To the north arena of Chinese agriculture, the Central Plain is flanked by the Gobi desert and beyond that a belt of steppe that continues westwards across Eurasia. In Western Asia early crops were processed for a flour-focused food system. While grinding stones were used in prehistoric China, boiling and steaming of grains and other foods appear to have been and remained the predominant East Asian methods for preparing foods. The ultimate expression of the East Asian culinary selection of grain quality is found in the sticky cereals, including sticky rice and sticky millets. Analyses of phytoliths recovered from Pleistocene caves on the southern margins of the Yangtze basin have also led to suggestions of Pleistocene rice domestication in the region, although clear criteria for determining either cultivation practices of rice have been lacking. While agriculture in the Yellow River region diversified through secondary domestications and adoptions and developed an ideology of diversity, early Yangtze agriculture was single-mindedly about rice.