Millet mystery: A staple crop failed to take root in ancient Japanese kitchens

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-millet-mystery-staple-crop-root.html

30•PaulHoule•6mo ago

Comments

giraffe_lady•6mo ago

I'm not that familiar with this subject in general (and not at all for japan) but I have read some about grain agriculture in east asia. And one thing resounds from the record here: people do not like millet and will do their best not to eat it. In northern china (the region I'm most familiar with) people who could afford to eat rice or wheat did so as much as possible, the wealthiest landowners generally did not eat millet at all.

I don't know how this fits into the history here, but if they got rice & millet at the same time and could farm enough rice, it fits with what I've read about other places where both grains were available.

FWIW millet eats fine to my modern palate but then I've only had the probably better tasting modern varieties, who knows what that shit was like a few thousand years ago. I also have access to a wide variety of grains and I might feel differently if I had to pick one to eat every day of my life. Similar thing with oats, which have occupied a similar role in the mediterranean for a long ass time: animal fodder if you could afford wheat, your food if you couldn't.

jandrewrogers•6mo ago

I ate millet occasionally as a child. It is fine if you are accustomed to eating rougher cereals, which admittedly most people these days are not. Honestly, if people can eat quinoa then they should have no issue with millet.

In the US, millet is grown almost exclusively for animal feed.

3eb7988a1663•6mo ago

That is an excellent insight about non-domesticated plant quality. Without human guidance, plants optimize for something significantly different than optimum tastiness or ease of harvest. Ancient corn varieties started with just seven kernels per cob.

chihuahua•6mo ago

Funny - I would probably eat mostly oats every day, if it was nutritionally complete. It's so convenient and pretty tasty.

thatguy0900•6mo ago

They might have felt the same if they could afford to douse it in suger and spices every time. How do you usually prepare your oatmeal?

eszed•6mo ago

Not the guy you asked, but I steelcut oats I mostly eat with butter and salt - I think they're delicious on their own. If you haven't tried that, you should!

fsckboy•6mo ago

I've never understood the steelcut trend. I don't dislike them, but I just love me a rolled oat, plain, it's more flavorful to me. It is difficult to find good rolled oats that are "old fashioned" and not "quick cook". It seems that the industry has gone to quick cook which are they are too mushy, and when you seek out the old fashioned, can't fool me, they've come from the same quick cook bin.

tonyedgecombe•6mo ago

Not the op but I cook mine in water and eat them as they are. I used to sprinkle some sugar on them but don’t so much now.

chihuahua•6mo ago

Fairly plain, just cinnamon and sugar or sucralose.

With chocolate chips for a special treat.

johngossman•6mo ago

One of the plot points in Seven Samurai is that the peasants save their rice for the samurai and themselves eat millet. When the samurai learn this, they are horrified at the privation the peasants are putting themselves through.

Terr_•6mo ago

That was actually a problem for the Japanese Navy, where crewmen (and particularly officers) suffered from beriberi, a deficiency of B1/thiamine.

Many of them, having "made it" socioeconomically, focused on white rice to the exclusion of "lower class" options.

analog31•6mo ago

I've read that in the Americas, some cultures abandoned farming, and went back to foraging. One reason was that having large stores of transportable food made you a sitting duck for your neighbors wanting to come and help themselves.

hollerith•6mo ago

Even more true of those farmers who kept livestock.

For example, the first written record (Tacitus) we have of the Germanic peoples (farmers who used livestock heavily) claims that the men did nothing but prepare for and engage in warfare: all the farming and taking care of the livestock was done by the women.

(And when wheat farming and livestock-keeping were introduced to Britain, after an initial enthusiasm, many went back to fishing and gathering chestnuts. This was prehistory so there is some uncertainty about this.)

roryirvine•6mo ago

As I understand it, there's currently evidence for arable farming in Britain between 4000BC - 3300BC, and again from 1500 BC onwards (those dates are very approximate, obviously!)

What happened between is anyone's guess. There may have been a wholesale shift to pastoralism, or farming may have continued in some form that doesn't show up in the archaeological record that we've been able to decipher so far.

Stevens and Fuller (2012) is the usual reference for the maximal claim for the abandonment of agriculture: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ab...

dismalaf•6mo ago

Yup. You can see in the Near East that the rise of fortified cities and armies came at pretty much the same time as the Agricultural Revolution.

In fact, pretty much the whole history of farming has been that you farm the land of someone who will protect you.

fsckboy•6mo ago

>One reason was that having large stores of transportable food made you a sitting duck for your neighbors wanting to come and help themselves.

the socialist impulse is still alive and well in the Americas!

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