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