From Literary Hub, March 25:
David George Haskell In Praise of a Versatile, Life-Giving Plant
As I walk through the broomsedge in June, dozens of grasshoppers clatter away with every footstep. Bees and wasps wing past, leafhoppers spring, and beetles scurry for cover. This productivity is why so many birds depend on grasslands for their breeding or wintering. Grasslands, especially those in humid areas with good soil, provision their local food webs as richly as do forests.
Grasses also build soil. Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil. This soil‑building process is so productive that it lifts the ground. When a degraded grassland returns to health, the ground heaves up, as if inhaling with relief. In old grasslands, the soil can be rich with organic matter to a depth of several meters. When prairie goes under the plow, most of the organic matter disappears, turning living water‑holding, nutrient‑rich soil into mineral dust. Today, despite widespread degradation of grasslands, one third of all carbon stored on land is still locked up in grassland soils.
As fellow volunteers, the staff of Birds Georgia and I sow grass seed, we enact the grassland ethos: Build community, one species helping another. Grasses are creators. They use cooperative partnerships to build their homes, places that, in turn, open possibilities for others. They hoard soil carbon, create habitat for other plants, and feed animals.
Grasses are creators. They use cooperative partnerships to build their homes, places that, in turn, open possibilities for others.Although we don’t often imagine ourselves in this way, we are a prime beneficiary, a species built by grass.
What’s for dinner? Grass. Wherever you live, some kind of grass is probably feeding you.
When the prophet Isaiah proclaimed that “all flesh is grass,” he intended a commentary on the fleeting nature of human life, but he also spoke an ecological truth. In Isaiah’s time and in ours, grass sustains us. If we stacked in 50‑kilogram sacks the total cereal harvest in 2023, the pile would reach to the moon forty times. That’s 2,836 million metric tons of grass flowers matured into seed. Three grasses—rice, maize, and wheat—account for 90 percent of this superabundance, supplying us with two thirds of food calories. The juices of sugarcane, another grass, supply another 1,900 million metric tons. Barley, sorghum, oats, millet, rye, and wild rice are grasses, too.
Livestock fattens on grass from pasture and the maize‑filled troughs of feedlots. While our great ape cousins feed on forest fruits, leaves, and animal prey, we depend on grasses. If we named ourselves for our primary food, we would be grass apes, Homo poaceae, for Poaceae, the scientific name for the grass family, from the ancient Greek for “fodder.”
It is the nutritive gifts of grasses, with help from oil‑rich fruits like mustards and oil palms, that caused the increase in food calories available to humans over the last millennium and, especially, the last century. The cereal harvest in 2023 was 50 percent higher than that of 2000 and three times that of the 1960s, outpacing human population growth on all continents. Famines are rarer than they were and now largely emerge from human injustice and war, not the failure of plants to yield food. Such productivity comes with severe costs: felled forest, mined and synthesized fertilizer, among many. But those who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made erroneous predictions of imminent mass starvation erred by underestimating the world‑changing potential of grasses.
These global patterns are evident in kitchens. At home, the bottom drawer of our kitchen cabinet grinds when I pull it open. The poor thing has worn sliders and is loaded with bags and tubs. Bread flour, whole wheat flour, all‑purpose white flour, masa, purple cornmeal, medium‑ground yellow cornmeal, plain fine cornmeal, semolina flour, barley flour, and sorghum flour. Some are baking staples, ingredients for pancakes, loaves, and corn breads.
Others are aspirational, plucked in moments of enthusiasm as Katie and I push our cart through the aisles of the Dekalb Farmers Market, a bustling warehouse near our home stocked with bulk dried goods and fresh produce from across the globe. Regardless of their origin, every one of the flours in our kitchen drawer is ground‑up grass seed, the product of a mature grass flower. Other kitchen drawers hold rice and pasta, also made from grass seed. Our kitchen, like kitchens over much of the world, is a bouquet of grass.
From the three hundred thousand species of flowering plants on Earth, we’ve plucked a handful of grasses and founded modern agriculture on their productivity. What made grass so special? The answers reveal not only why we latched onto them so firmly, but also how grasses managed to take over much of the planet long before humans evolved.
Grass flowers are super‑mothers, giving their embryos ample provisions. Under a magnifying glass we can see how. I pull open the complaining kitchen drawer and dip a teaspoon into some bags, retrieving flours that I dust onto scrap paper under a bright counter light. What looked to my unaided eye like powders of different colors reveal themselves under the lens as diverse and beautiful. I expected white flour to look fluffy, but magnified it looks like coral sand. I smooth the tiny pile with the back of my spoon and the flour becomes a miniature tropical beach, a gleaming expanse enlivened with a scattering of darker grains.
Whole wheat flour seems made of tan‑colored sand mixed with shredded cardboard, as if a hurricane had passed through a shipping warehouse on its way to the beach. The grains of purple cornmeal are larger than those of the wheat flours and are intermixed with white‑blue pebbles and chunks of broken obsidian. Uncooked rice grains loom over these sands. They are slightly translucent and etched with lines, as if ancient Egyptians had built their obelisks from milky glass. Who needs magic mushrooms when we have 7× hand lenses?....
....MUCH MORE
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