The Open Furrow: Psuedocereals: Super "Foods", or Pantry "Hokum"?

Move over, wheat, rice, barley, oat, and maize: Your botanical imposters are poised for global conquest! Yes, the psuedocereals are on the up and up, particularly among North American and European culinary savants and health conscious types. And, in a nod aimed at focusing attention on underexploited genetic resources for developing countries, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) anointed 2013 the “international year of quinoa”, a pseudocereal. But what exactly are psuedocereals, and why all the ballyhoo over them?

The term "psuedocereal" refers to a class of cosmopolitan grain-like plants, including old standbys like buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), and not-so-familiar plants like quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), kañiwa (Chenopodium pallidacuale), amaranth (Amaranthus spp.), huazontle (Chenopodium nuttaliae), and chia (Salvia hispanica). True cereals are monocotyledon (one seed leaf) plants, all members of grass family Poaceae, in botany lingo. Corn, wheat, oat, sorghum, are familiar monocot grass plants. Pseudocereals, in turn, are dicotlyledon (two seed leaves) broadleaf plants. The so-called “dicots” are a large, diverse group of flowering plants that include garden mainstays like cucumber and potato, and oil seeds soybean and canola, among many others.

Psuedocereals like quinoa, chia, and amaranth have surged in popularity because their seeds are nutritious, offering a favorable balance of amino acids, health-promoting fatty acids like omega-3, dietary fiber, minerals, or a combination of these. Psuedocereals also earn bonus points for being gluten-free, a food preference on the increase. Quinoa production has jumped since 2008 in the core Andean producing countries of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru (Figure 1). Quinoa exports from the region have also risen, fueled by demand in Europe and North America where the grain has acquired haute cuisine status as a super “food” possessing life-extending, health-promising virtues. Comparisons to meat have been made. As such, there’s concern that the boom in quinoa’s popularity is exhausting domestic supply in the exporting countries.

To answer this question, the Open Furrow blog’s dedicated Acme Scientific Research Collaborative® has canvassed the global literature to produce a survey of the psuedocereals: history, botany, and nutritional value in the human diet. Our first installment examines quinoa and allies, available here. Aspects of grain protein quality are emphasized since this seems to be the focal point of quinoa’s nutritional aura. Warning: this 13-page review is an advanced treatment of nutrition and food chemistry with citations from professional databases that may not be accessible to all readers of this blog. We delve into amino acids, amino acid profiles, scoring patterns, PDCAAS, fatty acids, fiber, vitamins and minerals. As a communication it’s not well suited for the blogger platform. Thus, it has been placed on another server where it can be accessed via the above link rather than reproduced here. If you're looking for a science-informed reckoning of the mob of nutritional claims accorded the psuedocereals, this piece is an excellent starting point.

The psuedocereals may seem far removed from my current preoccupation with soil productivity and tillage research but in fact, the subject is not entirely random. In the 1980s I tested soil nitrogen effects on amaranth grain and leaf protein content (ahead of the curve, you might say). Later, I field tested the first generation of "Roundup Ready" soybean transgenics. The fate of transgenics in the last decade has become entangled with that of the amaranths, particularly the Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri), due to the species' acquired resistance to the herbicide glyphosate. Which is just another way of saying that nature's all one big goopy mingled enchilada. Napkins de rigueur and do mind the crumbs, they're the nuggets that so often matter.