Staple Foods Region by Region: Grains, Pulses and Tubers

Start in the middle to lower Yangtze River valley, where Asian rice was domesticated in China some 13,500 to 8,200 years ago. Rice contains no gluten, and short-grain japonica stays sticky and keeps its shape, which is why it is used for sushi, while long-grain indica cooks dry and fluffy.

Move west to the Fertile Crescent, where the archaeological record suggests wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC. Its gluten-forming proteins give leavened dough its structure, and it is grown on a larger area of land than any other food crop.

Stay in the Fertile Crescent for the lentil, a lens-shaped legume with seeds usually two to a pod. Hacilar in Turkey, around 5800 to 5000 BC, is the early site the entry cites, and on the Indian subcontinent split hulled lentils, called dal, are cooked into a thick curry eaten with rice or roti.

The chickpea is one of the earliest cultivated legumes, with the oldest archaeological evidence found in Syria. It becomes hummus and falafel in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, and India accounted for 75 percent of world production in 2023.

Cross into Africa with sorghum, which was domesticated in Sudan and is native to Africa and the Indian subcontinent. It is the world fifth most important cereal crop, used as human food, animal feed and for ethanol, and its clumps can grow over 4 meters high.

In the Ethiopian highlands teff has been cultivated for its seeds since at least 1000 BCE and possibly as long ago as 4000 BCE. The seeds are about a millimeter long, and the flour is fermented over several days into injera, the sour flatbread beneath Ethiopian cuisine.

Return to Asia for buckwheat, whose cultivation began around the 6th millennium BC in what is now Yunnan Province in southwestern China. It is not closely related to wheat and is not a grass; it is a pseudocereal because its starchy seeds can be cooked like a grain.

Cross the Pacific to southern Mexico, where indigenous peoples domesticated maize about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native Americans planted it with beans and squashes in the Three Sisters polyculture, and since the Columbian exchange its total production has surpassed that of wheat and rice.

End in the Andes, where genetic studies place the single origin of the cultivated potato in southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia. The Spanish introduced it to Europe in the second half of the 16th century, and there are now over 5,000 varieties.