Quinoa, famous for protein and fiber content, still contains less protein and fiber than, say, oatmeal. It's okay - hyperventilating paleo bloggers have raised concerns about saponins -- but the whole "superfood" frenzy about quinoa is just a tad off base. It's okay, not bad for you, probably better than white rice or processed food, but most of what quinoa has going for it is simply that it is real and unmodified. If it "took over the world", it would be sweetened, boiled, extracted, and fried into chips with none of the nutritional benefits people are seeking therefrom anyway.
"Quinoa is a low-calorie, gluten-free, high-protein grain that tastes great." says the author.
It's low-calorie compared to butter maybe, and high-protein compared with a cucumber. But compared with the usual suspect of dinner alternatives like pasta or couscous it's just the same. Just by looking at the macros, there's no need to buy quinoa, especially if it's more expensive than other options. This is of course disregarding that it's gluten free and not looking at the micronutrients.
Maybe I'm going cross eyed from a long day, but looking at that result... how can Quaker oatmeal have 2g of protein and be 5% USRDA, while quinoa has 4g of protein yet 7% USRDA? Shouldn't that be 10% USRDA for quinoa?
Probably rounding issues, maybe intentional. Food vendors are known to fudge numbers in the low digits, legally, which result in problems like this when you extrapolate.
It's gluten free, which is important for some people (a lot if you buy into wheat belly). It's another source of a complete protein, which is important for vegans.
Not all popular health foods get converted into crap. There might be unhealthy variants of these, but fruits, vegetables, legumes, fish and soy tend to be popular and healthy. I'd even say that processed foods which are based on these, like french fries, are better than those based on sugar (like a chocolate bar).
It's about perspective. In a world where people eat fabricated sugars and fat, you're doing a disservice to it. It is, categorically, healthy.
> It's gluten free, which is important for some people (a lot if you buy into wheat belly).
Gluten is most likely not the problem for most people with digestive problems, although there is a strong belief that gluten is bad.
The most likely reason why many people have problems digesting wheat, is because it contains fructans. Nobody can digest it, but it causes more problems for some than for others, e.g. if you have IBS (which about 1 in 7 people has). Spelt, an ancient variety of wheat, also contains gluten, but has low levels of fructans, and is thus more easily digested.
There is a pretty well-researched diet for people with IBS, called the Low FODMAP (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides, and Polyols) diet. It tries to reduce the amount of complex carbohydrates (which are not easily digestible) from the diet to a level where they do not cause digestive problems.
Unfortunately, it is not widely known yet, so a lot of people buy into all kinds of wishful thinking (that often comes with a price tag).
I'm afraid you've forgotten about what is, likely, the most critical piece of dietary advice in the past 30 years. Specifically, that unnatural trans-isomer fatty acids should never be consumed. Glutens, saponins, oligosaccharides etc are irritants; elaidic acid is basically toxic. Unfortunately, while some stable non-hydrogenated oils like palm oil have become popular, it seems that popular opinion at large generally forgot trans fats existed after 2009. They still exist and they're still really bad for you. So don't eat french fries, is what I'm saying. Or other deep-fried things from restaurants that haven't eliminated hydrogenated oils from their cooking. In-N-Out is ahead of the curve on this. Five Guys is as well.
>"Probably better than processed food"
Originally that sentence just said "probably better than rice", and was modified until it sounded silly...
Would you use Oatmeal in place of rice though? I couldn't picture a healthy curry or stir-fry that used Oatmeal instead of Quinoa in place of rice, could you?
Good question. I've never thought about why there aren't more savory foods out there that use oatmeal. Seems like all the oatmeal-based foods I've seen are sweet.
I suppose that's because they are rolled. And most likely steamed as well. If you subjected wheat or corn to a similar processing, the outcome would certainly be the same.
Traditionally yes, and oatcakes are pretty common here as well. Bulk produced oatcakes are sometimes sweetened and rather compressed, proper oatcakes aren't sweetened and have a much rougher texture.
"Quinoa is a low-calorie, gluten-free, high-protein grain that tastes great." (emphasis mine)
I'm a vegetarian, high-mileage distance runner who has every reason to enjoy quinoa. "Tastes great" is not one of the reasons I eat it. I choke it down as best I can because it's good for me.
Really? I find it tastes close-enough to rice that I can substitute it easily in my vegetarian cooking. For example, this recipe for quinoa-stuffed tomatoes I love:
Mix 3 c. cooked quinoa with parboiled broccoli, cauliflower, or some other veg in a casserole dish. Combine 1/4 c. pesto, 1/3 c milk or cream, and one egg, mix and pour over the quinoa/veg mixture. Top with chunks of goat cheese. Bake uncovered for 30 min at 350.
A go-to dish for me. Really easy and tasty. Measurements are basically guesses, I usually just eyeball it.
He said stock. Salt is not needed, and there are plenty of decent ways to make a great vegetable stock without it.
That said, it's not clear why you'd regard adding a little salt as bad unless you had a serious medical condition prohibiting it. I get that you'd want to avoid the absurd amounts a lot of prepared foods include, just for taste.
I use unsalted stock exclusively in my cooking, because I like the ability to add salt in later, and if I'm adding other salty ingredients, I don't have to worry about overdoing it.
In case you've never heard of it, Scott Kurek relased a book called Eat and Run a year ago, it's packed with very nice vegetarian/vegan recipes and a very nice motivator for any runner.
Thanks for the ideas and the recipes. I'll admit that my experience has been off the Whole Foods food bar (and a few other places). It wasn't tasty enough to try at home, so I never bothered. Enough folks here tell me I'm crazy that I'll give it a go at preparing it myself.
For the next episode of "Ask HN: food preparation", how about a way to make tempeh edible? That I have tried at home enough times that I gave up. :-)
A particular concern with quinoa, given its narrow (native) growing area, and the poverty endemic to that area, is that worldwide demand for the crop has out-priced its growers' and their communities' ability to afford it in order to feed themselves. A select few brands set aside some of each harvest specifically for that purpose (and also put some of their profits back into improving the farms, sending the farmers' children to college, and that kind of thing), but so far, that's decidedly not the norm.
Why is this a problem? If quinoa sprouted literal diamonds we wouldn't be upset that the farmers were selling them instead of making their own jewelry.
Having your crops be too valuable to eat is a good problem to have; these farmers incomes have more than sextupled. That easily lets them sell the crop and buy other food like everyone else.
It's a problem for everyone else. Specifically, malnutrition in children has grown in quinoa cultivating areas since their parents can no longer afford quinoa. It's literally four times as expensive per weight compared to much less nutritious noodles
This is absolutely a correct response to @YokoZar's assertion, and I would add that the families of the farmers who grow quinoa can also be in danger of malnutrition, since there is now an unreasonably huge economic incentive for the farmers to avoid eating their own quinoa, compounded with a dearth of other ways for nutritious food to be obtained on the open market. YokoZar's "diamonds" analogy only holds true in a market unrestricted by physical transportation difficulties and education gaps about nutrition (why not just spend our larger income to get more of the cheaper [less-nutritious] grain?). True, these might be solvable problems, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the fact that they exist today.
An interesting parallel in urban environments in more developed countries is the phenomenon of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert - malnutrition can occur even when families have enough money to avoid it.
I remember seeing a headline in Thailand "rise in rice prices hits small farmers hard". I've seen similar things in Kenya: "high maize prices devastate small farmers."
It turns out many subsistence farmers (of which there are roughly a billion) are net consumers of their staple crop. In order to survive, the poor diversify across a variety of agricultural products. Large industrial farming operations are growing the rest of the rice/maize ... and I'm guessing quinoa.
So, if the same pattern holds here, farmers consume more quinoa than they sell, and suffer when prices go up.
I still don't understand. If a farmer produces 10 units of quinoa and sell 4 every year, they'll still produce 10 units no matter what the price is. They'll still be able to sell 4 units, and still be able to consume 6. The only difference would be that farmers will make more of a profit selling the 4 units.
The only possible explanation would be that the resources (farming equipment, seeds, fertilizer?) required to grow the crop go up in price as the price of the crop does - in which case, blame the suppliers of these resources.
The problem is that not everyone is a quinoa farmer or farms mainly quinoa. For example, here in Brazil we have a similar problem with Açai - if you are not an Açai farmer (fisherman, farm something else, etc) then the rising Açai prices are very bad.
1. Farmers used to have 100-200 acres apiece. At that point you can feed a family even with very low yields. There were few (if any) large-scale farming operations for them to buy from, anyway.
2. Each generation, the farmer would divide the land up amongst his sons.
3. Fast-forward to today, farmers have more like 2 acres, and with traditional farming techniques don't have enough yield to feed their families.
4. They make up the difference with cattle, chickens, beans, odd jobs - or don't make up the difference, as malnutrition and starvation are a constant problem. But if they make enough money, there is a national maize market to buy from, which previously there wasn't. Hence, they're net maize consumers.
"subsistence farmers are net consumers of their staple crop. In order to survive, the poor diversify across a variety of agricultural products"
I don't understand the downvotes for the parent. They are growing other products, or have cash from other activities, and use this to buy the staple they can't grow. If price of staple rises and price of other products and services does not, they can't afford to do this. The beneficiaries are large industrial farmers of the staple. Did I miss something?
The part where even if that is true, there are other, cheaper staples. This should be a classic self-correcting problem. The world as a whole has gotten by on staples other than quinoa. Now that the market price of this particular local staple has skyrocketed, it can be sold in exchange for greater quantities of less-expensive staples used elsewhere.
If there is in fact a problem (and I do question its existence), I believe lukasb is looking for it in the wrong place.
Something you sell is, generally speaking, more vulnerable to confiscation than something you make yourself... I mean, taxes, for example, are generally levied between when you sell a thing and when you buy food. (in my jurisdiction, I don't have to pay sales tax when buying food I intend to eat, but if I sold something to afford that food, I'd have to pay taxes on that income. If I grew food for my own personal use, there would be no taxes involved.) For me? It's not a huge deal because food (and housing and other post-tax expenditures... ) is a very small portion of what my business brings in,(most of my expenditures are things like electricity and payroll, which come out of the business pre-tax) but i imagine it makes a difference for sustenance farmers.
I mean, I'm not saying taxation is the only way it's easier for others to get their hands on your crops if the crops are bought and sold... but it's one of the more clear examples.
The reason staples are staples is because they're cheapest per calorie. There probably are not replacements that are as cheap per calorie. Remember that subsistence farmers tend to be geographically isolated so you can't assume they have access to the same food products you do.
"If they are net consumers of the staple, they must be net producers of some other crops."
Again, those other crops are likely more expensive per calorie. That means there is no mix of consumption that will get them the same amount of calories they previously consumed, which for subsistence farmers will often mean malnutrition if not starvation.
In terms of effort required to grow those crops, or in terms of market price? If they're growing the crops in order to eat them, the market price isn't relevant (except that if those other crops are expensive on the market, they can sell those for a profit, too).
Non-farmers in Peru used to be able to afford food. In a sense, they were getting discount-priced quinoa.
Now, farmers are selling quinoa to foreigners, so the farmers are making more money, but everyone else is paying more for food.
One solution would be to impose some sort of tax, to share the windfall quinoa profits with the former customers, or cooperative community ownership of the farms. Or farmers spending their increased profits on the labors of other locals in the community.
The farmers are the people bringing in money into the economy. The rest of society starts to simply charge more for their services b/c their expenses have gone up.
I completely disagree. Quinoa as a food stock is not a saving grace for the farmers that grow it. It does grow where little else grows, but it does not yield a lot of nutrition compared for the labor invested as a lot of other crops.
With the price rising they can actually afford a better living. For them, getting a little richer than they are means consuming less quinoa, and more meat, more fruit and vegetables. And they can afford stuff other than food, which seems to be a novel idea.
"In Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, a village of beleaguered peasants seeks to protect itself from marauding bandits by hiring a squad of samurai. To show their esteem, they offer up precious white rice to the warriors, saving only lowly millet for themselves. "
This is debatable.[1] After hearing about this through NPR I initially thought that it was terrible; however, after doing more reading it seems to be unclear what kind of effect this is actually having on their economy.[2]
Most would argue that "effect on their economy" is a means to an end, and that "effect on the well-being of people" is the end itself. In that case, economic analysis can fall short. Friends of mine have personally spoken to rural Andean farmers who can verify that the price rises in quinoa can cause more problems than they solve.
How does that work? Food security should increase rather than decrease. Subsistence farming is a living that can be extremely hard to the point of starvation when anything goes wrong.
Sometimes a "more problems" verdict neglects the idea of different qualities of problems. More money usually comes with a higher quantity of problems, for example...
Every farmer has a decision: Eat the grain, or sell the grain. They sell it if the money has more value to them than eating it. Unless they're indentured servants or slaves, they are doing this for their own benefit. If they'd starve as a result, they just wouldn't sell the crop.
If the local community has no economic integration and no means to afford the transportation costs associated with imports (because transportation has been optimized for a certain crop), then it's a problem.
Malnutrition has been an endemic problem in Bolivia since the Spaniards pillaged its mineral wealth. This does little to improve things.
Yes, but Quinoa is farmed in countries ruled by populist left-wing democracies. If the poor subsistence farmers were somehow being screwed by this massive inflow of cash, do you really think Hero Of The People types like Morales or Maduro wouldn't find some way to protect them? It's not like we're talking about corporate dictators here.
I mean, there's a lot of faults in Latin American populist leftist politics, but this kind of thing is the sort of stuff they're supposed to excel at.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I can't comprehend the concept of people growing a crop not being able to afford to eat it - if they're the ones growing it, then they don't have to buy it at all, just sell less of it. And surely the high international demand for quinoa means that they're making much more money in trade than previously.
> Quinoa is a plant that produces a tremendous amount of seed. So you have potential, with intensive selection, to identify variants that have unusual characteristics.
Will it still be as nutritious after all that selection though? There was an article pointing out that when farmers select for bigger, shinier, more marketable fruit, it's often at the cost of actual nutritional value:
Unlike vegetable and fruits, how quinoa looks probably doesn't matter to consumers at all. Given this is the case, selection criteria will focus more on nutrition numbers which they can advertise easily (20g OF PROTEIN!!!) than looks.
How does that explain white rice vs. brown rice preferences, or glutinous rice vs longgrain, etc.
People have preferences for some characteristics in something which would seem to be very ordinary.
Maybe quinoa is different, but who knows, at this point. Maybe it's like oats. Oats are oats are oats, for most people, I think (except for the cutting vs rolling process)
I am not attempting to explain why every kind of food is selected for certain criteria for whatever reason. I am not also saying that you either select to for looks or nutrition. It's a matter of degree and compromise between different criteria. For quinoa particularly, I think it happens to be a type of food that largely guides people's preference based on nutrition rather than looks.
I expect quinoa will be selected for environmental tolerance first. Given how difficult it is to grow in th US, top priority would be getting consistent high yield in North American conditions. Breeding has to meet the farmer's needs before you start considering the consumer.
True, so unless the quinoa is the same (flavor, texture, cooking, etc) across different varieties, people might prefer lower yield vars or nutritionally poorer varieties.
To you, maybe. I prefer it, mainly because it has a taste, especially compared to white rice.
Also, trying to live on white rice can lead to beriberi because white rice, shorn of the husk, bran, and germ, is vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficient: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriberi
> has anti-nutrients that block absorption of B vitamins and minerals like magnesium
The closest it comes is a warning about inhibiting the uptake of zinc and iron. In fact, it explicitly calls out the vitamin B content of brown rice as being very good, especially compared to white rice.
Meh... Cannabis seed is more nutritious, and has more uses, as does the cannabis fibers, that quinoa pales in comparison.
Cannabis is easier to grow as well.
If our governments weren't so afraid of people getting stoned the economic benefits of cannabis would make it a major cash crop capable of outperforming quinoa in every aspect.
Some puzzling stuff in this article. We're apparently to believe that Colorado's transportation infrastructure is far behind that of the Bolivian Andes?
Transportation in our mountains doesn't have to be worse than theirs, just bad enough to prevent our farmers from farming the areas. One of the reasons Japan has so much cool electronics is that a successful manufacturing run their is much smaller. A product could sell one tenth what it does in the US and still be seen as a success, but the the US one a failure.
A quick search revealed that quinoa is between £4.50 and £8 a kilo in the UK and brown rice is £1-£4 (depending on quality).
To the rice you could just add some bran (£2/kilo, but you don't need much) and another, cheap source of protein to make it similar to quinoa's nutirtional values.
Between 2006 and early 2013 quinoa crop prices have tripled.
That statement cites an article earlier this year in the Guardian [1] which links to another Guardian article [2] which doesn't have anything more specific than $4500/ton in 2013 versus $3115/ton in 2011.
That was my question coming out of the article: why exactly do we want quinoa? The native Americans stopped growing it because it didn't yield well enough. Modern farmers have had trouble growing it here in the US. And I've never found the taste astounding, so I find myself wondering why we don't stick to rice, soy, lentils, beans, corn, and wheat?
Sorry, I deleted my post because someone else posted at the same time a reasonable explanation - a rice substitute ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6029358 ). Thanks for adding information.
My original text:
"The arid, cool land that quinoa needs was plentiful, since little else could grow there. And thus far, that trait has made it difficult to grow elsewhere." (posted link)
"Protein content is very high for a cereal/pseudo-cereal (14% by mass), yet not as high as most beans and legumes." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa )
I'm puzzled. Why not stick to beans, which are cheap and plentiful, and come in a wide variety of shapes and colors?
It contains a good amount of all of the essential amino acids (ie the amino acids that your body cannot produce adequately itself). It also has calcium and iron. It's a pretty awesome nutritional food.
EDIT: to emphasize, the key advantage of quinoa is that it has a lot of all of the essential amino acids, which is very very rare among plants. I believe the only other plant with all essential amino acids is soy.
It's not very rare at all. It's rare if you compare it to grains, and while quinoa is not a grain, it is usually used instead of a grain. Many beans (e.g. white and black) and vegetables have a complete amino acid profile.
Even potatoes have a complete animo acid profile. Not in the most optimal ratio, but 10 potatoes/day gets you enough of all the essential amino acids. In fact you can live exclusively on potatoes if you add in a source of Vitamin A (like carrots).
Quinoa is popular for the same reasons greek yogurt is now popular. It has a bit more protein than the alternatives, so health nuts decide they must have it at any cost.
Never mind that nobody wants to eat plain greek yogurt, so it winds up with the same or greater sugar content, and really only has a little bit more protein than regular yogurt.
Quinoa is the perfect rice substitute. I switched over to Quinoa about 3 years ago instead of rice. Even though it's super expensive (especially in Australia) it has health benefits that far outweigh other suitable grains that can be used as a rice substitute. Steam some vegetables, put them into a bowl with Quinoa, cook a nice massive mushroom and sit the Quinoa on-top and then sprinkle some Himalayan Rock Salt over the top and you've got yourself a delicious healthy meal.
Why? It has some nutritional benefits and it tastes OK, but that's all. I wouldn't want to eat it all the time. This is a crap story, with this bolted-on conspiracy near the end that quinoa is losing out because it can't compete with Big Ag. Give it a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits - because it might well be a fad, like Acai berries were two years ago.
Quinoa gives me such gut-wrenching pain that I can no longer convince myself to eat it.
My girlfriend is vegetarian which is why I have such great armchair-scientific experience in describing this potentially-foul food.
I've been told to wash the Quinoa to remove the saponin from it before cooking, which worked on occasion. But when you get that gut-pain from eating Quinoa even once it's an incredibly strong deterrent from ever trying it again.
Having eaten razorblades is a pretty accurate description of how I can feel for hours after having eaten even a small portion of Quinoa.
That could be one reason why it isn't taking over the globe. Because some people can get violently ill after eating it. Last I heard, nobody has a chance of developing horribly painful symptoms after eating rice.
I did. I had to take medicatipn and stop eating rice for a year or so. Now, I can eat rice as long as my stomach isnt aleady upset from something else. I love quinoa.
For people who turn into a giant balloon when they eat gluten, yes, it's a Big Deal. The people around them too - it's typically a hazard to even have glutenous foods in the area, so it's much easier for families to just go gluten free. I'm talking about chrone's or celiac's disease people here, not ignorant folks who are basing their diets on some Paleo diet voodoo that's fashionable.
Also, have you had Quinoa? That shit is delicious and easy to cook. Throw it in a rice cooker, add some water, wait 15m - BOOM - tasty nom noms, no additives required.
Rice is generally pretty boring and you need to add something to it (Basmati smells nice, but still tastes pretty bland, short grain / Japanese style rice has at least some taste, but nothing interesting). It really doesn't add much to anything nutritionally either.
Wheat and corn is in fucking everything, so when you finally do eat corn or wheat it tastes like nothing because your goddamn peanut butter is hydrogenated corn syrup anyway.
Personally, I can't wait until quinoa is everywhere. It looks a lot more interesting than trying to invest in making better corn or wheat at this point!
>I'm talking about chrone's or celiac's disease people here, not ignorant folks who are basing their diets on some Paleo diet voodoo that's fashionable.
I'd say that's the problem it's trendy to talk about gluten and be on a paleo diet and it turns people off.
It seems a very small percentage of the population has celiac disease or Crohn's from what I can find it's 0.75% and 0.1% respectively of the general population of various countries that track it. Although I do realize you don't have to be born with either disease you they can develop either or both later in life and sometimes not even show symptoms.
Side note: Crohn's doesn't really have anything to do with gluten. Some people claim a GF diet helps them, but the disease itself is different to Celiac, and there's not much hard evidence to show that a GF diet helps in any way.
While I agree about Quinoa, there's a lot of variance in rice. Lately we buy the more expensive thai jasmine rice at the asian stores, and it's like night/day difference in quality vs. the cheap stuff.
And since you're using a cooker, do you have the cheapo one, or a high-end cooker that can do slow cooks? The slower it cooks the more flavor it tends to have, IMHO.
But yeah, unless you're doing say, basmati brown rice (lowest glycemic load), rice isn't exactly densely nutritious compared to it's calorie/glycemic load.
Same here. Sauté some onions and garlic in the pot. Right as those finish up dump in the water and quinoa and cover. Turn the heat to simmer and wait the few minutes for it to cook down. Using broth or stock of some sort instead of water adds even more flavor.
For anyone looking to add a nutritional grain to their diet at a low cost, I highly recommend millet. It has similar nutritional value to quinoa but because it isn't trendy (and thus doesn't have the same supply issues) it can be 80% cheaper than quinoa in most stores.
Also, having too much of any one food is bad for you. I'm not suggesting that you start baking your own bread with millet flour - just that the next time you would cook up some rice or quinoa, give millet a try. It's a very healthy whole grain and can be a welcome part of a well balanced diet for many people trying to eat healthier.
Here's how to explain the graph showing a bump and then a downturn in American consumption.
Tastes funky; hard to cook; unfamiliar consistency. Enthusiastic people (my wife) buy it and it sits on the shelf, they don't know what to do with it, lose interest.
Isn't quinoa technically a fruit? One problem with it is when you cook it, unlike say rice, it's tough to refrigerate or store it without it turning into a gelatinous mess.
Add quinoa to water (ratio: 1:2), bring to boil, reduce heat, simmer for ~20 mins.
I should have added a time parameter to my storage comment. We typically make a bunch of rice, like 6 cups uncooked and keep it in a big container for the week. With quinoa, by the end of the week it's pretty gross, kind of a big blob.
I'd be a little weary of keeping cooked rice for a week, even in a good fridge (my fridge stays at a solid 2C, which keeps most things good to eat for long than you'd think!). Rice is a surprisingly good vector for food poisoning due to it's often carrying Bacillus Cereus spores which are heat resistant and can then germinate and grow in the fridge - most of the sources I've seen suggest that you shouldn't keep cooked rice in the fridge for more than 1 to 3 days.
Anecdote - Of all the times I've had food poisoning, probably half of them have been because I've kept cooked rice around too long. I might just be unlucky though!
Do what Asians do. Cook a weeks worth of rice all at once in your rice cooker, portion it into rice bowls with plastic wrap on top and freeze it. For each meal nuke each portion for a minute and a half (or so) with the plastic on (you might like it with it off depending on how it steams).
It's almost as good as fresh cooked rice and keeps for weeks and weeks in your freezer.
Jeepers, that's scary. I've never had such bad luck - in truth, we normally don't have rice around for more than five days. But even that sounds like it could be too long.
"Grain" typically means the seeds of cereal grasses, of the family Poaceae. Quinoa is the seed of a plant from family Amaranthaceae; it's not a grass, it's a leafy plant from the same taxonomic group as beets and spinach. This leads to it being referred to as a "pseudocereal grain" if it's called a "grain" at all.
cereal grains (from the Poaceae) actually are both a seed and a fruit. In most grasses the ovary wall (fruit) and the seed are fused together into a structure called a caryopsis. Sometimes the ovary wall is milled off before consumption (often with wheat), sometimes not (corn, oats). Grain is not a well defined term, at least botanically. Soybeans, corn and wheat are all considered grains by some (for example, some departments of the US government).
I live in the Bolivian Andes and have met several people who produce and export quinoa. Even if local farmer meals have never had many diverse ingredients, they usually fare well without consuming quinoa. Given the commercial limitations derived from political actions in recent years the benefits of this whole quinoa craze for local farmers far outweight the costs. It is regarded as one of the best economic opportunities in a country still dependent on natural resources where most of its population work informally in trade-related activities. So stop worrying and go buy more quinoa.
Depends on the crop... Also there is a lot of development effort going into breeding or even genetically engineering plants, much more so than "software patents".
