Issue 14: Rice

When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, my only experience of rice was at Chinese restaurants, where it was dished from a rice cooker the size of an oil drum into small white china bowls, and served with every order, even tea. The fact that for almost half the world population, rice is the ultimate human food would be an awakening that came later, after making friends from Asia and the Middle East, and eating at their tables.

My travels to Spain, and then Japan and Southeast Asia were the next steps in my education. In Spain, I visited Valencia, where people joke that God himself delivered the recipe for paella. In Japan, where the word for cooked rice, gohan, is the same as the word for a meal, no food is considered satisfying without the inclusion of rice. In Myanmar, I saw the incandescent green of rice in the fields. In Cambodia, I watched young men with rifles riding on the open tailgate of a truck, guarding the grain as they transported the precious crop.

“Have you eaten rice yet?” “Have you had rice already?”
This is a standard greeting across Asia. It’s asked, not to inquire about what you’ve eaten, but to ask about your well-being. For three billion people, rice is a daily staple. It’s also the epicenter of history, family, culture and economics.

When you first think about rice, it’s hard to conceive of the enormous significance that the grain has for human life. This issue of the Gazette is a tribute to the immense importance of rice on tables around the world, from Bangladesh, to Taiwan, Spain, Palestine and Iran. The recipes come from the collective memory of communities and were shared with me by home cooks. They represent a very small sampling of the glorious grain.

Issue 14: Rice