The Botanical Archives No. 009: Oats, the Grain Nobody Agreed About, Then Everybody Wanted

For most of its European history, oats were considered the grain you fed to a horse, not a person, which makes it a genuinely strange thing that colloidal oatmeal is now one of the very few botanicals with formal medical regulatory recognition. The gap between those two reputations, fodder and pharmacopoeia, is most of what this history actually is.

Oats are thought to have begun, agriculturally speaking, almost by accident: not as a crop anyone set out to domesticate, but as a weed that grew alongside cultivated wheat and barley fields in the Near East and gradually followed those cereals north and west into Europe. What makes oats’ story unusual is what happened next: in the warmer grain-growing regions further south, oats mostly stayed a weed. In the cooler, wetter north, where wheat and barley struggled, oats thrived, and by the time cultivation reached Scotland and Scandinavia, the accidental follower crop had become, in places, the main event.

A grain, and an insult, depending where you stood

That north-south divide hardened into one of the more famous lines in the English language. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defined oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people,” a definition written to needle rather than inform, and one Scottish writers of the period were more than ready to return. The retort attributed to Johnson’s own biographer, James Boswell, and to others of the period, ran roughly that this was exactly why England had such fine horses, and Scotland such fine men, a joke that has outlived the argument it was making. The exchange is worth knowing not because either side was being scientifically precise, but because it captures, quite exactly, how deep the class and regional divide over oats ran: a grain good enough for livestock in one country’s self-image, and a genuine dietary staple, eaten daily and without apology, in another’s.

Porridge, oatcakes, and staying power

In Scotland and across much of Scandinavia, oats were never a fallback grain; they were the grain a cooler, wetter climate actually rewarded, and an entire food culture grew up around that fact. Porridge, oatcakes, and countless regional variations became genuine dietary staples, cheap to grow, storable through a long winter, and nutritionally sound enough to sustain populations through centuries where that mattered enormously. This is worth remembering against the modern framing of oats as a wellness trend: for a very long stretch of European history, oats were simply what a large portion of the population ate, not a lifestyle choice.

The industrial oat, and the birth of a brand

Oats’ transition from a regional staple to an industrially processed, nationally marketed product happened in the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as steel-cut and rolled processing methods made oats faster to cook and easier to package at scale. The Quaker Oats Company, formed from a merger of several American milling operations around the turn of the twentieth century, became the dominant name in that transition, and its choice of a Quaker figure as a trademark, intended to suggest purity, honesty and quality rather than any genuine religious affiliation with the Society of Friends, was itself one of the earliest and most successful pieces of American food branding. Oats went, within a few decades, from Samuel Johnson’s horse feed to a shelf-stable breakfast staple in millions of kitchens.

From breakfast bowl to bathroom cabinet

Oats’ second major transformation, from food into a recognised topical remedy, has a considerably more recent and more precisely documented history, told in full in the accompanying Botanical Library monograph. The short version: a genuinely old folk practice, oats stirred into bathwater to calm irritated skin, was given a proper scientific and manufacturing foundation in 1945, when researchers working with Mayo Clinic dermatologists developed a way to mill oats fine and stable enough to stay suspended in water rather than settling to the bottom of the tub. That single processing insight is what allowed colloidal oatmeal to be studied, standardised, and eventually recognised by the US Food and Drug Administration as a genuine over-the-counter skin protectant, a level of formal endorsement very few botanicals in this Library, or arguably in skincare generally, can claim.

Two reputations, and how rarely they meet

What makes oats worth writing about properly is how separately these two histories are usually told. The food history, porridge, Johnson’s insult, Quaker Oats, belongs to culinary writing. The skin history, colloidal oatmeal, Mayo Clinic, FDA recognition, belongs to dermatology and cosmetic science. They rarely appear in the same piece, despite being the same grain, and despite the second reputation arguably being the more remarkable of the two: an ingredient once considered barely fit for human consumption in large parts of Europe now sits in a genuinely small category of botanicals with actual medical-regulatory standing.

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References and further reading

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online: Avena sativa L. POWO taxon record
• Johnson, S. (1755). A Dictionary of the English Language, entry for “Oats.”
• Aveeno. Brand heritage: origins in colloidal oatmeal research with Mayo Clinic dermatologists, 1945. Aveeno heritage