There be rebels in the grass

We plant wheat for that sweet glucose rush.

Humans may be rebelling against our addiction to grasses, but there be canny sugar cane on them thar KwaZulu-Natal hills, warns ALWYN VILJOEN.

Tall sorghum, the farmer thinks he grew it for biomass...

Grass is earth’s dominant life form, and we Westernised humans are its slaves.
Naturalist David Attenborough first aired this truth in The Living Planet, one of his usually brilliant television series that gently reminds us we are the garden’s keepers. But our addiction to the quick energy we get from cereals have driven humans to let our garden become overgrown by the grasses that reward us with a glucose-rush from their saps and grains.
The grasses are not to blame. They are just following the same orders as the orchids, which lure specific species to propagate its various types by trickery. This includes mimicking the smell of a species’ sex pheromones, or providing a tasty treat, or in the case of us cheap-date humans, just showing a pretty petal.
The end result is the same: by giving us sweet, quick energy and lately even status among our peers, dumb grasses got modern homo sapiens sapiens to toil for them.

Replanting rice. It make a nice wine, right?

As Attenborough explained, if you are a Martian looking at earth, you would see tiny humans scuttling about to nurture huge swatches of green, be it our fields of rice, wheat, barley, maize or sugar cane, our bowling or golf greens, our sports fields and -- of course -- our little patches of lawn.
Look at black and white photos from 80 years ago and you will note: no lawns. Back then “garden” meant swept earth and vegetables. The really rich had flower beds and walkways of crushed stone.  But because a lawn is so much more expensive and for most days of the year, so utterly pointless, this has become the favourite way for us nouveau riche to say: “Look neighbour, I am so rich, I don’t have to grow my own veggies. Instead I’ll pay silly money to stimulate these grass roots and then cut and throw away their leaves once a week.”

Slower growing grasses are now planted at the coal face of
grass slavery, the instant lawn farm. 

But a rebellion looms. Our grass masters are under attack from all corners. Even at instant lawn farms – the coal face of grass slaving, so to speak – humans are finding ways to cut the cost of serving our grass masters. Instead of paying high water bills to feed the waterholic and fast growing kikuyu, KZNners are increasingly planting indigenous Durban grass, (also known as Berea or LM grass) on lawns with up to 60% shade.
But the city of eThekwini will not be using either the sods of kikuyu or Berea when they test public reaction to a new pedestrian walkway along the old Victorian embankment. The Durbanites will instead have the green carpet rolled out for them in the form of metres and metres of Astor turf.

Sugar cane makes for sweet rum.

The rebellion against grass continues on our bar and kitchen counters, despite a counter attack by the grass acolytes on our roads. Admittedly, the bar rebellion is not strong yet.
It may be, nay, it will be decades before we start weeding out all those modern addictive liquid grass products – the cool drinks, the beers, the whiskeys and the rums – and replace them with the wine that St Paul urged young St Timothy to have a little of with his meals, for the sake of his stomach.
In the kitchen grass products are taking a drubbing, however.

Followers of endogenic diets know their stomachs suffer no heartburn and fit into skinnier jeans if they but say no to all things grass.
Endogenesis is metabolic state in which the body burns fat instead of storing it, and the diets that achieves this state was recently made fashionable again by Professor Tim Noakes (The Real Meal Revolution); Dr William Davies (My Wheat Belly) and Dr Udo Erasmus (Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill).
The fight-back on South Africa's roads starts October next year, when fuel producers will have to two percent ethanol distilled from crops like sugar cane into their petrol or diesel.
In Jozini, this law encouraged investment for a R1.2 billion sugar-to-ethanol distillery that plans to provide 1,5 cubic litres of ethanol to meet local area demand.
For now, SA’s exploitative fuel laws prevent us from replacing our fossil fuels with ethanol, but the grasping petrochemical mafia better watch out…
Once it sinks into the collective chloro-filled consciousness of grasses that we are even more addicted to our cars than to a sugar rush, they will outgrow the competing crops of burrowing sugar beet and yellow canola to make us humans slave even harder to propagate only the narrow-bladed green stuff.
It’s just a deeply rooted thing they do.