I love rice

I think about rice a lot. As I’m eating it, cooking it, smelling it, drinking a tea made with it. Smell is powerfully evocative and the smell of rice cooking makes me feel very safe and warm. White rice, especially steaming hot, served on a steel high-rimmed plate is a very powerful gut-punch of comfort for me.

My family eschewed white rice at some point and began to eat brown rice for health reasons. Both my parents are diabetic, so while understandable, this made me and everyone else sad. Brown rice doesn’t cook the same way. Chew, smell, taste - nothing was similar enough to white rice. We pursued many alternatives - quinoa, oats, but in my heart I wanted white rice even if it ruined my nutrition, just like the Japanese sailors trying to signal class status all those years ago.

Given how deeply important rice is to much of the world, and how diabetes has been reaching epidemic status, researchers in Sri Lanka found one weird trick to halve the calories. Pancreas love it!

I recently started eating more red rice - the Thai variety mushes up a bit too easily and the Kerala variety stays a bit too birusu/al dente unless you soak it first. I always forget to soak it. Nevertheless, it’s actually better than the average white rice, and as a treat, I sometimes add 1 part basmati for 4 parts red.

Basmati rice is wonderfully fragrant and I sometimes want to cook it just for the pleasure of the scent. If there is a flower out there that smells like cooked basmati, I will gladly plant a garden full of them.

Basmati is also a great example of how contentious rice can be. When Texas farm companies began to grow varieties of basmati, they also tried to patent basmati rice - and the USPTO granted it to them. India and Pakistan sought to protect this trademark in the WTO, which often rules on rice-related decisions. This means basmati grown in the US cannot be called that - it has to be called Texmati. The patenting of basmati rice seeds by an American corporation is also a stark reminder of the power of US law far beyond its borders. India’s patent system allowed for the eradication of major diseases across the world, turning the country into the world’s pharmacy thanks to a focus on process patents rather than product patents. Chemists were able to synthesize expensive lifesaving drugs using new processes and sell them in the developing world where American pharma companies wouldn’t venture. This was unfortunately reversed.

I sympathize deeply with talks about cultural appropriation - but I feel they’re often aimed at the wrong people. Restaurants stealing recipes from villages in the developing world is certainly douchey. Corporations using the power of American empire to rob a subcontinent of the shared intellectual heritage of rice cultivation? That’s another level entirely.