Cereal | Can’t Sleep? Learn About the World’s Most Important Crops

Mornings have a rhythm, and for billions of people, that rhythm begins with a bowl of cereal. But the word "cereal" points to something far older and more consequential than breakfast: a class of grasses that have shaped human civilization for nearly ten thousand years. As Benjamin Boster explains in this episode of I Can’t Sleep, the story of cereal is the story of how we moved from foraging to farming, built cities, created gods, and now feed a planet of eight billion people.

The Domestication of the Grasses

A cereal, botanically speaking, is a grass in the Poaceae family that produces an edible grain called a caryopsis—a fruit where the seed coat is fused with the pericarp. The term itself comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain, and fertility. These grasses were domesticated independently in several regions during the Neolithic period, roughly 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Wheat and barley emerged in the Fertile Crescent; rice and millets in East Asia; sorghum in Sudan; and maize in what is now Mexico, domesticated by indigenous peoples about 9,000 years ago.