The most important cereals are wheat, rice, corn, buckwheat, barley, rye and oats. They are plants of the family Gramineae grown since the dawn of time which have provided most of the food for mankind.
We have news of the probable existence of cereals since the Neolithic age. The cereals were cultivated in China five thousand years ago. In historical times for each civilization cereals were a goddess, mother-mind, they turned to the man because he harbored Isis among the Egyptians, among the Greeks Demeter, Ceres among the Romans, which in fact derived from the word ‘cereal ‘.
The Chinese and the Japanese cultivated rice as early as 2800 BC. Europe has rice since the expedition of Alexander the Great in India, but until the sixteenth century was a rare food. Maize was the food of the Mayans who first cultivated rudimentary and rationally using a single pointed stick. Prepared with the crushed corn a kind of cakes of which were cooked on hot stones and topped with a sauce of vegetables rich in vitamin content, based on tomatoes and peppers. From the third century before Christ until the beginning of last century modes of cultivation differed not much, then spread some more advanced tools that reduced somewhat human labor, and the grafts were obtained and the selection of seed nutritional value of particular and high yield.
Among the “spelled” a very crude type of wheat bran, of which the Romans used to eat, and the “wheat” of today runs a significant difference.
