Job's Tears

Job's tears, Coix lacryma-jobi, is a tall, grain-bearing perennial tropical grass, also sold as adlay or adlay millet and often mislabeled Chinese pearl barley despite belonging to an entirely different genus from true barley. Native to Southeast Asia, it was introduced to northern China and India in ancient times and has since naturalized in the southern United States and other New World tropics, thriving at higher elevations where rice and corn struggle. It exists in a wild form with hard shells used as beads for rosaries and other objects, and a cultivated soft-shelled form used as a cereal crop and in traditional medicine across Asia; residue on Neolithic pottery in north-central China shows it was used to brew beer alongside barley as early as about 3000 BC, and the soft-shelled grain is still easily cooked into gruels and other dishes across East Asia.