The great increase in the consumption of cereal grains in various forms as flours, cornmeal, corn grits, rolled oats and the breakfast foods with which we are familiar, is an incident in the development of modern industry, and in the change from a rural to an urban life. This has forced a great part of the population to depend upon the remainder for food, and the result has been the cultivation in ever increasing amounts of those farm crops which yield the greatest returns in the food substances which were deemed of greatest importance, viz.: energy and protein values. For many years preceding the recent discoveries regarding food values, the U. S. Department of Agriculture published numerous bulletins containing the advice to the housewife to spend a large part of every dollar invested in food for wheat flour and other milled cereal products, and vegetable fats, because these were the purchases by which she could secure the greatest amounts of protein and energy. With each succeeding decade the acreage of the entire world which was devoted to the cultivation of cereal grains has been enormously increased for a century.

In great measure this was due to the invention of machinery which made possible the tilling of the soil and the harvesting and threshing of grain with a minimum expenditure of human labor. Furthermore, this type of agriculture in which the products of the soil and consequently its fertility were sold and transported from the farm year by year, yields the greatest profits in areas too far removed from the city to be successfully utilized for truck farming. The result has been an ever increasing consumption of cereal foods. This process was so gradual that to-day many who are fairly well versed in the principles of nutrition believe that cereals are and were from the dawn of history the most prominent and satisfactory source of human nutriment. Actually this is far from true.