Tamed

by Alice Roberts

  Inundated fields would have brought key advantages – suppressing weeds and increasing the productivity of rice. How did people first discover this secret? I imagine the way that most discoveries are made – by accident. Perhaps a particularly wet year led to flooded fields – the farmers must have been distraught … but then the harvest was extraordinary. Once this secret had been discovered, it quickly spread. And the evidence for rice culture eventually emerges from written history, as well as archaeological finds. The Book of Poetry, thought to have been written in the eighth century BCE, refers to rice fields irrigated by water diverted from the Shensi River. In the second century BCE, the Chinese historian Sima Qian wrote that the fields of the Yangtze Valley were ‘tilled by fire and hoed by water’, presumably referring to the use of fire to clear land for agriculture, and the practice of creating flooded paddy fields to suppress weeds.

  Cultivated in wet or dry fields, rice was clearly proving to be a useful cereal, and it was spreading. Again, it’s easy to fall into that familiar academic trap of talking about everything in the abstract. People didn’t start to grow and eat rice because it was a good source of calories, protein and other nutrients. Surely they started to eat it because it was tasty. I love watching cookery programmes, looking at and learning from culinary cultures from around the world. Let’s not underestimate our Neolithic ancestors – they had their own cuisines. They would have enjoyed working out how to combine different ingredients to make something new and even tastier. They would surely have jumped at the chance to incorporate something novel into their diets. And if it turned out to be a good, dependable food supply, so much the better. And there lies the secret of any successful ally – combining attractiveness and usefulness.

  By the first millennium BCE, japonica rice was being grown in tropical south-east Asia, with indica rice arriving there later. During the latter part of that millennium, domesticated rice was also spreading west, via overland routes. The traders and armies of the Persian Empire, and then Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire, helped to introduce rice to the eastern Mediterranean. Carbonised rice grains have been discovered in the pyramids.

  But the introduction of rice into Europe – particularly Spain – remains obscure and controversial. Did it arrive by a spread along the northern Mediterranean coasts? Or was it short-circuited – by an introduction across the sea from North Africa? Some claim that rice was already being grown around Valencia during the first century CE. Others suggest that the Moors (from the North African lands known by the Romans as Mauretania) introduced rice – along with saffron, cinnamon and nutmeg – to Spain, much later, in the seventh century CE. After all, the Spanish word for rice, arroz, comes from the Arabic al arruz.

  However it was introduced to Spain, rice was regarded by other western Europeans as a food for infants. And yet the Spanish embraced it, recognising its culinary potential and laying the foundation for one of the most well-known Spanish dishes – paella. From Spain, rice cultivation spread to Portugal, and to Italy, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries CE. Today, Italy and Spain remain the largest rice producers in Europe.

  After Columbus’s voyage of discovery, domesticated rice became part of the great Atlantic exchange, crossing from the Old World to the New. For Latin Americans living in tropical countries today, rice is the single most important source of calories after sugar. The combination of rice and beans is so iconic, so important in Caribbean cuisine in particular – and yet it’s a relatively recent partnership. It dates back just a few hundred years, and has been called ‘an early dish of globalisation’. But the underlying concept – the idea of combining grass seeds and pulses – has an ancient heritage, going back before the origins of farming. These foods may complement each other in taste and texture, but they do something even more important than that: they make up for each other’s deficiencies. They come together to create a comprehensive package of protein that includes all the amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – that the human body needs but cannot make.

  In each centre of domestication – including East Asia, the Fertile Crescent, West Africa, Mesoamerica and the Andes – early farmers domesticated at least one indigenous species of grass and one indigenous species of legume or pulse. Today, the descendants of those founder crops of cereals and legumes feed the majority of the global population. In the Fertile Crescent, early farmers grew lentils, peas, chickpeas and bitter vetch alongside emmer wheat, einkorn and barley. The farmers of the Yangtze Valley were growing soybeans and adzuki beans alongside rice and millet. The separate centre of agriculture in sub-Saharan West Africa saw the cultivation and domestication of hyacinth beans and cowpeas alongside pearl millet, finger millet and sorghum, between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. In the Americas, common beans (also known as string beans, and – quite wrongly – as French beans) and lima beans were grown alongside maize.

  The great Atlantic exchange saw crops swapped between Old and New Worlds, and centuries of slavery left their mark on agriculture too. Spanish settlers arrived in the Americas with rice to plant there – as a subsistence crop. The Native Americans had gathered and eaten indigenous wild rice, but the Asian rice was softer and more palatable. It grew well in wet lowlands, where maize could not be grown. The immigrant rice would develop into a staple crop in Latin America and the Caribbean. By the eighteenth century, rice was being grown on a huge scale in South Carolina, mostly for export.

  Enslaved Africans brought sorghum and African rice, Oryza glaberrima, with them to the New World – though Asian rice, Oryza sativa, was higher yielding than its African cousin, and became the predominant crop. So the famous rice and beans of the Caribbean is a truly cosmopolitan dish, most often combining Asian rice with pigeon peas, Cajanus cajan – originally domesticated in India and arriving in the Americas via Africa. In this apparently simple food, then, is an astonishing depth of history, stretching from the first farmers of the Yangtze Valley and India, to European contact with the New World and the transatlantic slave trade. The best and the worst of globalisation and human interactions are enshrined in this dish.

  The European colonisation of Africa left its mark on crops there too. Some five hundred years ago, Portuguese colonisers introduced Asian rice, Oryza sativa, to West Africa, and it largely replaced African rice, thanks to its higher yields. African rice is now grown only on a small scale, as a subsistence crop – but it continues to hold a special cultural significance for some; the Jola people of Senegal grow it specifically for use in rituals. And Asian rice, while outperforming African rice in some ways, fails badly in others. It’s not as good as suppressing weeds as its African counterpart, and it is extremely thirsty – not really a crop suited to an African climate. And as the population of Africa has risen, rice production has not kept pace. In the 1960s, sub-Saharan Africa produced more rice than it needed; by 2006, it was producing less than 40 per cent of the rice being consumed.

  In the 1990s, plant-breeders setting out to produce new varieties of rice, specifically suited to an African environment, worked on hybridising African and Asian rice. The aim was to combine the high-yielding traits of Oryza sativa with the drought resistance of Oryza glaberrima. The project was called ‘New Rice for Africa’, or NERICA. The cross the rice-breeders were aiming for was quite tricky – after all, they were trying to bring together two separate and quite distinct species. African and Asian rice do not breed together naturally. So the scientists used a plant version of IVF. The resultant hybrid embryos needed careful support, and were grown in tissue cultures in the lab. But – it worked: thousands of new, hybrid varieties were created, and are already being grown in Guinea, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda. The results – at least, those reported by the NERICA project – look promising: the hybrids produce a higher yield than their parent varieties, contain more protein, and do seem to be more drought-resistant than Asian varieties. But NERICA is not without its detractors – who see this as yet another example of a top-down solution bei
ng imposed on poor farmers, without proper engagement. They raise familiar concerns, worried that it could promote monoculture and devalue local seed systems, without fully delivering on its promise.

  NERICA hybrid rice brings us back, full circle, to Golden Rice – making us look again at some of the philosophical objections to genetic modification. Creating hybrids by breeding separate species together has long been considered acceptable in agriculture, while moving individual genes, or suites of genes, across the species boundary provokes anxiety.

  NERICA also demonstrates how important it is to preserve diversity – even while some species and strains are so successful, they seem set to supplant all the rest. We saw the danger in such a narrow focus with the Lumper potato, its susceptibility to disease – and the famine that ensued. The diversity of our domesticated species, and their wild counterparts, represents a vast storehouse of variation – of adaptations that have proved useful, in different times and different places, under domestication and out in the wild. There’s still room to improve existing crops, and that living archive presents us with opportunities to do just this – whether through age-old breeding or new techniques like gene editing. Not only that, but human needs will change, as will climate and environments. Some of the less promising varieties of today may well come into their own in the future – if, that is, they’re still around.

  But NERICA also reminds us that, no matter how beneficent the intent, and irrespective of the technology used to drive advances in agriculture, scientists and farmers need to work closely together. The potential of advanced agricultural technology to change lives, to save lives, will only be recognised through real engagement – not just with abstract problems, but with the people working the land. People like Liao Jongpu and his predecessors have been preparing the ground, sowing seedlings, reaping the harvest and sharing that bounty with their communities for centuries, for millennia. They’re not just ‘end-users’ – they drive innovation too. There’s not only a moral imperative to involve them in development, farmers will help us all to make better decisions. They’ve been in the business of domestication and crop improvement for thousands of years.

  8

  HORSES

  Equus caballus

  O I was thine, and thou wert mine, and ours the boundless plain,

  Where the winds of the North, my gallant steed, ruffled thy tawny mane …

  William Henry Drummond, ‘Strathcona’s Horse’

  Un caballo llamado Zorrita

  Zorrita was my companion for just three days, and we were very close. We were thrown into each other’s company, but pretty much immediately we understood one another. For that short time, we looked after each other and I grew extremely fond of her. She became a firm friend. But when I said goodbye, I knew I was unlikely to ever see her again.

  There was something of a language barrier on that first day, but I quickly learnt to communicate with Zorrita, and she understood exactly what I wanted. Together we trekked along valleys, through rivers and up mountains. She carried me all the way, taking my direction, but picking the best path herself through prickly bushes and up steep, rocky mountain ridges.

  I first met Zorrita at the stables on the Cerro Guido ranch, in the Las Chinas Valley, near the Torres del Paine mountains in southern Chile. I was introduced to this horse by a gaucho named Luis. He was dressed in loose, black linen trousers, tall leather boots, a red shirt and a brown jerkin. He wore a black cap with a red cord around it, his tousled long black hair escaping at the back. His stubbled face and his hands were brown and weathered. I guessed he was around fifty, but he could have been younger. He’d clearly spent most of his life outside and around horses. He hardly spoke any English – and I hardly speak any Spanish – but somehow he asked me if I’d ridden before, and I said yes, a little. Zorrita, he told me, was a special horse. A champion. I was excited and daunted as I swung up into the saddle.

  I’d grown up with the English way of riding, holding the reins in two hands, fitting feet securely into stirrups, and lifting out of the saddle to gallop. Western-style horse-riding is quite different – you hold the reins in one fist, with just your toes in the stirrups, and sit firmly into the deep saddle when galloping. I’d had a chance to experience this way of doing things before, but some years ago, and it still felt a little alien to begin with. But I settled in quite quickly – what was surely far more impressive was that Zorrita seemed to immediately understand her new rider. After a few minutes, she was perfectly attuned to what I wanted: where I wanted her to go, and how fast. We left the stables and made our way up into a long valley, with snow-covered mountains in the distance. After an hour of walking and trotting, Luis rode up alongside me.

  ‘Bien?’ he enquired. ‘Muy bien,’ I replied. ‘Gall-op?’ he asked, and before I had a chance to answer, he’d spurred his own horse into action, and I had little option but to do the same with Zorrita – she’d been wanting to run since we’d left the stables – and we were soon flying down the valley, hooves thundering on the turf. It was utterly exhilarating.

  After three hours of riding, we reached our destination and set up camp, down by the river. I was hunting for dinosaur fossils with a Chilean palaeontologist called Marcelo Leppe. His site was high up in the mountains above us, and the following day we rode up to it. The first part of the ascent was steep, but over grassy, mossy terrain. As we climbed higher, the vegetation ended and we were riding up an even steeper, dusty and rocky mountainside. It rose up, practically at a 45-degree angle. I looked at Luis, above and in front of me. His horse was perched, seemingly precariously, on the sheer, stony slope. I followed him up on Zorrita. She seemed a little wary at first, testing her footing (her hoofing?) on the rocks. She picked out a narrow trail of her own devising. There were no real paths up here. Her hooves dislodged a couple of rocks and they went tumbling and skittering off down the hillside. I tried not to look down after them. We turned a corner and found ourselves on a more gentle incline – covered in vegetation again. It had been a false summit – we still had some way to go, to reach the fossil site near the top, but the most precipitous, dangerous-looking part was over. I breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, I think I’d been half-holding my breath for most of that tricky ascent.

  We reached the fossil site and spent a fruitful few hours collecting surface finds – laid bare by the winter’s snow, now melted, and the wind, which still whipped sand into our faces as we searched for ancient relics. I found a piece of a vertebra of a hadrosaur, a 68-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur, and several pieces of fossilised monkey puzzle tree – so well preserved that the grain of the wood and even the tree rings were still clear.

  Then it was time to go back down to the camp, before darkness enveloped us. The descent was even more terrifying than the journey up the mountainside had been. Now it was impossible not to look down. I stood in the stirrups and leant right back in the saddle. If Zorrita had slipped, both of us would have ended up at the bottom of the slope. I could have dismounted and descended on foot, but I trusted her – and she got me down safely.

  What an extraordinary partnership with another being. And it’s one that depends on centuries of humans and horses getting to know each other, working out how to communicate, and establishing trust. It also seems to depend on an innate predisposition of horses – something deep within them – that means, like dogs, they can enter into this inter-species partnership. They’re naturally gregarious creatures. Wherever we stopped en route or at the camp, Zorrita clearly wanted to be close to the other horses. When we were ready to set off, she would nudge the others, pushing her head against their flanks and shoulders, nuzzling their noses. They’d do the same to her. We’d left a couple of the horses tied up at the camp. As soon as Zorrita spotted them on our return down the mountain, she neighed excitedly. They neighed in reply. They were obviously very pleased to see each other.

  The gauchos took the horses back to the stables each evening, and rode back up the valley to our camp each
morning. On one of the evenings, we heard that they’d managed to catch one of the wild horses, los baguales, that roamed around the Las Chinas Valley. On our last day, we struck camp and rode the horses down the pass. I dismounted in the paddock and tied Zorrita to a fence post, whispering an affectionate farewell to her and patting her shoulder. She stood there calmly as the rest of the expedition arrived, and all the horses were tied up in a line along the fence.

  The bagual was standing in a corner, tethered away from the others, with a basic rope bridle. His black mane and tail were splendidly long. He looked more curious than frightened, but his life as a creature of the wilderness was at an end. His feral nature would be tamed. He’d be a fine addition to the stables, I could see that. And there, he’d be protected from pumas, and fed plenty of hay. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him.

  As I walked off and closed the gate behind me, Zorrita had a magnificent tantrum. I like to think it was because I was leaving. She reared up with such force that she pulled the stout fence post clear out of the ground. A raucous rumpus broke out, neighing and flying hooves, but the gauchos ran in and quickly held ropes and soothed the tired horses. Zorrita had been lucky not to injure herself, and she soon calmed down. She was tame enough, but still wild in her heart.

  Horses in the New World