I had my preconceptions rocked this week.  Which is always a healthy thing,
but I'm still reeling from it.

My assumption has long been that most cereal grains and beans are foreign
to the human digestive tract because they can only be rendered edible by
technology--i.e. extended cooking.  Earliest evidence for use of fire for
cooking among humans seems to be 25,000 years (I have no reference for that
handy, let me know if that's in dispute), which would indicate the
potential for some adaptation to cooked foods.  Yet it would seem that the
fact that grains and beans are inedible without things like cooking pots
and mortar and pestle ought to make us look with suspicion to those foods,
since that all by itself would tend to indicate that humans would never
have eaten them in any appreciable quantity until around the time of
agriculture.

Enter the members of the raw food community who I recently encountered
online.  These people eat absolutely everything raw, on the belief that the
molecular changes wrought by cooking foods are unnatural, addicting, and
carcinogenic.  I am mildly skeptical of this belief system, although there
is some rational argument for it; humans ARE the only animals who cook food
and most of the evidence I've seen suggests that we haven't been doing it
for very long.

But what really rocked me is that these people (and I've seen messages from
more than one of them) eat whole cereal grains and beans raw.  They most
commonly will use overnight soaking methods, either in pots or jars or even
just wrapping the stuff in moist rags.  However they will also apparently
eat them even without this, eating them completely raw without even any
soaking.  Their claim is that if you haven't been eating this way all your
life it might take a week or two for your digestive tract to adjust, but
that they otherwise have no trouble at all living this way.

At first I was tempted to dismiss this as a bizarre cultish sort of thing.
But if these people appear to be happy eating this way.  The very fact
that it's POSSIBLE for them to do this should, at minimum, throw back open
to question whether or not humans have been eating cereal grains since
before the advent of agriculture after all.  Although it's hard to imagine
them making up the majority of the diet, if people can comfortably eat wild
grains without technology then there's not much reason to think they
wouldn't, is there?

Once in a while you get shown the light/
 In the strangest of places if you look at it right   ---Robert Hunter