As far as I know millet can be eaten as a whole grain cooked with water or milk over an open flame. This would be akin to eating kernels of wheat without grinding them to flour and baking them with other ingredients.
So you could just eat wheat but IDK how digestible that is. Perhaps someone here does?Cream of Wheat and Malt'O'Meal are the closest I've had.
Quite digestible, but you have to cook it far longer, about 5–8 hours. There is a dish called Haleem that is popular in the middle east, but each country and region has their own version of it [0]. The version I am familiar with is served as breakfast food, similar to porridge. Its main component is wheat cooked overnight over low heat. Although it should be noted that it is made with wheat endosperm, not whole wheat. But buying one is no more difficult than the other.
In this example eating unbaked grains would be the compromise to remain comparatively minimal and yet become more self reliant.
Another example would be simple car maintenance. A minimalist would pay for an oil change.
One may want to become more self reliant and begin changing one's own oil. In this case you will need a catch basin, a funnel, new oil and filter. You may need a jack, jack stands and a specialty wrench.
You could become both more self reliant and more minimalist by getting rid of your car. If you live in an area with good transportation you will become slightly inconvenienced. If you live in a place with bad transportation you will become significantly impoverished.
What on earth are y'all talking about?! Buying unbaked grains to eat is to become self reliant? That's just unrealistic and makes no sense.
Why not buy bread (as GP said), cut it, and freeze it? Surely that would be a minimalist approach.
Minimalism is not reinventing how to do everything, but just having what's needed now. If bread is your breakfast, then it's what's needed daily.
FYI: it's possible to be a mechanic and a minimalist. Owning equipment in a garage is not anti-minimalism, it's just common sense. Especially if you have multiple cars (e.g. a family).
Again, buying millet or raw wheat instead of bread is not more minimalist it is more self reliant. You are not using as much of other people's services.
Imagine instead that you grow your own wheat. You can cook the grain for hours over an open fire. And poor people did such with various grains as their daily meal for generations. That's a state that's pretty minimalist, pretty self reliant and pretty impoverished.
But if you want to make bread you must possess a mill to grind it, a source of yeast and all the other implements to make bread. To decrease your poverty you have to decrease you minimalism by owning all these things and now having them as a concern in your life or you must decrease your self reliance and depend on someone else having a mill to grind your flour or bakery to have an oven.
Trust me, as someone who is very DIY. The more self reliant you become, the less minimal your life becomes.
