(Roughly) Daily

Tomas Pueyo on why this is so… and what that has meant for culture and history…

What’s your staple, bread or rice?

This is a momentous fact, for it might have determined politics, culture, and wealth.

How? Well, bread comes from wheat, and rice from… rice…

… Wheat and rice are not harvested in the same places. Rice and bread are the predominant food where rice and wheat are respectively the predominant crops. Here’s another way to look at the same data:

This, in turn, is determined mainly by this:

… But this doesn’t fully explain it since it also rains a lot in Ireland, for example, but nobody grows rice there. You need the heat found closer to the equator: Rice grows in hot, wet, flat, floodable areas, whereas wheat prefers cooler, drier, better drained areas.

Flooding rots wheat but can 3x the yields of rice. That makes wheat well adapted to hills, whereas rice can only survive on hills when they are terraced.

This sounds like just a fun fact, but it ain’t. Because rice generates twice as many calories per unit of area.

This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.

Yet rice paddies also require a lot of work—twice as much as wheat. And that work is almost year-round: preparing paddies, raising seedlings in nurseries, transplanting every single seedling by hand into flooded fields, managing water, pumping it, weeding, harvesting, and threshing—often followed by a second rice crop or a winter crop. These tasks peak during transplanting and harvest, creating critical seasons where a huge amount of work must be done in a short window of time.

Crucially, this labor cannot be delayed—if you miss the planting window or harvest late, the crop is ruined. As a result, rice farmers developed reciprocal labor exchange: neighbors help each other transplant and harvest in time. The timeliness pressure meant rice villages became tightly cooperative communities to ensure everyone’s fields were tended before it was too late.

Wheat farming historically had a more seasonal rhythm with periods of relative quiet. Wheat is typically sown in the fall or spring and then mainly just left to grow with the rain. Aside from episodic weeding or guarding the fields, there was less continuous labor until harvest time. Harvest itself was a crunch period requiring many hands with sickles—European villages would collaborate during harvest, and farmers might hire extra reapers.

These differences made these regions diverge across politics, culture, and economy…

Read on: “How Bread vs Rice Molded History,” from Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.

* adage

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As we deliberate on our diets and their destinies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires).  It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the alamanc entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging open-range cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming.