An oat inundation is occurring all around us. Forget instant oatmeal; try oat groats, oat bran, oat bread, oat flour. There is oat yogurt, oat spread, oat ice cream, and that monarch of millennials, oat milk. The grocery aisles, even the narrow, single-file ones here in Europe, are crammed with oat products, and they are dominating the dairy alternatives. Is it just good marketing, or is this particular edible plant truly the \u2018greatest of all time?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many will point to its rapid rise and say it\u2019s only a trend. It will be gone before we know it. But a trend is only a trend if it also appears quickly, almost out of nowhere, and oats have been slowly encroaching into the kingdom of wheat for 4,000 years now. Oats grew plentifully in the ancient Middle East, but were not widely eaten. Denizens of the Mediterranean considered them a mere weed. Greeks and Romans cultivated wheat and barley, but they already looked down on barley as the inferior plant (since it was also easier to grow.) Even the self-punishing Spartans had no interest in oats. When boys and girls joined the agoge<\/em>, the communal military education program, at age seven, they subsisted mostly on melanas zomos<\/em>, a gruel made of barley and pig\u2019s blood. There is some mention of the Greeks using oats for medicine, though, and Pliny the Elder<\/a> mentioned that the Ethiopians ate them.[1]<\/a> Somehow, around 2000 BCE, some stray oats traveled to northern Europe and east to China, where the climates are cooler and damper compared to the hot and dry Mediterranean.[2]<\/a> About three and half millennia later, they became the favored cereal of Celts, Scandinavians, and Poles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n