Column

Reading one of the doyens of food writers, AA Gill (Table Talk Sweet and Sour, Salt & Bitter, Phoenix paperbacks 2007), I was drawn to an essay of his on rice. It was the most interesting take on the subject I had read and I think it is worth sharing it with you.

First, a little bit about rice.Rice has descended from wild grass. It started getting cultivated when some unsung genius discovered how to cook it.It is the South Koreans who claim the oldest record for domesticated rice, around 15,000 years ago breaking the Chinese claim that they cultivated rice a mere 10,000 years ago. It is almost certain that rice was imported from India to Rome as the Dravidian term for rice is ‘arisio’, from which we can assume came the Italian riso, the Spanish ‘arroz’ and the English ‘rice’.

But to return to Gill, he draws a parallel between rice and wheat and I will quote “The Wheat World and the Rice World are better definitions of our most fundamental divisions than the myopically first and third, the mealy mouthed developed and developing, or the plainly geographical north and south.We are far more what we eat than what we vote and what we pray”.

This is an extraordinarily insightful observation, and there is much to be said for it. He argues, in substance, that wheat eaters have all the fun.

Gill argues that because you can feed more people with an acre of rice than an acre of wheat, he argues “population grows to consume the food available and not the other way around”.He cites the example of Ireland which witnessed a huge increase in population when the potato crop was introduced in the 17th century.Whilst rice will sustain a huge population, it requires much greater intensity of effort to produce, consider the water management, the population required to plant a paddy field. So he surmises that, “Rice may keep a large population just above starvation, but it also needs that population to grow it”.He then compares this with wheat-growing societies, which may feed smaller populations, but allow them to other things, “such as develop social systems and technology which ends up colonising rice eaters”.There you have it, the reason for our backwardness and the basis for our colonisation: all in a plate of rice.

This may be a little simplistic, but it is true that rice is something which agrarian societies with small holdings can easily cultivate, as most of the work is while planting, the post crop work is negligible while it is the other way round for wheat, involving milling and so on, which is better suited for industrial societies.

A different take on this argument comes from a book on Japan published in the heady 1980s, rather quaintly titled Nippon the New Superpower [Horsely & Buckley, BBC publications 1990] which attempted to explain why they were going to take over the world: cooperation and the basis for this was that they were a rice-growing civilisation, in contradistinction to a wheat growing culture which lead to greater individualism and thus confrontation.Growing rice creates societies which cooperate, so the argument goes.

In India, the East and South are rice growing and eating areas, but if Eastern UP, Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal are poor, Tamil Nadu and Andhra are rich. You have the dilemma of Punjab and Northern UP which is rice growing, but largely wheat eating.