Are you or a family member dealing with inflammation? Are you gluten-free or Celiac? Or do you perhaps want to stock a larger variety of grains in your preps to avoid being too dependent on wheat? Good news! Below I have compiled a list of alternative gluten-free grains you should consider for your preps and a few suggestions of what to do with them.

Dent corn is a good option but requires some processing.

You'll want to stick with organic for this one. Avoiding GMOs will protect your gut from any further damage if you suffered from gluten sensitivity or Celiac for a while before diagnosis. Field or "Dent" corn as I call it is not the same as sweet corn, which we generally think of when corn is mentioned. It's the type of corn ground up and used to make polenta (coarse ground) cornmeal (medium ground) for baking cornbread or masa flour (fine ground) for tamales.

If you plan to stock dent corn, you'll need to be sure to research how to lime your corn, which is via a process called nixtamalization. It uses calcium hydroxide to break down the hulls and make the Vitamin B3 and protein in the corn bioavailable. Without this process, your corn will not give you the nutrition you need. You'll need a way to grind the corn after it's been soaked in the lime water mixture, so your grain mill won't work for this in an off-grid situation.

Alternatively, you may grind your corn and then soak it in lime water afterward. You'll still get the hulls, but this should help release the protein and B3 for your body to use. I have yet to experiment with this, so please comment to let us all know your results.

Quinoa is a versatile gluten-free food.