Lentils, Red

As biologist-historian Jared Diamond points out, only a few varieties of plants in the world lend themselves to being farmed and the farmer had little choice but to focus his efforts on those few. This practical reality greatly reduces the variety of foods eaten. So, it was for our first planters in Kurdistan. Instead of consuming plants from the hundreds of wild, foraged species, the farmers' diet was now limited mostly to just four farmed species— wheat, barley, lentils, and beans. As the centuries rolled by, farmers gradually domesticated some fruits (such as apricot and apple) and vegetables (such as onion and leeks), but they remained a tiny part of the diet.