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Wheat

The cereal used in the largest quantity is wheat. With regard to its composition, there would appear to be quite as much if not more nutritive matter in oats--a larger quantity of saline matter, and, in fact, of all those constituents of food which are necessary to the production of tissues, the maintenance of the animal heat, and the supply of mineral material to the body. With regard, also, to barley, we find that barley has the same capabilities as oats--it contains all the constituents of wheat and of oats. We may also say in regard to maize, that it contains the same constituents--starch, nutritive matter, and saline matter-even in larger quantities than oats and wheat; and, in addition to these, it contains a very large quantity of fatty matter and of oily matter, which is not found in wheat, in barley, or in oats. But wheaten flour alone of all these farinaceous foods will make fermented bread. Its product is more abundant in districts of a higher temperature than our own, and it is always cultivated in this country with some amount of uncertainty. Our really natural grains are barley and oats. Barley is cultivated up to 70 deg. latitude, and also in the tropical parts of the Western world; so that barley has a greater range than oats or wheat. The oat has a much more Northern range than wheat, and of the three, the wheat is cultivated in our Northern climate at the greatest uncertainty and expense; but still we cultivate it. Wheat does not appear to have a large quantity of nutritive matter: it contains less protein than oats, and very little more than Indian meal; a considerable quantity, however, more than rice, but not a much larger quantity than barley-meal. It seems, then, not so much its composition, as the power it possesses of making a light loaf by fermentation, which causes it to be the favourite form of food.