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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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How Grains Domesticated Us by James C. Scott. This may be of general interest as a history of how people took up farming (a more complex process than you might think), but the thing that I noticed was that there are only a handful (seven, I think) of grain species that people domesticated, and it all happened in the Neolithic Era. (I'm not sure about quinoa.) Civilized people either couldn't or wouldn't find another grain species to domesticate, and civilization presumably wouldn't have happened without the concentrated food and feasibility of social control that grain made possible.
Could domestcatable grain be a rather subtle filter for technological civilization? On the one hand, we do have seven species, not just one or two. On the other, I don't know how likely the biome which makes domesticable grain possible is.
Grain is just food that happened to possess two essential features:
Making it was sufficiently productive, that is, a group of humans could grow more grain than they themselves would need;
It could be stored for a long time with only minor spoilage. Having reserves of stored food to survive things like winters, droughts, and plagues of locusts is rather essential for a burgeoning civilization. Besides, without non-perishable food it's hard to have cities.
You left out an important property:
That's a relevant feature for figuring out the consequences of depending on grain production. I'm not sure it's a relevant feature for the purposes of deciding why growing grains became so popular.