Meet the Ingredient: Oats, A Short History From Weed to Porridge Bowl

October 11, 2026

Oats (Avena sativa) may have begun life as a weed among the wheat and barley. It is one leading theory, and it fits how the grain has been treated for centuries: grown on poor ground and valued in places where other cereals struggled.

From weed to crop

The closest wild relatives of oats grow around Turkey, close to where wheat and barley were first domesticated. Researchers at Aberystwyth University, who led a project on the origins of the crop, describe a possible "weed" route: a wild relative colonised disturbed ground, adapted to life in tilled cereal fields, especially barley, and spread across Europe with those crops. In hard times, when the main crops failed, the weed may have been harvested as a crop in its own right. Oats were traditionally grown on poor soils and at the end of crop rotations, which the project sees as a possible legacy of that secondary start. Archaeological evidence points to oats becoming a crop in late Neolithic Europe, in the centre of the continent rather than where their wild relatives live.

The story may be more complicated than a single weed. The same project notes that the common white oat (Avena sativa), sown in spring, and the red oat (Avena byzantina), sown in autumn and common in traditional Mediterranean farming, seem to be related to different wild populations in Turkey. That suggests oats may have been domesticated twice.

Why oats suited the north

Oats thrive in cool, moist climates, and today the main growing countries include Canada, Finland, Poland, Russia and the United States. Farmers in the cold, wet parts of Europe found them more reliable than wheat. One review of the literature suggests that common oats spread into north-central Europe around 1200 to 600 BCE, and that Romans may have been the first to grow them in Britain, mainly as fodder for cavalry horses. Neolithic farmers in Scotland grew mostly emmer wheat and naked barley, and oats were rare, probably growing only as weeds in those fields.

Porridge

By the 18th century oats were Scotland's main crop, accounting for up to half of recorded cropland in some places between 1750 and 1850, according to that review. The first clear reference to porridge in Scotland comes from 1615, when the English traveller Richard James described oatmeal boiled in water and eaten with butter or ale. Traditional Scottish porridge is just oatmeal, water and salt, stirred clockwise with a spurtle and eaten from a wooden bowl with a horn spoon. Left-over porridge was sometimes allowed to set, sliced and eaten later, a little like Italian polenta.

Oatcakes were the portable version. Most houses had no oven, so they were cooked on a girdle, a thin iron plate hung over the fire, from oatmeal, salt, a little dripping and water. The chronicler Froissart reported that Scottish soldiers in 1328 carried oats and a flat metal plate, mixing the oats with river water and cooking them into thin cakes. Highlanders preferred a thinner, crisper oatcake than Lowlanders, who sometimes added wheat flour.

Oats also had a reputation problem. In his 1755 Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined oats as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people". The definition is often read as a dig at the Scots, whose diet was a target for attacks in an England still dealing with the Jacobite risings. Boswell is said to have replied that this was why England had such fine horses and Scotland such fine people.

What "sprouted and naked" means

Most oats have a hull that is removed in the mill. Naked oats (Avena nuda) lack that inedible hull, so the grain is clean without extra processing, though it is covered in fine hairs. Ours are activated with water and germinated into shoots, then dehydrated below 40°C and rolled. Germination begins when a grain takes up water, which reactivates the enzymes stored inside it and starts the breakdown of stored food for the growing embryo. In barley, for instance, enzymes turn starch into sugars. The rolled oats cook into a soft, creamy porridge.

Conventional oat milling adds a hot step that ours skip. After dehulling, groats are generally steamed and kilned at up to 105°C for about two hours, which deactivates enzymes that make the fats in oats go rancid. Sprouted and raw oats are dried gently instead, so they are not kilned in that way.

See our oats for nutrition per 100g.