Why do certain foods (i.e. wheat and rice) dominate our carbohydrate intake?
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You might want to read Chapter 8: Apples or Indians in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
That chapter essentially claims that those staple crops provide relatively high nutrition relative to their ease of cultivation, rate of growth, resources required, and yield. All of which equate to cheap and plentiful.
Things like how tolerant the crop is of climate and soil quality affect how easily you can grow it, if at all, as you migrate and things like how easy the seeds are to handle also affect how easy it is to cultivate. It's difficult collect and handle seeds if they are dust-like and spread by the wind.
There are more nutritious crops but they are more difficult to grow and/or produce less yield. If I remember right the book does comparisons of yield versus nutritional value and the most common crops had the highest overall score.
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