The staff of life

Do you take for granted your steaming bowl of rice with the fragrance of spices rising from the succulent white grains? Or your sweet cornbread with jalapeno bits blended into the batter? Or your whole-wheat English muffin, toasted, slathered with butter and orange marmalade?

I perhaps take for granted being able to enjoy all those things. It wasn't so very long ago that most people knew only one or two grains for dinner -- rice in Asia; corn (maize), wild rice or quinoa in America; millet, wheat, sorghum or barley in Africa, the Middle East and Europe; and rye and oats in Northern Europe.

And of course, some peoples consumed starch substitutes not technically in the grain family -- potatoes, taro, breadfruit, arrowroot, manioca, etc.

Collingham (Curry, A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors) describes the misery of a group of Indians (India Indians) traveling with a certain European across that vast sub-continent in the early 19th century. Seems their stomachs were used to the grains of their respective home-regions and suffered on other people's staples.

"They were unable to adapt to a different grain and when compelled or induced to try another, their digestions became disordered," the Englishman, Francis Buchanan, reported.