40 Fun Facts About Sorghum

Whole sorghum grains can be prepared at home as a miniature version of which snack?

Popcorn made from sorghum looks like the usual kind, only much smaller. The grains burst when they are heated in hot oil.

In a Korean folktale explaining why sorghum stalks are red, which animal falls from the sky onto a stalk?

Tiger blood stains the sorghum in the tale, after a rope snaps under the beast as it chases two children into the sky. The brother and sister climb on to become the Sun and the Moon.

The first known US record of sorghum is Benjamin Franklin's 1757 note on using it to make which household item?

Brooms are still commonly made from the stiff seed-head fibres of one type of sorghum. In 1797 a Massachusetts farmer made one for his wife, and neighbours were soon asking for their own.

Sorghum has become a popular flour for people with coeliac disease because the grain naturally lacks which protein?

Gluten is absent from sorghum, so the grain can stand in for wheat and rye in breads and even in beer.

Which clear East Asian spirit, usually distilled from fermented sorghum, is the most-consumed liquor in the world?

Baijiu outsells vodka about three to one by volume, and nearly all of it is drunk in China. Its name simply means white, or clear, liquor.

Sorghum syrup took root in Southern US kitchens when a naval blockade made cane sugar scarce during which war?

Civil War blockades by the Union navy choked off Caribbean sugar, so Southern farms pressed their own sweetener. Anti-slavery families in the North grew sorghum too, to boycott sugar made by slave labour.

Which grain, introduced to Africa by the Portuguese, displaced sorghum as the main cereal outside the driest regions?

Maize won over African farmers because it was grown much like sorghum yet yielded far more. Sorghum held on where the rains were too unreliable for the newcomer.

Which people brought sorghum to North America, along with okra, sesame and black-eyed peas?

Enslaved Africans carried the crop from West Africa through the Atlantic slave trade. It became a fixture of Southern cooking, prized for the sweet syrup pressed from its stalks.

In which present-day country was sorghum first domesticated over 5,000 years ago, near the rivers Atbara and Gash?

Sudan holds the oldest domesticated sorghum, found at a site near Kassala in the east. From there the crop reached India about 4,000 years ago and West Africa a thousand years later.

Sorghum syrup poured over which hot baked item is a traditional breakfast in the Southern United States?

Biscuits split hot and doused in sorghum syrup are the classic pairing, though the syrup also goes on pancakes, grits and cornmeal mush.

Which Chinese novelist, awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, made his name with the family saga Red Sorghum?

Mo Yan filled his first novel with distillers of sorghum wine who become resistance fighters when Japan invades. He was the first Chinese citizen to win the literature Nobel.

About 80% of Ethiopia's sorghum crop goes into which spongy sour flatbread, more famously made from teff?

Injera uses so much sorghum that the grain costs more than wheat in Ethiopia, the reverse of most of the world. Sorghum versions are most common in the lowlands.

Nearly a third of the US sorghum crop is turned into which renewable fuel, using less water than rival crops?

Ethanol from sorghum matches the yield per bushel of rival feedstocks while needing up to a third less water, which suits the dry Great Plains.

The US Sorghum Belt of mostly dryland farms runs from South Dakota down to the southern tip of which state?

Texas anchors the southern end of a belt where sorghum is planted on land too hot and dry for thirstier grains. Kansas, in the middle of the belt, is its heartland.

Sweet sorghum syrup is colloquially known across the southern United States as sorghum what?

Molasses strictly means the syrupy by-product of refining cane or beet sugar. Sorghum syrup is no leftover: it is the boiled-down juice of the crushed stalks.

Sorghum is a food grain across Africa and Asia, but what is its most common use in the United States?

Livestock feed takes the largest share, going into rations for poultry, cattle and pigs. China began buying American sorghum in 2013 for the same purpose.

Medieval Arab farmers spread sorghum as far west as Al-Andalus, a region of which present-day European country?

Spain was the western limit of a medieval exchange that moved African and Asian crops, among them cotton and citrus fruits, across the Arab world.

Young or drought-stressed sorghum plants can kill grazing cattle by releasing which fast-acting poison?

Cyanide is released from dhurrin, a compound the plant makes to repel insects. Dhurrin takes its name from the Arabic word for sorghum.

Which wild sorghum, counted among the world's ten worst weeds, is named after an Alabama plantation owner?

Johnson grass spread after Colonel William Johnson sowed it on his river-bottom land around 1840. It has since reached every continent except Antarctica.

Which director's debut film, Red Sorghum, won the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival?

Zhang Yimou filmed only the first two of the novel's five parts, setting the story at a rural distillery that makes sorghum liquor.

Which actress made her screen debut in Red Sorghum as a bride sent to marry a distillery owner with leprosy?

Gong Li plays the narrator's grandmother, who inherits the sorghum wine distillery when her husband dies and rallies its workers to take new pride in their craft.

Which parasitic plant, known to botanists as Striga, fastens onto sorghum roots and can wipe out an entire crop?

Witchweed is so hard to control because most of its life cycle takes place underground. It infests about 40% of Africa's arable savanna.

Sorghum is the world's fifth-most important cereal; which crop sits just above it in fourth place?

Barley follows the three giant staple cereals in the ranking. Sorghum earns fifth place largely in hot, dry regions where the others struggle.

Umqombothi, a thick, sour, low-alcohol beer brewed with sorghum malt, is a tradition of which country?

South Africa's home brewers test a batch by holding a lit match over the vat. If the carbon dioxide from the fermenting mash blows it out quickly, the beer is ready.

By which name is sorghum known across India, where its flour is hand-flattened into bhakri flatbreads?

Jowar bhakri is everyday bread in Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. The dough is mixed with hot water and patted out by hand rather than rolled.

Ethiopian-born breeder Gebisa Ejeta won which 2009 award for sorghum hybrids that resist drought and a root parasite?

World Food Prize honours went to Ejeta after he bred Africa's first commercial drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid. As a boy he walked 20 kilometres each week to reach his nearest elementary school.

The word sorghum may descend from a Latin term meaning a grass of which Middle Eastern country?

Syria is the likeliest root, by way of the Italian word sorgo, though the trail is uncertain. The crop itself came from Africa, not the Middle East.

A Yvonne Chaka Chaka hit named after the sorghum beer umqombothi plays over the opening scene of which 2004 film?

Hotel Rwanda opens with the song, one of the best-known hits of a singer nicknamed the Princess of Africa.

Which continent, far from the crop's African birthplace, is the native home of most wild sorghum species?

Australia's wild sorghums were gathered for food by Aboriginal peoples, and the Dagoman of the Northern Territory personify the plant as a spirit.

Chibuku, a carton-packed sorghum beer sold across Zambia and Malawi, takes its name from a local word for which object?

Book is the root because brewer Max Heinrich logged every drinker's comment and recipe change in one. The beer is nicknamed Shake Shake, since the carton has to be shaken before the first sip.

Pito, a sorghum beer sold from the brewer's own home and served in a calabash, comes from the north of which country?

Ghana's pito is never bottled or canned: drinkers buy it straight from the household that brewed it. It is sometimes served still warm from fermenting.

Which prized Chinese sorghum spirit is named after a town in Guizhou and made with water from the Chishui River?

Maotai may only carry the name if it is produced in the town itself. Red Army leaders, Zhou Enlai among them, acquired a taste for it when the Long March passed through.

Which Taiwanese-held island became famous for kaoliang liquor after a general urged its farmers to grow sorghum?

Kinmen's garrison commander Hu Lien wanted a local source of spirits because bringing alcohol over from Taiwan was a financial strain. The island's distillery now belongs to the county government.

Which Indian city is home to ICRISAT, the institute whose improved sorghum cultivars are planted worldwide?

Hyderabad hosts the institute's headquarters and a genebank that safeguards seed of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea and other dryland crops.

What is the botanical name for the large bushy flowerhead of sorghum, which can carry up to 3,000 seeds?

Panicle is the term for sorghum's branching seed head, which tops a clump of stalks that can stand more than four metres high.

In Friulian folklore, witches armed with sorghum stalks were fought off by benandanti wielding bundles of which herb?

Fennel was the weapon of the benandanti, villagers who said their spirits left their bodies four times a year to fight for the harvest. Several were tried by the Roman Inquisition.

In Nigeria, the pulverised red leaf-sheaths of sorghum have traditionally been used to dye which material?

Leather takes its red tint from the powdered sheaths, and in Algeria sorghum has been used to colour wool as well.

What is the name for the dry, fibrous pulp left after sweet sorghum stalks are crushed for their juice?

Bagasse holds enough energy to be burned as fuel for the plants that process the juice. The same word covers the crushed remains of sugarcane.

In which US city did Lakefront Brewery win federal approval to label New Grist, brewed from sorghum, as a beer?

Milwaukee's Lakefront Brewery had to petition regulators because beer was then required to contain 25% malted barley. New Grist was made so that drinkers with coeliac disease could have a beer.

Sorghum bread about 5,100 years old, now kept in a Turin museum, came from a grave of which ancient civilisation?

Egypt's Predynastic graves, dug before the first pharaohs ruled, preserved the loaves. They are now kept in Italy at Turin's Egyptian Museum.