Oatmeal: How A Weed Grew Into A Health Hero

Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson (1755)

- Kate Lowenstein and Daniel Gritzer

THAT, IF YOU CAN believe it, is how the venerable Dr Johnson, in what was the language’s guiding reference until the appearance of The Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, chose to define me. Me! Ouch. But that was then, when Scotland was indeed among the only places where humans fed on me. Thankfully for me, and for your cholesterol ratios, I’ve come a long way in the 264 years since. And the famed Englishman’s dig at both me and the Scots now looks as foolish as his word for a burp of undigested meat. (For the record, the word is nidorosity.)

It has been a wild ride, and from inauspicious roots. I began as a seed that grew in pods at the tops of towering, five-foot-tall weeds called green oat grasses, which littered the wheat and barley fields of yore. About a century after Dr Johnson’s diss, a German immigrant grocer in Akron, Ohio, by the name of Ferdinand Schumacher realized—long after the Scots had— that once removed from my hull, chopped and cooked, I made a fine cereal. To process me, he figured out how to steam and roll me flat so that I could be cooked more quickly. Then he experimented with selling me in his small store.

At first, shoppers were resistant. But when the Civil War broke out and the Union started buying me to feed its soldiers, demand went crazy. My reputation as an affordable, healthy, stick-to-your-ribs food for humans took hold. Schumacher, who came to be called the Oatmeal King, founded the German Mills American Cereal Company to (barely) keep up with demand, and suddenly this weed became a very viable crop.