What’s for dinner?   Burgers.

Yeah, what’s in it?  Millet.

No meat?   No, it has millet.                                           

So they’re birdseed burgers.

No, it’s not birdseed.

Is millet in birdseed?

I think so.

They’re birdseed burgers.

Okay, I wasn’t an enlightened teenager, I just wanted regular burgers. I don’t think any of us made it easy on my father to incorporate whole grains into our meals. Truthfully, though those burgers weren’t great, they were pretty dry and not my idea of great food.

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Grain is the cornerstone of great civilizations. Wheat baked into daily bread fed the Romans and Greeks, while rice was a staple for the great dynasties in the East. Native Americans in the North used corn in lieu of a grain from the grass family.

Lesser known grains have enjoyed favor in other parts of the world. The sophisticated Incans harvested quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wa.)

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Granola goes way back. It makes you think of the birkenstock people, the hippies, the natural world embracing types. Granola is not only their food of choice but a fitting adjective: Madison’s grandmother smuggled weed in her bra to Woodstock back in the day, how granola!

The granola set wisely held tight to unprocessed, natural foods during the latter half of the twentieth century while the rest of us were eating Wonder bread. The virtue of the whole grain has since fallen back into the favor of nutritional scientists. Grain is refined by the removal of two outer layers. Because these layers contain fiber, phytochemicals, and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), processing a whole grain into a refined grain renders it less nutritionally useful.

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