The concept of "five grains" is deeply rooted in Chinese people. Even if you don't know which grains "five grains" refers to (referring to rice, millet, millet, wheat, and bean sprouts), you must know that there is such a saying, because they are the main food source of our civilization.
However, before the Song Dynasty, our Chinese civilization actually had "six grains". We can also find records of the six grains in some ancient classics, such as "the six grains are eaten as gifts from mortal kings" ("Zhou Rites, Tianguan, Shanfu"), but later one of the grains was "lost", so it became five grains and was passed down to the world.
What is surprising is that China’s lost “Sixth Valley” is now being packaged as a “specialty of the Great Lakes in North America” and “caviar among cereals” and exported to our country at a high price.
So what exactly is the sixth grain?
If you live in the south, you may have heard of "six grains". The extra grain here refers to corn, but the origin of corn is America. It was introduced to China in the late Ming Dynasty. It is not the sixth grain as our ancients called it.
Wild rice in bloom @MattLavin
The traditional sixth grain in China refers to wild rice (gū), which is also a gramineous plant. Most of the rations domesticated by humans come from this family. It also grows ears full of seeds, and the edible part is also the starch-filled seeds on the ears. The appearance is very similar to rice, so the picked wild rice has been called wild rice since ancient times.
Wild rice is black, and you can find many merchants selling it online. However, it is not called wild rice, and it is not domestically produced. It is wild rice imported from Canada. It is claimed to be nutritious and very healthy, and the price is naturally quite expensive. It can be sold for around 100 yuan per catty.
Seeing this, you may be curious, how could wild rice go abroad, and how could Chinese wild rice be lost?
Why did wild rice go to America?
In fact, wild rice did not go to America, but it was already there. At least when Columbus discovered the New World, Indians were already collecting wild rice and eating it as a staple food.
Nowadays, wild rice is the collective name for the genus Wild Rice. There are 4 species in this genus, 3 of which are in North America. There is only one species in the Old World, which is the sixth cereal eaten by our ancients.
Wild rice @LorieShaull
The two main types of wild rice in North America are both annual herbaceous plants. The other is only found along the San Marcos River in central Texas. It is an endangered species and has little relationship with humans. However, it is most similar to the Chinese wild rice, which is perennial.
Although the four kinds of wild rice are very far apart geographically, they are very similar in terms of their growth environment and plant appearance. They all grow in shallow water in small lakes and slow-flowing streams. The plants are tall and the seeds are slender and black.
When Europeans arrived in the New World, they discovered wild rice. Because it looked like rice and grew in water, they called wild rice and water oats in North America.
At the same time, Europeans also described in detail the scene of ancient Indians picking wild rice:
The Indians would tie up the wild rice plants before they were ripe. When they were mature, they would row a boat and dump the bundles of wild rice onto the boat, and then beat them with small wooden sticks, causing the wild rice to fall off and fall into the boat.
I guess this is how the ancient Chinese collected wild rice too!
However, different from the eating methods recorded in us, the Indians mainly ate it by frying, while our ancients mainly ate it by steaming and cooking. And because wild rice is precious, a small amount is usually added to ordinary rice and steamed together.
Whether it is recorded in ancient China or the existing American wild rice, it is famous for its outstanding taste and is very popular.
After Europeans began to settle in the American continent, people in the Old World began to be attracted to wild rice again, and demand began to severely exceed supply.
Therefore, in the last century, Canada began to vigorously cultivate and grow North American wild rice to meet the increasing demand. The wild rice (wild rice) we find online now is indeed basically imported from Canada.
Photo: Steamed wild rice
Why has wild rice disappeared in China?
Seeing this, you may wonder, since wild rice is so good, why did the ancient Chinese suddenly stop planting it and let it disappear?
Although the ancient Chinese did regard wild rice as the sixth grain, they never really domesticated it. Wild rice has always been a semi-wild crop. Of course, the Indians did not do it, so it was called "wild rice".
There are of course reasons why humans have not completely domesticated wild rice. There are two main reasons:
One is that they have high requirements on the environment; the other is that their seeds will fall off automatically after maturity instead of staying on the ear briefly.
It is easy to understand that it is difficult to cultivate because of its high environmental requirements. Many people may not understand that the seeds will fall off on their own and cannot be domesticated. In fact, corn and other food crops are planted and cultivated in large areas because of genetic mutations that allow the seeds to stay on the ears. Because the seeds will fall off on their own, which means that they are difficult to harvest and collect.
Precisely because it has not been completely domesticated, the yield of wild rice has always been quite low, so in ancient China it was mainly eaten by emperors and nobles, and some great poets could only lament in their poems that they wanted to eat wild rice but could not.
Of course, it is also because it has not been fully domesticated and its yield is low, so it is very likely to be abandoned. Most importantly, Chinese wild rice has also experienced serious fungal infections, causing them to become another food on our tables.
Picture: The wild rice now grown in China is actually wild rice
Many people may not know that the wild rice we eat now is actually produced from wild rice. After infection, wild wild rice will grow wild rice instead of ears, flowers and fruits.
What infects wild rice is a fungus called smut (or smut). When wild rice is infected, its stem will swell and block the emergence of ears.
This swollen part is wild rice. We call it wild bamboo shoots here because it grows like an ear of corn and looks like a bamboo shoot when pulled out.
Smut also spreads itself through spores. We usually cut open wild rice and find that the black dots inside are smut spores, but don’t worry, they are edible like mushrooms.
There is another crop that humans are also deeply infested by smut, and that is corn. Infected corn will also turn black, but it is also a delicious food.
Picture: Corn infected by smut, this is also delicious
On the one hand, the transformation of wild rice into wild rice was lost. On the other hand, it was eliminated by the ancients because of its low yield.
During the Southern Song Dynasty, wild rice was almost lost, because at this time China's population began to skyrocket, and people began to build fields around lakes. The habitat that wild rice relied on for survival was sharply reduced. At the same time, because of its low yield and severe fungal infection, people slowly abandoned it instead of protecting it, until it was almost completely transformed into wild rice and planted.
In fact, the wild rice trade is now banned in North America to protect local wild rice from smut infections from Asia.
You may be curious, how to reproduce wild rice that does not produce ears?
The good thing is that it is perennial and has a strong ability to reproduce asexually - their roots can also replicate themselves.
Finally, let’s talk about a digression. You may also be curious about why the wild rice in America and China are so similar. You must know that the geographical isolation between the two is very long.
I have a personal guess here. It is purely a personal guess. It may not be accurate, and I have not found any relevant documents. It is that the wild rice in the Americas was probably brought there by the ancient Chinese.
In the past, it was generally believed that Homo sapiens from Central Asia entered the American continent through the Bering Strait 33,000 to 15,000 years ago and settled there. However, some recent studies have pointed out that in fact, Homo sapiens migrated to the Americas in many batches.
Using the D4h gene lineage in mitochondrial DNA (mitochondria also have their own independent DNA, inherited through the maternal line), the researchers reconstructed the migration of Homo sapiens to the Americas, and the results showed that residents of China's northern coastal areas entered the Americas along the Pacific coast at least twice.
The first time occurred between 26,000 and 19,500 years ago during the peak of the last ice age. The driving factor for the migration of Homo sapiens was that the cold made the habitat difficult to survive. The second time occurred between 19,000 and 11,500 years ago, when the ice caps began to melt, and Homo sapiens also migrated into the American continent. The driving factor was that the climate improved and the population exploded [1].
Obviously, during the second phase of migration, Homo sapiens had already reached the dawn of agriculture, so it was entirely possible that they would bring their closely related plant seeds into new habitats.
In addition, these two migrations also explain the striking similarities between cultural relics from China, Japan, and the Americas.
refer to:
[1].https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/some-of-the-1st-ice-age-humans-who-ventured-into-americas-came-from-china-dna-study-suggests
[2].https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_2072126