As I understand it, all our modern cereal crops are grasses that have been selectively bred over many centuries to enhance the grain size, flavour, nutrition etc…
This suggests that at some point, our ancestors started off with regular grass, had some way to eat it, and decided it was tasty enough to go to work farming it and spending generations breeding the best grass they could.
So I have a couple of questions:
If you let lawn grass grow until it looks like tiny wheat, is the top bit edible/nutritious? (Also, would it be edible if our appendixes were bigger/second stomachs?)
Are our cereal crops selectively bred from the same kind of grass that we use for lawns or are there two/several distinct kinds of grass?
Can you make bread/beer/other grain based food products from regular lawn grass if you let it grow long enough to flower/make grains?
Basically the underlying question I have is: with fruit, berries, vegetables & meat being things that exist and are easy to eat, what compelled our ancestors to look at (what modern humans would consider inedible) grass and think that this plant also needed to be made into food? And not just food, but the staple food for many countries.
They were very probably eating that before they were human. They did it by instinct.
But remember. They didn’t look at a cherry tree, for example, and say let’s eat the tree. They ate the cherries. In the same way they almost certainly didn’t eat the grass itself (because otherwise we probably would be able to digest it now), they ate the seed and the nutritious stuff that was supposed to nourish the seed when it was starting out.
The grasses on the Savannah aren’t the same as the ones on your lawn, although they are probably related. Eating grasses probably wasn’t their first choice, but if you don’t have anything else to eat it will give you some nutrition. Remember that early humans were hunter-gatherers, so gathering was part of their regular routine.
Most species of grass have very small seeds. A few have very large seeds. Those with large seeds were eaten by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Then they started deliberately spreading and tending those large seeded grasses, and then selectively propagating varieties of those large seeded species that had even larger seeds. This was called agriculture.
There are several types of things that are pretty much grains that don’t actually come from grass, like amaranth, buckwheat, and quinoa. But most are. But the ancestors of our cereal grains like rice, wheat, maize, barley and oats weren’t lawn grass, since as was pointed out there are thousands of different species of grass. If you take some time to look at grasses you can see that there are many different types, even in a suburban lawn, unless that lawn was recently seeded or turfed by a monoculture. To give an example, think of the guys complaining that crab grass is getting into their lawn. Crab grass is a different species than the one they wanted.
Einkorn is believed to be the progenitor of modern wheat and folks were munching on the seeds, not the leaves. Besides humans being unable to absorb much nutrient from grass leaves, they tend to have sharp little silica phytoliths along their edges for the purpose of discouraging being eaten.
In another thread I mentioned the three-part documentary, How to Grow a Planet, in the third episode, the rise of grasses is covered. Host Ian Stewart commented, “So we have a grass specie that convinced another specie to grow it, store it carefully, and plant it widely the next season ensuring its survival. This leads to the question who domesticated whom?”
There are also grasslike-but-not-grass plants that have edible or usable parts - for example Pendulous Sedge - Carex Pendula (not a grass, but might as well be one, to the layman) has panicles of small edible seeds that are easier to process than wheat.
Our ancestors would have been hungry a lot of the time - when you’re hungry, a lot of things start to look like food - I imagine the seeds of the ancestor plant of wheat were probably first chewed and eaten dry, after picking them out of the husk - from there, it’s easy to imagine our ancestors gathering whole ears of the grass and picking through them later after dark - next step is to realise that you can pick the seeds into a little heap, then eat a handful of them at once - and the next step after that is to realise that if you smash them with a rock, you won’t have to chew them so much - that’s four simple, incremental steps from wild grains, nearly all the way to bread.
It’s interesting that in a scenario like the above, the cultivation of more modern grains that fall more easily from their husks could have been entirely accidental - you pick a whole load of ears of proto-wheat, and any that are loose in the husk, fall out and end up planting themselves at some point closer to your camp than where you went foraging.
