I shouldn’t have to say this but I do.

This is part of the that “all cultures have to be basically feudal Europe but with variations”. No they don’t.

There’s a worldbuilding teacher called Grainbound who thinks that… well it’s there in his name. He goes on and on about how bad worldbuilders break the rule that grain-logistics determine the social order. He is the cure, teaching people grain-logisitcs so they can worldbuild the correct (feudal European) way.

This dataset ‘Cereal Grains the Principal Crop’ shows about 50% of societies surveyed were grain-dependent. And this dataset shows that of societies that got calories from agriculture (i.e. not hunter-gatherers) most got 46-75% of their calories that way.

There’s so many alternatives –

• Look up ‘Nuts As Staple Foods with Osker Brown’ on youtube… he talks with evidence about how hazelnuts and chestnuts have been used as the basic food. Californians were largely acorn-people (acorn+salmon). Mongongo/Manketti is the main food of many traditional Khoisan people. A tree, not a grain. Osker Brown is talking from his own experience of farming and eating as well as historical evidence.
• Root crops like the ones the Inca depended on. “Oh but they rot and can’t be stored like grain!” Think again: they stored chuño in qullqa.
• Pastoralism, herding camel or cattle or llamas or xcaiuds. Here are the data on dependence on animal husbandry: very high in the northern and horny parts of Africa.
• Non-domesticated animals, e.g. the buffalo-people of North America, or the Inuit.
• The Norte Chico (Caral-Supe) civilization recently owned the libs by proving that you don’t even need agriculture for organised civilisation. There were mobile hunter-gatherer bands without centralised populations and architecture. There were also sedentary hunter-gatherer civilisations with architecture.

You are also allowed to be imaginative in worldbuilding. What about a civilisation that gets most of their calories from seaweeds? Aquatic plants grow quicker than terrestrial plants, so they’d have more abundant food.

What about a civilisation that gets most of their calories from Black Soldier Fly larvae? That seems entirely possible to me.

Where Mr. Thegrainbound Dot Com is good is thinking through how food-logistics determines the social order. Can the food be taxed easily? Over what distances can it be transported? What logistical issues vanish with a particular food-source? What new ones are introduced? For example, pastoralism means your food can walk. The buffalo-folk migrated because the food migrated.

I think there’s some truth in the idea that grain-agriculture leads to states (James C. Scott and a lot of anarchists have thought about this) because it’s a fungible, taxable, store-able food. It’s a lot more money-like than a fruit is, and you can build a bureaucracy on it, and therefore a centralised state. But unless you’re building a centralised state, you don’t have to default to grain ‘just because’. Someone recently told me I should change my Faroes-style sheep-and-fish realm to be grain-dependent.

In the same way people on stackexchange worldbuilding have the attitude “I can accept telepathic penguins, so long as it’s a free-market economy”, grain-obsession is another version of that, a sub-belief in the same paradigm.