From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
The highly nutritious grain kernel of a cereal grass, Avena sativa, used as horse and cattle feed since the early Bronze Age. Alexander the Great fed only oats to his legendary horse, Bucephalus, because he believed that the grain, which thrived in the south wind, passed on the swiftness of the sirocco to his horse. But, when offered a swill of oat-and-honey kykeon, a hallucinogenic mixture of oats or barley combined with mint, Alexander stubbornly declined to taste even a drop of it. "I preferred neither to outrun nor to out-copulate my horse", he stated. The crusaders took the grain with them to their native countries, because it was easy to carry in a saddlebag; could be cooked easily over an open fire; and provided a soldier with enough nutrients for battle. Oats have the dubious honor of being, in modern times, the lone whole grain consumed to any extent by North Americans. In most oat products, all three parts of the grain are used: the bran, the germ and the endosperm. "Oatmeal" can mean the cooked cereal or the oats themselves. See also bran, groats, old-fashioned oats, porridge, rolled oats, steel-cut oats.
