THE STORY OF RICE

Zhang, a botanist and professor at Savannah State University in Georgia, presents a debut book about rice and its importance throughout human history.

Rice is such a common food throughout the world, but few know its history as a staple crop. The journey begins in the Chinese village of Hemudu, which is home to one of the earliest rice farming villages, dating back to at least 3,300 B.C.E. As a cereal crop, rice began as a wild grass with surprising biological differences between short grain and long grain varieties. The legend of how rice noodles were created in Guilin, China, during the Qin dynasty in 214 B.C.E. works effortlessly alongside accounts of the author’s personal journeys around the world and current state of the crop as one of the “cultural threads” that connect Asia and Africa. Rich descriptions bring historical facts to life, as in an account of when Yuan Longping, a Chinese rice researcher, attempted to create a male-sterile line of rice in 1966 and finally found what he was looking for: He “pulled the plant out of the swamp carefully and wrapped it gingerly with a paper. Covered with mud and dripping with water, his assistants brought the plant back to the lab. They nurtured the mutant like a baby, hand-pollinating all of its sixty-five florets.” This discovery saved millions of lives in China during the 1970s and 1980s—and it’s just one intriguing tidbit in a tome that’s packed with information. The material is handled with passion, and its keen eye toward all aspects of the crop will engage readers. From a scientific explanation of the difficulties in developing self-pollinating cereal crop hybrids to an account of the author’s delight in tasting rice-based gumbo in Savannah, Georgia, for the first time, this is a love letter to an ancient grain that, to this day, feeds the world.

An ode to rice that offer a vivid tour of the science, philosophy, and culture behind it.