Wheat and other grains are grasses. How edible is 'garden variety' grass seed? If you let it grow instead of..

Question

mowing it regularly, and if you have acres of it, and if you harvest it and grind it to flour, could you make edible bread out of common grass...?

Yes, I KNOW that wheat, oats, rye, corn, etc., are better and have been bred (no pun intended) for the purpose. But would it work? Anybody know or heard of anyone who's tried it? Would it taste nasty...? I know cows, horses, etc, will eat it, but I don't think they have very discriminating palates.

I don't have the time or space to experiment with this. Please, serious answers only! Thanks.

Answer 1

You have mentioned yourself, indirectly albeit ; that man has discriminating palate !!

This will be the hindrance as the grass seeds are edible but are not palatable to us .

Even the wheat has undergone a 'sea change' before it was accepted world wide !! Read about it in the following link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat

Dog biscuits are edible but do we consume them avidly ?

How many of us eat brown bread as compared to white bread ?

Millets are cheaper , much cheaper than wheat or rice , but they consitute only poor man's diet. Why? The taste ! what else?

Therein lies the crux of the problem. Other wise man would have started the practice of cultivating Garden grass for consumption.

Answer 2

Good question. I have never seen any "Poison" warnings on grass seed bags. If cows and horses can eat it, we probably could too. A typical lawn actually includes a pretty wide variety of grass species, mixed with a similar variety of weed species. So you would get a lot of different seeds. I would expect most of them to be edible, but some might not be. So I wouldn't try it. Anyway it would probably taste crappy. The grass seeds (grains) that we do eat have been selected for breeding largely because they taste good. If lawn grass seeds tasted good, we would probably be breeding and growing them for food.

Answer 3

yes it's possible ...

generally spoken, humans are
neither gras eaters nor carnivores
(no urease in stomach, little ptyalin in saliva
indeed we could derive all proteine from fruits)

but throughout the development of culture
gras seed has become center of nutriment.

beside the 6 main cultivated gras types
(gras as family ranks 4 from occurance in nature)
you can eat many wildforms, some extra care may
be necessary, like avoiding poisonous corn "pelt"
as some plants got etc. - specific research please. :)