Humans eat all of the different parts of plants: carrots are roots, we pick lettuce leaves, stems of celery, stone fruit, hibiscus flowers, and ginger rhizomes. However, the majority of the calories humans consume worldwide are from one part of the plant: seeds. Grains, legumes and nuts are all seeds. 

They are so vital to our human diet that whenever people started to farm, their first crops were seeds to eat. In the Levant, that meant wheat, barley, lentils and chickpeas. A few thousand years later, the Chinese domesticated another seed, rice. In Mexico 9000 years ago, farmers coaxed and crossbred a plant that grew a single inch-long cob... into what we now recognize as maize. It’s one of the most significant feats of biological manipulation in the history of humans. 

There is a botanical reason that seeds are essential food for humans: seeds are powerful. Each one contains a tiny embryonic plant, with a root and a stem, plus food to sustain the embryo as it starts to grow into an entirely new plant. Seeds are little bath bombs of protein, starch, oils and nutrients, in perfect ratios to support life. 

It’s when you start to strip the seeds for their parts, that humans run into dietary problems. Corn is so complete that it sustained human life for thousands of years in Mesoamerica. Corn is essential. But once you split the corn up into oil, starch and sugar, and then shove those byproducts into a bunch of other foods that don’t have anything to do with the rest of the corn, you have demolished the very thing that makes eating seeds such an important part of the human diet: the proportion.

This even happens to foods that you think are “whole.” In most commercial settings, “whole wheat” flour is not the whole wheat seed milled into flour. The wheat seeds are separated into the bran, germ and endosperm. Each part is processed independently. Some of it is kept separate for a bunch of different uses; some of the white flour, bran and germ is mixed back together to make “whole wheat flour.” It’s the wheat equivalent of the hamburger made with the meat of a hundred different cows all ground up together. That’s why I like using the whole rye from Anson Mills and the whole wheat from Community Grains. They mill the whole grain all at once. I can see, smell and taste the difference in the flour and in the bread I bake. 

Bread baking is just one use of whole seeds. Another one of my favorite ways to use them is in sauces. Across cultures, ground whole seeds are used to give classic sauces richness, flavor and texture. In Mexico, oil-rich pumpkin seeds are essential for moles. Tahini paste is the base of sauces in the Arab world and North Africa. Fermented and ground whole soy beans provide the signature flavors for sauces in Japan (miso), China (doubanjiang) and Korea (doenjang). Ground peanuts are the base of mafé in Senegal and satay in Indonesia. Basically, European chefs are total global outliers, insisting that cooking depends on whisking refined white flour into melted butter to make a mother sauce. Just about every other cook on the planet knows that your food tastes better if you keep your seeds whole, toast or ferment them, and let them do their thing.