The name left by the Grain God.

Ceres (the Greek Demeter) is the goddess of grain, agriculture, and abundance in Roman mythology. She taught humankind how to grow wheat and barley, how to break the earth with the plough, and how to make bread. Ceres' most famous story is her grief over the loss of her daughter Proserpina (the Greek Persephone) — when Hades abducted Proserpina and carried her off to the underworld, Ceres sank into sorrow and let no grain grow. As humans began to starve to death, Zeus mediated, and Proserpina came to spend half the year with her mother and half with Hades. Thus in spring and summer the grain grows, and in autumn and winter it does not. In other words, the myth of Ceres is not merely a myth of abundance but also a myth of "the origin of the seasons." In Rome the festival of Ceres (the Cerealia) was held every April. In 1818 the word cereal entered English, from the Latin cerealis ("of Ceres"). At first it meant "grain in general," but in the late nineteenth century, after the Kellogg brothers invented corn flakes in America, its meaning narrowed to "processed grain for breakfast."

Shennong (神農氏) is one of the Three Sovereigns (Sanhuang) of Chinese mythology, the god of agriculture and medicine. The Huainanzi records: "Shennong tasted the flavors of the hundred herbs and the sweetness and bitterness of the spring waters, so that the people might know what to shun and what to seek. In this time, in a single day he met with seventy poisons (神農嘗百草之滋味, 水泉之甘苦, 令民知所辟就. 當此之時, 一日而遇七十毒)." Shennong was, quite literally, the "divine (神) farmer (農)." In the age of hunting and gathering, humans did not know what to eat and often died from mistakenly consuming poisonous plants. Shennong made his own body an instrument of experiment, tasting herbs and fruits and roots himself, and recorded which could be eaten, which served as medicine, and which were poison. In later ages the medical text The Divine Farmer's Materia Medica (Shennong Bencao Jing) was compiled under his name — the oldest pharmacological work in Eastern medicine. On the agricultural side, he is said to have invented the plough and the ploughshare and to have taught the five grains (wugu).