A report on Maize and Flour

Worldwide, it is the most common carbohydrate in human diets, and is contained in large amounts in staple foods such as wheat, potatoes, maize (corn), rice, and cassava (manioc).

Starch grains from the rhizomes of Typha (cattails, bullrushes) as flour have been identified from grinding stones in Europe dating back to 30,000 years ago.

As of 2014, potatoes were the world's fourth-largest food crop after maize (corn), wheat, and rice.

Similarly, cooked and mashed potatoes or potato flour can be used in the Knödel or dumpling eaten with or added to meat dishes all over central and Eastern Europe, but especially in Bavaria and Luxembourg.

In 2020, world production of wheat was 761 e6t, making it the second most-produced cereal after maize.

Soft Red Winter – Soft, low-protein wheat used for cakes, pie crusts, biscuits, and muffins. Cake flour, pastry flour, and some self-rising flours with baking powder and salt added, for example, are made from soft red winter wheat. It is primarily traded on the Chicago Board of Trade.

The storage proteins in other grains, such as maize (zeins) and rice (rice protein), are sometimes called gluten, but they do not cause harmful effects in people with celiac disease.

This flour-like powder, when added to ordinary flour dough, may help improve the dough's ability to increase in volume.

Staple foods are derived either from vegetables or animal products, and common staples include cereals (such as rice, wheat, maize, millet, and sorghum), starchy tubers or root vegetables (such as potatoes, cassava, sweet potatoes, yams, or taro), meat, fish, eggs, milk, and cheese, and dried legumes such as lentils and other beans.

Rice is most commonly cooked and eaten as separate entire grains, but most other staple cereals are milled into a flour or meal that can be used to make bread, noodles, pasta, porridge and mushes like mealie pap.

Corn starch, maize starch, or cornflour (British English) is the starch derived from corn (maize) grain.

It is sometimes preferred over flour alone because it forms a translucent, rather than opaque mixture.

Cornmeal is a meal (coarse flour) ground from dried corn.

Tortillas made from nixtamalized maize meal—masa de maíz— are the oldest variety of tortilla.

Europeans introduced wheat and its cultivation to the American continent, and it remains the source for wheat flour tortillas.

quinoa'' occurred before highland varieties with floury perisperm emerged.

A third bottleneck can be considered "political", and has lasted more than 400 years, from the Spanish conquest of the new continent until the present time. During this phase quinoa has been replaced with maize, marginalized from production processes possibly due to its important medicinal, social and religious roles for the indigenous populations of South America, but also because it is very difficult to process (dehusk) compared with maize.