Rye rye harvesting was a manual task performed with scythes or sickles. The cut rye was often shocked for drying or storage, and the threshing was done by manually beating the seed heads against a floor or other object. Like wheat, barley, and their hybrids and derivatives, rye contains gluten, which makes it an unsuitable grain for consumption by people with gluten-related disorders, such as celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and wheat allergy, among others. Nevertheless, some wheat allergy patients can tolerate rye or barley. Ergotism is an illness that can result from eating rye and other grains infected by ergot
Wheat gluten (food) among adherents of Buddhism. The oldest reference to wheat gluten appears in the "Qimin Yaoshu", a Chinese agricultural encyclopedia written by Jia Sixie in 535. The encyclopedia mentions noodles prepared from wheat gluten called "bo duo". Wheat gluten was known as "mian jin" by the Song dynasty (960–1279). Wheat gluten arrived in the West by the 18th century. "De Frumento", an Italian treatise on wheat from 1745, describes the process of washing wheat flour dough in order to extract the gluten. John Imison wrote an English-language definition of wheat gluten in his "Elements of Science and Art" published in 1803.