Curated category
Staple foods
- MaizeMaize relies on humans to survive. Its kernels stay locked to the cob, unlike its wild ancestor teosinte, whose seeds scatter to the ground on their own.
- WheatWheat grows on more land than any other food crop on Earth. In 2024, farmers planted it across 219.5 million hectares, and the world harvested 799 million…
- PotatoThe potato is a starchy tuber that pre-Columbian farmers domesticated around Lake Titicaca between roughly 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
- RyeRye, known to botanists as Secale cereale, is a grass that has fed northern civilizations through climates that defeat nearly every other grain.
- BeanFour or five raw red kidney beans can leave a person doubled over with stomachache, vomiting, and diarrhea. The culprit is a flavourless toxin called…
- OatOats, known scientifically as Avena sativa, may be the most underestimated grain on Earth. Samuel Johnson, writing his famous 1755 Dictionary of the English…
- Sweet potatoThe sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, carries a name that is older than written history and a journey that crossed entire oceans before Europeans had any idea…
- Cooking bananaCooking bananas rank as the tenth most important staple food in the world, yet most people in North America or Europe have never peeled one.
- BananaBananas are the world's most exported fruit by volume and by value, yet almost every banana eaten in the Western world belongs to a single variety: the…
- PumpkinPumpkin fragments unearthed in Mexico have been dated to somewhere between 7,000 and 5,500 BC, making the pumpkin one of the oldest cultivated plants on…
- FlourFlour is one of the oldest human-made substances on Earth, and archaeologists have found evidence of people grinding cereal into flour over 32,000 years ago.
- BreadBread is one of the oldest human-made foods, and the oldest evidence of it does not come from a kitchen. It comes from a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in the…