FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

CEREEAL

a term derived from Ceres such as wheat, corn, rice,oats, rye, barley and millet.

Grimes, William. 2004. Eating Your Worlds. Oxford University Press.

is a grain used for food, such as wheat, oats, or corn. Is a breakfast food made from roasted grain, typically eaten with milk. -
ORIGIN from Latin cerealis, from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

Sources and Varieties

Does the type of grain or seed make a difference in food preparation? What type of grain should one select?

The consumer in the United States tends to think that flour refers to all-purpose white flour or, possibly, whole wheat or cake flour. Unfortunately, baked recipes are generally assumed to use all-purpose flour. Increasingly, other sources are being used for their cost, nutritive value, specialized functional properties, unique sensory characteristics or simply due to marketability. The many different sources may be grains, oilseeds, and legumes. The oilseeds [soybean, flax, safflower, peanut, rapeseed, coconut, cottonseed, sesame, and others] and legume flours [navy bean, lupine, lima bean, chickpea, cowpea, fababean, pigeon pea, lentil] are increasingly being used as substitutes or supplements for wheat flour.

Each of these alternate sources have their advantage and disadvantage. The phenolics are a particular problem, especially for the legumes, rapeseed and mustard. They are intermediate in concentration in soybean, flax, peanut, and safflower flour and low in coconut, cottonseed and sesame flour. Other problems constantly are being identified and minimized, such as the gossypol in cottonseed.

Excerpts from Bender, Arnold E. 1990. Dictionary of Nutrition and Food Technology. Butterworths, Boston.

Any grain or edible fruit of the grass family which may be used as food. include wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, maize, and millet.
Provide the largest single type of foodstuffs. In the Far East cereal often constitutes 90% of the diet; even in the UK bread and flour provide one-third of the calories and at the same time one-third of the protein of the average diet.