Rice

The origin of fragrant rice

September 4, 2009

Basmati means many things to many people. Some translate it as the prosaic “full of aroma”. Others as the more fanciful “Mother of all Aroma” or “Queen of Fragrance”. But no matter how you render the word, which is Hindi, it is inseparably associated with India. India, however, is not the original source of fragrance [...]

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Rice domestication: a different story

December 4, 2008

My discussion of rice domestication may have been a bit behind the times. Duncan Vaughan, of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, was kind enough to send two recent papers on the subject. The “old” view, based on molecular clock studies that showed a divergence long before the start of domestication, was [...]

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Japan insists on labels of origin for rice

November 25, 2008

Luigi wondered what Vavilov would make of last week’s news that Japan would require traders and restaurants to specify country of origin for rice. Who knows? The law was proposed because unscrupulous rice traders apparently bought rice treated with pesticides that was imported for non-food use. The canny traders then washed the rice — none [...]

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Origins of rice

November 24, 2008

Vavilov noted that: When in Kyoto I had also an opportunity to study the large collection of rice, collected from all over the world by Professor Kato. It was evident that the maximum diversity of forms and varieties were concentrated not in Japan or in China, but in India. In the Journeys he does not [...]

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Rice linguistics

November 14, 2008

A propos of rice and linguistics, my friend Luigi Guarino points me to a blog entry that we are certain would have pleased N.I. Vavilov. Chad Nilep discusses Rice as rice and rice as discourse, where he points out that Many Japanese people regard Japanese rice as superior to rice grown elsewhere, so called gaimai [...]

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Rice

November 14, 2008

The cultivation of rice reaches not only Sapporo but much farther north, as far, according to professors in Sapporo, as to 50-60 degrees northern latitude. These are the fastest-ripening kinds of rice. It was necessary to somehow obtain samples of it for cultivation of rice in the Soviet north. However, in contrast to Americans and [...]

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