A Matter of Taste 



Through a Mill, Coarsely 



The laborious art of hand- grinding flour is not entirely lost 



by Raymond Sokolov 



When people say that wheat and rice 

 are grains, they think they have said some- 

 thing simple and obvious. But as a 

 Supreme Court Justice once remarked 

 about obscenity, he knew it when he saw 

 it, but defining it was the hard part. 



The etymologist will tell you that our 

 word grain comes from the Latin gramim, 

 meaning "seed," as in cum grano sails, 

 "with a grain of salt." Which is what you 

 have to take that definition with, because 

 by no means are all seeds grains. Think of 

 potato seeds or sesame and poppy seeds. 

 Nevertheless, the etymological approach 

 has its grain of truth. Let's try saying that 

 grains contain the seeds of grasses. 



At least, they start that way. The major 

 grains are, in a botanical sense, the fruits 

 of true grasses from the Gramineae family. 

 There, however, the universality of the de- 

 finition comes to an end. Ears of com and 

 drooping green rice plants do not seem to 

 have much in common, but that has more 

 to do with their history under cultivation 

 than with any underlying botanical dis- 

 similarities. The grain, or useful part of 

 these plants in terms of human consump- 

 tion, is the endosperm, the httle packet of 

 starch, protein, and other nutriments 

 meant by nature to nourish the true seed 

 (the germ, or embryo, it encloses). 



This starchy packet is many times 



larger than the seed it accompanies. Like 

 some bloated commissary of carbohy- 

 drate, it is properly referted to as the fruit 

 of the grass plant, just as the orange, fleshy 

 globe surrounding the seed-containing pit 

 of the peach is its fruit. Both organs are 

 primarily food sources (for the seed or for 

 ambulatory and flying animals that will 

 eat the seed along with the delicious fruit 

 and then spread the seeds around the land- 

 scape in their dung). 



Each major grain is slightly different 

 from the others, but they all share two fea- 

 tures: a dry, fibrous outer layer and an 

 inner kernel of useful starch. The whole of 

 grain technology after harvest aims at min- 



A Navajo woman in Arizona grinds com for tortillas 



John Running 



72 Natural History 2/94 



