Luigi’s Nibble this morning prompted me to look again for one of the seminal papers in the Italian use of wild agrobiodiversity: Pistic, traditional food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy. ((Maurizio G. Paoletti, A. L. Dreon, & G. G. Lorenzoni (1995). Pistic, traditional food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy. Economic Botany, 49 (1), 26-30. DOI: 10.1007/BF02862273)) The abstract says:
So many questions. This was more than 10 years ago; are the people of western Friuli still making pistic? What if you can only find 55 of the species? How do people remember the names of the plants? Are there any other dishes that use more species? What would it matter if some of the species could no longer be found in the wild?
Of course, the Italians, let alone the Friulians, are not alone in their use of wild plants, especially in spring. But they do seem to take wild plants more seriously than anyone else in the Mediterranean.
SciDev.net reports on a fascinating trial set to begin in May. Researchers in West Africa have selected about 80 different rice varieties from genebanks around the world. These will be planted in iron-rich soils in four countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria to see how they survive. Iron at the levels found in the trial plots would normally kill high-yielding rice varieties. The researchers will be looking for the five best varieties in each plot, and will be assisted in their search by local farmers who have agreed to participate in the variety selection. The best-performing varieties will then be given to the farmers to grow using their normal methods, to see whether they outperform traditional varieties.
An interesting aspect of the trial seems to be that the researchers are not looking for high-iron rice, which might help to address chronic anaemia. They want varieties that will yield well on high-iron soils, even if the rice itself remains iron poor. Increasing the mineral content (notably iron and zinc) of cereal crops remains an important breeding goal, complicated by the arcane relationships between soil levels, genotype, other soil chemistry and, probably, phases of the moon. There is impressive variation among accessions of wheat wild relatives and several methods have already been tried to make high-iron rice, which does actually reduce anemia. There are also traditional rice varieties that are high in iron.
Department of Silver Linings: No matter how bad things get, people still need to eat. The Economist reports on good times in the agriculture industry, even though “much of the global economy is falling apart and demand both for consumer goods ((Food, of course, is the canonical consumer good. Or is it?)) and the firms that make and finance them is collapsing”. You want scary?
China is consuming twice as much vegetable oil (instead of less healthy pork fat), 60% more poultry, 30% more beef and 25% more wheat, and these are merely the obvious foods. Scores of niches have expanded dramatically: people are drinking four times as much wine, for example.
And yet even with all this growth, people in China still, on average, consume only one-third as much milk and meat as people in wealthy countries such as Australia, America and Britain. The gap is even larger with India, which is also growing fast.
A paper by Dorian Fuller and his colleagues in this week’s Science sets out three kinds of evidence that help to pinpoint the time and place of rice domestication in eastern China. ((Fuller, D., Qin, L., Zheng, Y., Zhao, Z., Chen, X., Hosoya, L., & Sun, G. (2009). The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice: Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze Science, 323 (5921), 1607-1610 DOI: 10.1126/science.1166605)) The site is Tianluoshan, just north of the current town of Hemudu on Hangzhou Bay. The water table is very high, which has preserved botanical remains and charred remains, as well as artefacts. Among those remains are more than 35,000 fragments that show how the foodways of the people changed.
In the oldest segment, reliably dated to 4900 years BCE, acorns and water chestnuts (Trapa spp) predominate, with a few other gathered species, notably foxnuts (Euryale ferox). ((A new one on me, related to water lilies. Anyone outside Asia growing it?)). Rice is about 8% of the remains.
Three hundred years later, rice has increased to 24% of the remains, with an equally large increase in the remains of weeds typical of rice paddies.
Domesticated, it should be noted, is not the same as cultivated. Domesticated types usually have a mutation that keeps the seed attached to the stalk. These non-shattering genes make the domesticated plant dependent on people to spread the seeds, and would be automatically selected for in the normal course of cultivation. As the authors note: “This trend toward an increasing proportion of domesticated types though time implies that rice was under cultivation at this time and that domestication traits were under selection.”
The paper offers clear evidence of rice cultivation and domestication 6500 years ago, but what does it say about the great japonica-indica divide? There are two views; that the two types were domesticated entirely independently, or that there was a single domestication event (selection of the non-shattering gene) which then found its way from japonica types to indica types, perhaps by crossing with wild varieties.
Fuller et al. do not treat this topic at length — that’s not what the paper is about, and Science does not allow for much discussion. I asked Fuller directly, and he said that he thinks “there is a good case archaeologically (and genetically) to be made for a separate origin in the middle Ganges”. So people there independently started to manage wild rice and to cultivate it, and then full domestication got under way around 1900 BCE, with the arrival from China of japonica types and the techniques to grow rice more effectively. He was kind enough to send another paper ((Fuller, D., & Qin, L. (2009). Water management and labour in the origins and dispersal of Asian rice. World Archaeology, 41 (1), 88-111 DOI: 10.1080/00438240802668321 And that looks like an amazingly interesting volume.)) which sets out the ideas in considerably more detail and throws fascinating light on the whole question of the cultural and social organisation needed to grow rice effectively. A parting thought from that:
We suggest that the spread of rice, which has played an important role in models of Neolithic population dispersal in Southeast Asia, may have been triggered by the development of more intensive management systems and thus have required certain social changes towards hierarchical societies rather than just rice cultivation per se.
While rather similar to Passiflora mollissima (now classified as Passiflora tripartita var. mollissima), the fruit in the picture actually is Passiflora tarminiana, a species that was only described in 2001 (by Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, who was working in Bioversity’s office for the Americas at that time).
