How do you make a Blueberry Sparkler?

Forget the politicians. It is the tinkerers that make the world a better place

Here’s a fun game to play around the dinner table: Name the one individual who you think has shaped the course of human history most. I would suggest three criteria: long-lasting impact (beyond just one generation), global reach (transcending national or regional boundaries) and causality (the irreplaceability of the individual in the context of their impact).

Of course, there are many candidates, good and bad. It would be difficult to argue that people like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao did not have a long-lasting impact and global reach. But let’s narrow the question to consider only individuals who have improved human history.

I asked ChatGPT to name three such individuals. Its answers were Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ and Muhammed. Historians would certainly want to add others like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Martin Luther or Napoleon Bonaparte. But what struck me is the tendency to choose political or religious leaders – and end up with leaders whose rule or beliefs also resulted in the deaths of thousands if not millions.

So I asked ChatGPT a different question: Give me the three individuals who have saved the most lives in human history. First on its list was Edward Jenner, the man who developed the first successful smallpox vaccine in 1796, which led to the eventual eradication of smallpox and saved millions of lives. Second, Louis Pasteur, who pioneered the principles of microbial fermentation and pasteurisation. Third, Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928, the first true antibiotic, which has saved millions of lives by treating bacterial infections effectively.

There is no doubt that these innovators have saved countless lives, but here’s my wildcard entry: Norman Borlaug, a man few have heard of but who is credited with saving as many as a billion lives through his work.

His story starts in Mexico. Borlaug, a microbiologist at DuPont, was invited to establish a Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico in 1944. Despite DuPont’s offer to double his salary, he left his pregnant wife and young daughter behind to move across the border and start the program. Over the next decade, he bred disease-resistant wheat cultivars, making 6,000 individual crossings. He pioneered the ‘shuttle breeding’ technique, exploiting Mexico’s double harvest seasons to speed up breeding and create adaptable wheat varieties. By crossbreeding semi-dwarf Japanese wheat with his varieties, Borlaug significantly increased yields. By 1963, Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat production, with 95% of its crops using its new high-yield, disease-resistant varieties, and began exporting wheat, transforming its farmers into suppliers for other countries.

The exchange of high-yielding wheat varieties enabled Mexico’s success to be replicated elsewhere, especially in Southeast Asia. Pakistan, driven by its rivalry with India, achieved self-sufficiency in wheat within three years. India, embracing the Green Revolution, saw its wheat production more than double between 1965 and 1972, becoming the world’s third-largest producer.

How important were these new crop varieties? A 2021 Journal of Political Economy paper analyzed the impact of Green Revolution crops, finding that HYVs increased yields by an average of 44% across 90 countries between 1965 and 2010.¹ In a counterfactual scenario where the Green Revolution was delayed by a decade, they estimated that 2010 GDP per capita would be 17% lower across these countries, highlighting a significant impact.

And those numbers only estimate the effect of a delay. What if there never was a Green Revolution? Their baseline estimates suggest that without the Green Revolution, aggregate food crop yields in 2010 would have been 49% lower. Most astoundingly, GDP per capita would have been 51% lower, indicating the Green Revolution was responsible for about half of GDP per capita growth during this period, an absolutely astounding number.²

In short, the Green Revolution is responsible not only for boosting farm yields and reducing the risk of famines but also for propelling global living standards to levels unimaginable only a generation earlier. It is no wonder that Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Like all inventors, Borlaug built on the work of predecessors. New crop varieties needed large amounts of fertilizer. Before the Haber-Bosch process, invented by German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in the early twentieth century, effective fertilizers were limited and costly. An important pre-Haber-Bosch fertilizer source was guano. Although guano as fertilizer was not a recent invention – inhabitants of the arid Atacama Desert in Chile already used seabird droppings to grow maize more than a millennium ago – the industry took off in the mid-nineteenth century because of agricultural demand in Britain and the United States. Peru was the hub of global trade, but the Cape also had deposits of this ‘white gold’. Cape Colony farmers could choose between seabird guano from rocky islands off the western coast or bat guano from remote southern Cape caves.³ It would be excessive guano-scraping by private companies that gave rise to government ownership and legislation to protect animals and birds, the first attempts to balance economic interests with conservation efforts in the region.

Using unsustainable guano harvesting as a source of fertilizer would not have made the Green Revolution possible. Indeed, the Haber-Bosch process, by which atmospheric nitrogen is converted to ammonia by a reaction with hydrogen, has been of ‘greater fundamental importance to the modern world’, the scientist Vaclav Smil wrote in 2004, ‘than the invention of the airplane, nuclear energy, space flight, or television’.⁴

My first point is that we often don’t celebrate the farmers, the scientists, the engineers, the mechanics, the entrepreneurs – what I’d like to call the tinkerers – who have, over countless years of experimentation, quietly revolutionised our world. At a time when political leaders are receiving all the attention, for good or bad, it is worth keeping in mind that it is the persistent, often unsung efforts of the tinkerers that have profoundly shaped our societies, making possible the conveniences we now take for granted.

And here’s my second point: it is becoming ever more essential to continue this tinkering. Two weeks ago I spoke at a BerriesZA symposium in Paarl. In preparation, I came across the American botanist Frederick Coville. In 1906, three years before Haber invented his technique, Coville observed wild blueberries flourishing on his New Hampshire farm. He then initiated experiments to cultivate them, overcoming the prevailing belief that they could not be transplanted. Through meticulous research on soil requirements and propagation methods, Coville successfully developed techniques for germinating blueberry seeds and growing them in plantations – and improving the health of humans (and the quality of a morning muesli bowl) decades down the line.

Today, blueberries are rapidly on the rise; over the last decade, total hectares under cultivation globally have more than doubled. And because of their nutritional benefits and consumers’ higher incomes, particularly in Asia, demand for blueberries will continue to rise in the next decade. This is why South African and Zimbabwean producers, who now supply around 3% of the global market, are optimistic.

What struck me about the BerriesZA symposium, though, was the scientific experimentation on display. Experts discussed managing pests like fruit flies, how UV light can help protect the plants, and ways to keep blueberries fresh after harvest. Add to that how advances in artificial intelligence will radically improve farm productivity, from genetic engineering to soil health optimisation, from water-efficient irrigation systems to the use of drones for precision agriculture. One US company, Plenty, will soon start producing commercially sold strawberries year-round in its indoor vertical farm facility. (To demonstrate the power of AI, I even offered my own ChatGPT-created recipe for a Blueberry Sparkler, a drink for the young, sophisticated economic historian, though there was, sadly, little interest from the audience. Scroll down for the super-duper recipe!) But the point is clear: farmers who do not adopt these technologies will be unable to compete, and those most able and willing to experiment are likely to thrive. Tinkering has become a necessity for blueberry producers – and, indeed, for most other industries too.

This can only be a good thing. Tinkerers like Norman Borlaug and Frederick Coville made the modern world, enabling humanity to grow from 1 billion people two centuries ago to 8 billion today. While political leaders often dominate the history books and the daily news, especially in the present moment, it’s the tenacious tinkerers – those who persistently solve problems and push boundaries – who have truly shaped our world for the better. And they will continue to do so.

An edited version of this post appeared (in Afrikaans) in Rapport on 9 June 2024. The images were created using Midjourney v6.

---

ChatGPT Blueberry Sparkler recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 cup fresh blueberries

• 2 tablespoons sugar

• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

• 1 bottle of sparkling wine or champagne (chilled)

• Fresh mint leaves (for garnish)

• Ice cubes (optional)

Instructions:

1. Prepare the Blueberry Syrup:

   • In a small saucepan, combine the blueberries, sugar, and lemon juice.

   • Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the blueberries have broken down and the mixture has thickened (about 10 minutes).

   • Remove from heat and let it cool.

   • Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve to remove the solids, pressing down to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard the solids and keep the syrup.

2. Assemble the Drink:

   • In a champagne flute or a tall glass, add 1-2 tablespoons of the blueberry syrup.

   • Fill the glass with chilled sparkling wine or champagne.

   • Gently stir to combine.

3. Garnish:

   • Add a few fresh blueberries and a sprig of mint to each glass for garnish.

   • Optionally, you can add ice cubes if desired.

Enjoy your elegant and sparkling Blueberry Sparkler!

1. Gollin, D., Hansen, C. W., & Wingender, A. M. (2021). Two blades of grass: The impact of the green revolution. Journal of Political Economy, 129(8), 2344-2384.

2. Ibid. p. 2378.

3. Snyders, H. (2021). “Little More than Rich Soil?”: The Anatomy and Politics of the Cape Bat Guano Trade, 1890–1920. African Historical Review, 52(1), 72-98; Snyders, H. (2020). “Preventing a silent wilderness, securing the economic bounty”–Cape guano and the politics of seabird protection during the 19th and early 20th century. New Contree, 85, 22.

4. Smil, V. (2004). Enriching the earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food production. MIT press.