notbob > wrote:
> On 2011-08-17, Hackmatack > wrote:
>
>> No, he's saying that grains have *always* been toxic.
>
> Horsecrap!! We've been subsisting primarily on grains for 10
> millinium and we now live longer than ever. To deny it is to ignore
> our entire history as human beings.
>
> nb

Jared Diamond, in "Guns, Germs and Steel," has argued that grains and
seeds, because they could be stored over growing seasons and famine
intervals, were instrumental in fostering the growth of basic human
technologies. And because they were portable, but were sensitive to diurnal
light levels for germination, they could only be transported successfully
equitorially -- in other words, humans could take their seed corn east or
west and rely on predictable crop yields, but not north and south into
radically different climates that prevented reliable germination. From this
he extrapolates the technological success of European societies spreading
from the fertile crescent to northwest Europe, as opposes to the doomed
north-south fate of pre-Columbian South America.

None of this addresses the nutritional consequences of a farming vs.
hunting culture, but it does suggest how vitally central grains have been
to human development.