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But if we eat the animals that eat the grain arnt we kinda eating the grain... like indirectly? If I grind the grain into a kinda dust and then let tiny organisms eat the dust and then cook those organisms am I eating grain?
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> which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
No, probably not. Mostly it gets said because sweet corn is tasty when prepared simply as a whole food, and it's what most people think of when they see the word "corn".
If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
I've started eating barley a couple of times a week, which is used primarily as an animal grain. I've found it makes a great alternative to rice or quinoa. From Wikipedia: > Globally 70% of barley production is used as animal fodder,[4] while 30% as a source of fermentable material for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various foods. It is used in soups and stews, and in barley bread of vari…
I decided probably 20 years ago that the simplest thing I could do was to eat multigrain bread, based on the observation that it's not just acres of alternative grain that matter in a situation like this, it's experience with grains that matter. A farmer who has grown 5 acres of millet for a decade can easily ramp that to 50, 100, and his neighbors can impose upon him for advice to do the same (probably the next year or the year after since farmers gonna farm).
But if you don't know anyone who grows millet or sorghum or chia or whatever, it's going to take you years to sort that out, and if you're older you might just decide to try to avoid having to change at all.
But if we eat the animals that eat the grain arnt we kinda eating the grain... like indirectly? If I grind the grain into a kinda dust and then let tiny organisms eat the dust and then cook those organisms am I eating grain?
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In 70 something years we went from 60% forest coverage of earth's land mass to 30%. I can't help but wonder how it would be without any animal agriculture.
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. I have it sitting on my desk and have watched some talks by the author, but I haven't gotten to the book yet.
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> which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
A little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization Best use of maize, IMO, is fermentation. Let the yeast have it first, take off the volatiles, then feed the mash leftovers to tasty critters.
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It is that the binary presentation implies an either-or when in fact both are helpful.
Plus it just shits on people and nobody likes that.
A staggering amount of California's water is used for alfalfa, which gets shipped to China to feed cows. In essence, we are allowing certain farmers to sell CA's water to China.
California is a very wealthy state and giving up some of these agricultural businesses to other states and maybe even to our poorer southern neighbors will be an overall good thing with minimal loss in tax revenues. These lands should be used to grow trees instead.