India, June 25 -- In January 1905, Commissioner Frederick St George de Lautour Booth-Tucker, a senior Salvation Army officer and the son-in-law of William and Catherine Booth, the organisation's founders, was travelling in Travancore when he noticed that even though the prices of rice and other staple grains had skyrocketed, the people seemed "unusually prosperous and well-fed".

Upon enquiry, he discovered that the people of Travancore had escaped hunger, even as other parts of the country faced severe food shortages, because of the widespread cultivation of cassava. He found that each house cultivated cassava and "rendered it independent of the fluctuations of the grain market". He was impressed with the "Indianisation" of the cassava i...