You know corn and wheat. But America grows another huge grain โ and you may never have heard its name.
It's called sorghum (some farmers say milo). It's a tall grass โ think of it as corn's tougher cousin โ grown for the round grain packed into the seed-head at its top.
Basis: Botany: grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a cereal grass โ textbook.
Sorghum's superpower is toughness. It handles heat and drought far better than corn, so it grows out on dry plains where corn would dry up and fail โ which is why it's often called a 'camel' among crops.
Basis: Agronomy: sorghum is a notably drought- and heat-tolerant cereal โ well established.
In the U.S. it's widely grown to feed farm animals, but people eat it too: it's naturally gluten-free, can be popped like tiny popcorn, or boiled like rice. In parts of Africa and India it's an everyday food grain.
Basis: Food/ag: sorghum is a gluten-free cereal used for feed and food, and a staple in parts of Africa and South Asia โ established.
So why don't Americans eat more of it? A common explanation is simply habit โ corn and wheat came to rule American plates, leaving sorghum as 'the animal's grain.' Plausible, but food traditions grow from many tangled roots.
โป A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
๐ Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.