Is the collective opinion of a group of people more valuable than that of a single expert? I don’t know. What do you think?
Cite as: Kamoun, S. (2022). Wisdom of the crowd — What’s the most important food crop. Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7473887
This is the last post of 2022. Let’s have some fun.
What’s the most important food crop
The peer-reviews of our paper “A pandemic clonal lineage of the wheat blast fungus” are in, just in time before the winter holidays break. The verdict is positive, but one reviewer took offence to the opening sentence: “Wheat, the most important food crop, is threatened by a blast disease pandemic.” They wrote that according to Google, rice, not wheat, is the most important food crop. Fair enough. But what does the crowd think? Let’s ask the Twitterverse.
The responses — 36 at last count — ranged from “the cultivation of wheat in the Middle East was the factor that jump-started the whole European Civilization. So, yeah, wheat,” to “half the world’s population eat rice at least once a day,” and not to forget “based on gross production in biomass, it’d be corn/maize”.
The potato people somehow kept quiet with just one mention. But, there was the usual semi-serious and tongue-in-cheek replies that pitched anything from millet, sugarcane, Arabidopsis, raspberry, oat, olive, pistachio, almond, barley and strawberry.
ChatGPT, the remarkably articulateAI engine, was more reasonable than most tweeps: “It is difficult to choose just one food crop as the most important, as different crops are important to different regions and cultures around the world, and the importance of a particular crop can also vary depending on the context,” it wrote.
When asked the very specific question, ChatGPT still wouldn’t take sides, “both rice and wheat are important food crops,” it stated.
There was also the wise people who objected to the reviewer’s use of Google, referred to FAO statistics, and pointed out that an affinity for vodka could influence the reviewer’s perspective. I’m not so sure about that last one; you can make superb alcoholic drinks with rice. And you can also cook with rice based sake — a somewhat irrelevant fact I’m adding simply to give myself an excuse to post a photo of this fish kinmedai (金目鯛, splendid alfonsino, Beryx splendens). Isn’t it splendid?
There was only one solution to sort out this divergence of views once for all. A “scientific” Twitter poll. And the Final Results are in: rice is the most important food crop.
Who can argue with such an unambiguous outcome. We will have to revise the paper accordingly. In fact, our trusted editor Jen Mach suggests deleting that first sentence altogether.
There is a fungus among us
Jen is absolutely right. Let’s just ditch the throwaway “X is the most important…”. Can’t we just agree that both rice and wheat are very important food crops that are so critical to feeding the planet? Which leads me to the blast fungus pathogen; it happens to cause recurrent epidemics on both of these essential food crops. I guess that means it’s an important plant pathogen, okay. Say no more.
