery store? They're not being stored year round. They're grown in Mexico and South America before being imported. That's how you're able to get tomatoes in March.

I guess I meant more along the lines of: "An ear of corn can be husked by hand and boiled." Individual processing is far more accessible and feasible compared the threshing, hulling, and winnowing processes of wheat.

Unfortunately rural japan hasn't really figured out good bread yet so almost all the bread where I live is white bread. Japan is known for a lot of great food but their sandwiches are depressing.

Yeah, commercial bread is terrible. Good bread isn't hard to bake at home though

It's all the same, Rice bread is terrible for you also.

Got a source on that, because it sounds like "America bad" bullshit? Also, what is "store bought?"

Eating potatoes still feels great

Only if you cook them all the way through, i imagine the first couple of guys that tried to eat it died

Tbf, the Romans were fucking stupid. They sweetened their water with lead and designed a calendar where the year was 355 days long

If the poop knife existed in modern times, I’m sure that there’s a communal sponge somewhere.

Actually, you're right, wtf was I thinking. Bread was clearly alien tech.