Why Does Half the World Eat Rice? The Earth History of Rice

Rice is the staple food of more than half the world's people, supplying over 20 percent of all the calories eaten on Earth and giving work to several hundred million people in rural areas. This documentary follows its long path from a wild plant of wet ground, through ice ages, river floods, monsoon seasons, and the holds of ships, to the flooded fields where it is grown today. Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:33 Before Rice Was Rice 8:02 The Moving Belt of Rain 14:28 Cold Rivers at the End of the Ice 21:35 A Delta Made of Mud 29:24 The Grass That Lived in Water 36:09 Stone Blades at Shangshan 42:10 The Grain That Would Not Let Go 48:40 The First Engineered Wetlands 55:22 Rice for the Ancestors 1:01:57 Two Rices Meet in India 1:08:53 Africa's Independent Rice 1:15:31 Rice Crosses to Yayoi Japan 1:22:01 Thirty Thousand Bushels from Champa 1:28:09 The Terraces and Their Two Histories 1:34:26 A Country Measured in Koku 1:40:48 Rice Fields Built by Captive Knowledge 1:47:20 New Fields for Edo 1:53:41 The Chickens That Refused White Rice 2:00:03 The Short Plant Called IR8 2:07:11 A Golden Grain 2:13:39 Methane Beneath the Water 2:20:37 When the Delta Sinks 2:27:13 The Rice That Waits for Rain 2:34:00 Why Half the World Eats Rice 2:40:03 Closing Images: AI-generated illustrations. Sources https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d... https://gpm.nasa.gov/science/observin... https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20000... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/4/3/21 https://genebanks.cgiar.org/resources... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590... https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art... https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1538333/1... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... https://www.jjarchaeology.jp/contents... https://link.springer.com/article/10.... https://link.springer.com/article/10.... https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/722/ https://whc.unesco.org/document/139925 https://academic.oup.com/ssjj/article... https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibit... https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibit... https://www.aric.or.jp/kiseki/img/kis... https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/abo... https://educationalgames-staging.nobe... https://ricetoday.irri.org/in-retrosp... https://ricetoday.irri.org/the-brains... https://ricetoday.irri.org/changing-t... https://www.philrice.gov.ph/golden-ri... https://www.philrice.gov.ph/golden-up... https://www.fao.org/in-action/enteric... https://ghgmitigation.irri.org/mitiga... https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles... https://ricetoday.irri.org/making-ric... https://www.fao.org/4/x2505e/x2505e.htm Narration: synthetic voice (Kokoro TTS, Apache 2.0).