November 25, 2025 • 47 mins
Rice may be the most eaten food on the planet, accounting for 50% of the caloric intake of Asian countries and 25% worldwide. Learn all about this edible cereal crop today.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a podcast
called Stuff you Should Know About Rice.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right, kind I just throw out a couple of
stats real quick at at the onset. I would love that,
because this is about rice, the food. Just in case
it was confusing at all.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What other kind of rice is?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
You know?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No, I just wondered. I mean, for all I know,
it's some weird new sex term.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Oh that's rich. Okay, Yeah, you've clearly only seen it
written before.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I guess so. All right, So rice generally is looked
at as the most eaten food in the world. I
think some people might have wheat just ahead of it,
but it's either one or number two. It's grown on
every continent except Antarctica, about three and a half billion people.
(01:04):
It's a staple food, accounting for twenty percent of the
calories consumed all over the world is rice, which is
a staggering number. In Asian countries, fifty percent of the calories.
That's amazing. Fifty percent is rice.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, it is until you realize that pork kracklnes make
up another twenty percent of all the calories consumed worldwide.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yum.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
There's also like something that's worth mentioning too, that rice
production supports two hundred million households in developing countries. That's
how they make their living. Yeah, so to say that
rice is an important crop here on planet Earth is
kind of an understatement. Uh yeah, okay, good, I'm glad
(01:52):
you agree. There's one thing I want to cover before
we move on, because it bothered me, so hopefully it
will bother somebody else, and that's why I want to
satisfy that itch. Okay, I wondered what rice is when
we're eating rice, what is it? It's a seed. The
rice is the seed of the rice plant. Did you
know that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, okay, well.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That was just my new persona.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Here's how we know that rice is a seed aside
from you don't have to be a botanist for this.
You can go to the store and buy rice and
plant it and it will grow a rice plant. So
it's the seed, but it's classified as a cereal, which
is a seed from a grass plant. And so rice
is a seed. Everybody calmed down, that's.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, and I'm clearly joking. By the way. I can't
imagine how many people I turned off with the new persona.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I liked it.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I figure people like, is that what Chuck shaped his
beard for Halloween? Is that new Chuck? I don't like it? Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, that's right, you did. I think you should have
grown the mustache back real quick after Halloween.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Buddy, if I could, I would. I miss that beard
so much.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Already are you growing it back?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I mean I told Ruby Ruby hated it, of course,
but I said Ruby, it's already growing back. I've already
started the second I finished shaving, I started growing it back.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
You're like, I got to hurry up and squeeze Halloween in.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
But the stash look pretty good, though, right.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It did. I liked it a lot. It looks like
a construction worker slash porn star slash yacht rock musician
all rolled into one. Yeah, like Kenny Loggins. I guess.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah. Any anytime you have a stash like that, you're
twenty percent more police officer too.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Oh don't forget that. Yeah, yeah, but you looked a
little more like village people police officer.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Hey, I'll take that any day. Okay, that just sounded
like Kim Katrell.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
You should have been like, oh, I'll take that any day.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
All right, back to rice, because this is the Bulkan
and we can't goof around. We're gonna break down types
of rice. If you look sort of at the top
of the dividing point, you're probably gonna go white rice
or brown rice. I really don't care for brown rice.
I'm not yucking yum. I can't stand the taste.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
It's an acquired taste.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
It's much better for you. They are not different varieties.
But white rice as rice with the brand and the
germ removed. Brown rice, and also red and black rice
still has the brand in the germ, and it's much much,
much better for you than white rice. I just cannot
stomach it.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah. The reason why is because the brand and the
germ are the thing that have all the nutrients. So
if you're eating white rice, it's basically stripped of any
nutritional value whatsoever, so much so that a lot of
rice is actually fortified. They mix the vitamins and minerals
that they strip out back in in different ways.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
That's enriched.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Right, Yeah, let's talk about that real quick. Okay, did
you see the different ways that you can enrich white rice.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I mean, can't they just kind of like powder coat it.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Sure, powder coating is one, but they don't powder coat
all of it. They pick out select grains of rice,
powder coat them, and then mix them back in with
unpowder coated rice at a ratio of about one to
one hundred.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
What really? And that provides enough good stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I guess. So do you have any other guesses of
how you could enrich rice?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Mmm? I'm trying to think how I would do it now,
I have no other guesses.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
You could coat it in layers, based coat, nutrient coat
to protective top coat. And then the last one is
you can extrude it. So you take rice flour and
you actually make fake rice grains, and you've mixed the
rice powder with the nutrient powder, and you mix those
in with real rice or regular rice. That's how you
do it. I don't know why, but I could not
(05:42):
not find out how you would enrich rice. It just
got me. So I had to go figure it out,
and I wanted to share that, just like sharing the
fact that rice is seed.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
That's right. I love it. Most of the rice that
we you know, kind of buy in stores and know
about is a descendant from the ryz A capital o.
I guess the Ariza sativa that was domesticated in China,
you know, somewhere between eighty two hundred and thirteen and
a half thousand years ago. There are two main subspecies,
(06:17):
Indica into couch am i right, and Japonica. I think
that Indica is more likely to be long grain. The
Japonica is more likely to be short even though there
are exceptions, and the starch levels are different in the two, right.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, I think Japonica has more starch, a certain kind
called amelopectin, which is water soluble, so it makes the
rice sticky. Indica is chuck full of ammelos, which is
a starch, but it keeps the rice separate, or the
rice doesn't stick together, it doesn't actually keep it separate.
(06:56):
And so knowing that and knowing long grain and short grain,
you can kind of start to guess what different varieties
of rice belong to which family.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, for sure, we don't want to leave out the
or as a glab arima that's African rice, and that
is is grown in Africa. Still it is not as
popular as the Asian or As a variety, but they
have tried to mix the two because there are good
and bad points for both. I think the African variety
(07:26):
is a little heartier and more resistant to disease and
pests and climate issues, which is great. I think water
depth and soil it just seems like a better all
round sort of grower. But the yields aren't as great
and it's harder to mill without breaking. So maybe cross
breeding these two you could come up with like a
super rice.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, I don't know what you'd call it. Maybe Glaborema japonica.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Poof, Yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Let's talk some varieties, shall we.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, we can kind of quickly go through. But Bosmadi
is one of my faves. It's a long grain indicica rice.
South Asian cuisine a lot of time will have bosmodi
or maybe jasmine, also a long grain indica rice. It's
a little stickier than basmadi, a little more floral.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Did you know I've always thought like they added something
to give jasmine rice that smell. Apparently that's natural to
the rice. Did you know that?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I kind of figured that because I just didn't think
they would add a scent to a rice.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I could see that I could see somebody adding a scent,
especially the time they love like orchids and stuff like that.
They love the strings that are lovely, and so adding
a lovely scent to rice makes sense.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah. Two of my favorite rice is right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
All right, Well, one of my favorites actually, let's just
go ahead and say it. My favorite is sushi rice.
It's a type of Japonica. Not surprisingly, it's sticky, but
it's not as sticky as another kind of rice called
sticky rice or glutenous rice, and they're not to be confused,
even though they're both pretty sticky. Glutinous rice is naturally
(09:04):
sticky because it's got so much amylopectin starts in it
that it actually the grains actually kind of crumble together
and it almost turns into like a porridge. Like when
you make a batch of sticky rice, it's almost like
a just a big clump that sticks to your fingers,
gets all over the place. You can use just to
hang wallpaper. Sushi rice is sticky. It'll stick together. But
(09:27):
if you ever really look at sushi like a piece
of nageary, you can see the individual grains of rice. Yeah,
but it still sticks together, And the reason why it
really sticks together is because of the treatment it gets
with a little bit of vinegar, salt and sugar concoction
that's mixed in with the rice after it cooks.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
That's right, maybe a manny petty.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I don't get that one.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
You know the treatment?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Okay, do you ever get those?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
No, chuck, eat yourself at least to a pedicure. You
will never not get one again.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Uh we'll talk off air, okay, but I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Just saying you can't surprise those people or offend them.
Somebody who's a professional pedicurist, it doesn't matter what your
feet look like. They will do it. And they yeah, yeah,
not crack a smile.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It's not a hammertoe issue.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Oh okay.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Can we move on to risotto, because if you love risotto,
you're probably looking at one of a couple of things,
both Japonic aversions, either arboreo or carnioli rice risotto. They're
both medium grain delicious. I don't I've made risotto before,
but it's really tough to perfect. Yeah, but one of
my favorite dishes if it's done right.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I made it once or twice too, and it actually
turned out both times. But it is very time consuming
because you add like the broth a little bit at
a time, and you basically have to stir until that
the rice absorbs the broth and over and over and
over again. But when it turns out it's delicious. It's
just much easier to order out though.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah it's a dish. You got a babysit, you know,
you can't walk away.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Similarly, piea is a dish that you have to babysit too,
and that uses a couple of specific kinds of rice
bomba which means bomb because it expands into little bombs
the grains of rice to when they encounter water in Calispara.
And they're both short grain rices, which is strange. There
(11:28):
should be long grain because of the dish kind of
calls for it. But you do not want to use
other short grain rices as substitutes in paea because they're not.
They actually indica type rices like those other two are,
and they'll just cook different and you'll basically ruin your pia.
And who wants ruin pie?
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Now? I used to make pia and I never baby
said it was I doing it wrong?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Oh yeah, I thought like you typically made it outdoors
and you basically had to hang around it while it
was cooking.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I always just baked it in the oven, in the
proper pan.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Maybe that was just a cooking show I saw once,
and they were doing that to seem cool.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
It was like one of those cooking challenges that like
they give them a bunch of restrictions.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
No, weirdly, it was a cooking show. I don't remember
the chef, but Gwyneth Paltrow was standing around there and
it was like first thing in the morning, and they
were both bleary eyed and clearly messed up still from
the night before. But they decided to film that that
episode of the cooking show that day.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
I'm probably not doing it in the traditional style or something,
but it always turned out pretty good. Good. I want
to talk a little bit about Carolina gold. It's one
of my favorite prices. It's in heirloom long grain Japonica.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
You haven't had it, No, I've never had it?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Oh man, is it yourself? Yeah? It's great. Always when
I go to Charleston, I'll pick up a bag of
the local stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Well, pick up two, I will.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Big boy comes in a looking little soft bag too,
you know.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I saw, oh, like a kind of a little burlap bag.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, like a cloth thing.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
I saw there's a company called Antson Mills that they
started making it in the nineteen nineties. I guess at
least for national sale, and their prices aren't terribly bad.
I didn't get to the shipping stage that probably jecks
the price up, but it was like eight bucks for
a pound of this apparently the best rice you'll ever have.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I mean, I think you can just buy it in
publics here, can't you.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I've never looked for it. Maybe I will, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I mean in Charleston, certainly you can buy it at
just Harris Teedter or whatever, because it's local and that's
the deal it was. You know, it comes from the Carolinas,
the lowlands of South Carolina and North Carolina. I think
it was the first commercial rice in the United States
and genetically goes back to South Asia, although the seeds
(13:55):
reportedly arrived to Charleston in the sixteen hundreds from Madagascar,
went away after the Civil War and then came back
into fashion, like you said, in the nineties when Anson
Mill started making it again. But this was a rice
where English colonists, you know, they came here. They hadn't
grown rice very significantly, so they they didn't really know
what they were doing. But enslaved Africans arrived, they had
(14:21):
that experience on how to grow rice, which was it's
a tricky crop and we'll get to all that later.
They had, you know, some lowland wetland cultivation areas in
West Africa. So they came with that knowledge, and you know,
that's how it became a thing in South Carolina, Like
how how to cultivate it and grow it there?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yep? Then now we have Carolina gold.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I have to go try because this article, thanks to
doctor Clau for helping us with this, too, made me
very hungry for rice.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
How many of these others do you want to go over?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't know that there's much to go over. There's
black rice, which apparently has anthracyanin's the same pigment and blueberries,
so it's high in antioxidants. Yeah, apparently it was called
forbidden rice in ancient China because only royalty could eat it.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
It's black rice, I think, right.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, black rice, yeah, and then I think it's worth
mentioning wild rice. It's not technically rice because it doesn't
come from a rice plant comes from a different type
of grass that's native to North America. But from what
I see, it's actually even healthier a than brown rice. Okay,
and it's not bad.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Do you like it?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
And you know, I'll quickly shout out calros because when
I used to roll my own sushi, that's what I
would use. Even though it's not exactly sushi rice, I
was told by a chef like that it does pretty good.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Okay, that's a nice little tip from Chuck's kitchen.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All right, Well let's take a break then. It's a
good start, and we'll come back and talk about that
cultivation I spoke of right after this. All right, rice cultivation,
(16:22):
like we mentioned earlier, started in China, specifically the Yang
Sea River basin could have been like as much as
fourteen thousand years ago, definitely at least nine or ten
thousand years ago. And it's the kind of thing that
happened over time from like wild rice growing just in
the wild after heavy rains, to them saying hey, let's
(16:43):
actually try and farm this stuff, and you know, valleys
would flood and they would say, hey, this is this
is how you grow rice in water. Flooded paddies. I
imagine it was quite a revelation.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I think it made it to South Asia, that
is India by I think eighty three hundred years ago,
and made it to Southeast Age about forty four hundred
years ago. And the whole idea of growing rice, Like
anybody who ever thinks about growing rice, you know, when
you're sitting around thinking about growing rice, you think of
it in paddies, like you're talking about like little flooded
(17:18):
fields usually surrounded by slightly raised dikes or walkways or buns,
and that is a way that rice grows. But it
doesn't actually need a flooded field to grow. It needs
a lot of irrigation, a lot of rainfall. But it
can also be grown on like mountain sides, terraced mountain sides.
(17:41):
That's called upland farming. But lowland part I didn't either.
Usually that's for subsistence that upland stuff, because it's so
much more productive using the lowland method, which is using
flooded paddies. But it only needs flooding a couple of
times during growing the growing season, and they actually drain
(18:03):
the paddy for harvesting. Yeah, but a lot of a
lot of people who cultivate rice just keep it flooded
the whole time because it's a lot easier to not
put water in and out when you need it.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, for sure, as far as you know farming it,
you can be old school. It can be done by hand. Obviously,
they have machinery that can do that stuff now in
a lot of places. The rice plants, you can like
a lot of plants and vegetables and things like that,
and herbs. You can start them out in a like
a nursery bed, transferm over to a paddy, or it
(18:36):
could be a big mechanized system of seed drilling. Or
you can drop rice. You can air drop it into
a flooded field and it doesn't take that long, a
few months, about one hundred and twenty days. And you know,
different varieties. It depends on like the depth of water
for the different varieties and stuff like that, and they
will drain as needed. But just a few months to
(18:58):
grow a successful rice yield.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah. I was watching some mesmerizing videos on growing rice
and one of them was in Vietnam. I couldn't tell
where the other one was, but it was really interesting.
For some reason, I find a rice patty. Fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Oh same, it's just way, way.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
More interesting than your typical crop field.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah. Agree. Water Yeah, and I thought until yesterday that
was the only way to do it.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Nope, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Cranberries, didn't it. Cranberries that grow in water.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, and like a bog. Yeah, that's deep water. You
have to wear waiters to harvest cranberries. As far as
the commercials for ocean spray that I've.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Seen say, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
So after you harvest the rice, there's a lot of
ways to harvest it. One of the traditional ways is
to just use handsickles and cut the probably the top
half of the plant off. After that, you dry the
rice and what you have is called rough rice, and
that still has the hole on it. It's got what
(19:59):
the prote husk, which you'll sometimes see if you buy
a plant. There's these little holes. Those are rice hucks husks.
I guess they put them in for drainage maybe, I
don't know why else they would. But when you remove
just the husk and leave the rest of the rice alone,
like shucking an ear of corn, but really tiny, that's
(20:20):
essentially the rice husk. Once you take the husk off,
you got brown rice.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, little tiny bits of cardboard ready for eating.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I mean, I'm with you. It takes a lot for
me to make myself make brown rice when I have
the option of making sushi rice. Yeah, but it is
so much better for you. I know it's but I
don't know if either of us eed enough rice to
really matter.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
I know, no, no, I mean any help problems I
have or not for eating white rice?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
You know, but what about white rice? How do you
get white rice from brown rice? Because that's where you
get it from.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Well, another you got to go through another round of work,
basically and called the milling process that's going to remove
the brand. Sometimes they even if you see rice that
looks like just super pristine and shiny that might have
been polished in a factory somewhere with lucose.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Weird.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And then we talked about you know, some rice even
goes through the enriching process.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Would you like to go over those three ways again? Ah,
that's right, Okay, But.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
You know, we're going to talk a little bit about
the downside of rice because anytime you're talking about like
these major crops or farm situations, it's not always the
greatest for the environment and it takes a lot of
water to grow rice, like you said, if it's not
done in a patty, just tons and tons of irrigation,
which makes it surprising that California, which suffers a lot
of drought, has about half a million acres of rice.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, if you listen to our saltancy episode, that should
be an eye popping number to you. Yeah. That said, though,
rice production still requires less water than any kind of
meat production, any kind of nut production from what I understand,
and a lot of vegetables still use more water than
rice cultivation I guess worldwide. So water use is a thing.
(22:09):
Land use is another thing too, but greenhouse cases seem
to be probably the biggest problem with rice production.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, this kind of is something that I would not
have considered. Again, I was just sort of naive to that.
I usually think of like factory farming of animals and
stuff as being big methane contributors. But when you have
a big flooded rice field, you're also going to have
a lot of microbes in there feeding off of decaying
plant matter, and that's going to create a lot of methane.
(22:40):
I didn't realize it was that big of a problem,
but apparently it is.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It must be because so much rice is cultivated worldwide
that all combined makes it a problem. One of the
things you can do to reduce methane emissions is to
drain the patties when the rice is at a growing
state where it doesn't need to be flooded, and then
when it needs it again, you can reintroduce the water.
(23:06):
Then you dry it again for harvesting. The problem is this,
and I love stuff like this, even though it's terrible.
I love it when you solve one problem and it
creates an equal and opposite problem. That's exactly what happens
with rice cultivation. When you dry out that paddy, it
exposes the soil and a bunch of nitrous oxide, which
is another greenhouse gas gets emitted. And so if you
(23:31):
just grow it just with soil, it's going to emit
nitrous oxide. It's going to be covered up with the
water and the paddy, and then when you dry it again,
it's going to release more nitrous oxide. So they're trying
to figure out like the balance of which one's worse,
you know, would it be better to just leave it
flooded all the time, would it be better to dry
it because you can take care of the methane, nitrous
(23:55):
oxide goes up. Take care of the nitrous oxide, the
methane goes up. But did you see that thing about
rice fish farming?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Is that like the seawater farming.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
No, this is it's a little different. It's where you
actually you you grow fish, you like farm fish in
your rice paddy, and they actually help take care of
the methane problem by eating a lot of the algae
that would otherwise decompose. So the methane goes down, the
nitrous oxide emissions go down because the paddy's always flooded
(24:25):
because you know, the fish need the water. And I
saw that it increases yields by ten to fifteen percent
because the fish are pooping and sore, the nitrogen cycle
is going a lot, but a lot more frequently. You
don't need to add as much fertilizer, if any. And
they're eating a lot of the pests, so there's a
fifty percent reduction in pests. And I think in some
(24:46):
if you do it right, you don't even need to
use pesticides in rice production. So growing fish with your
rice is like the way to save the planet.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
What kind of fish do you know, I don't.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I don't think it matters. Probably a smallish fish because
there's a a few inches of water that you need
for rice paddies, So it wouldn't have it wouldn't be
like a giant carp you'd be you'd be up the creek,
I think, Or the carp would be if you tried
to grow carp in a fish, Patty.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Right, it wouldn't be say a marlin or great white shark.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
No, no, but that would be something to see.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I did mention seawater rice there, you know, people efforting
to do that kind of thing to you know, grow
it in seawater. Obviously, it's got to be a situation
where they can get a rice variety that can tolerate
that salt content and the alkaline soil. But it's something
that they're looking into that has got a little bit
of promise I.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Think, yeah, because it reduces the land use, right, because
you're not using really valuable land for cultivating rice. Yeah.
There's also the matter of toxins too. I didn't realize
rice was such a downer, did you.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
I did not. I didn't know about the toxins, and
I think specifically arsenic is one of the I think
like lead and cadmium also, but arsenic seems to be
the major offender.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah. And the reason why it's such a deal with
rice is rice absorbs at more than most crops for
some reason. The big downer about the whole thing is
that arsenic is most present in the germ and the brand.
So the type of rice that's most beneficial for you
health wise, brown rice is also the ones that have
(26:27):
the most arsenic.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Aha.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
I found an article that asks if the benefits outweigh
the risk as far as arsenic and brown rice is
concerned twenty twenty three edition of Frontiers and Nutrition, and
they basically said, I don't know, we should do more
study on it. To eat what you want, bub yeah,
I guess, But basically they were like, we don't know.
(26:52):
Why would you even read this article, chump?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
If you're seeking out safer rice, you know there are
people have done studies, consumer reports I think did some
testing for arsenic. Specifically, they found white basmadi in California,
India and Pakistan, and sushi rice from the United States,
maybe not intuitively, has the least amount of arsenic. If
(27:19):
you get rice from Arkansas, Louisiana or Texas, it's gonna
have higher levels of arsenic.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, it's if your soil is more likely to be
contaminated by industrial metals, that rice is gonna suck it up.
And apparently California's soil is less contaminated by industrial metals
and some other states. So from what I could tell,
your best bet is California rice as far as arsenic
(27:46):
is concerned.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, and you know you rinsing the rice helps before
you cook it. Cooking it in the water and then
draining and even rinsing afterward can reduce the arsenic count
even more. But it's not like it's apparently it's not
enough arsenic to really do a ton of damage to you.
But the problem is is children that eat like a
(28:09):
lot of times, you know, you'll have like the processed
rice meal and baby food, and I think that stuff
you can ever tell how much that has been rinsed
or not. This might orthodonist Doctor Blake used to say, So, yeah,
it can be problematic for little bebes and toddlers.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
It can be problematic for you too, like as a
grown up. And yeah, it's not like you would have
to eat a lot of rice to hurt yourself with
say arsenic. But if you eat rice every day, which
a lot of people do, sure you can. And arsenic's
associated with multiple kinds of cancer, diabetes, cardio issues, and obesity.
So you don't really want a lot of arsenic. So
(28:49):
that is an issue with rice, everybody. Let's face it.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Should we take a second break? Yeah, all right, we'll
take another break. Go over some lists of countries wheat right,
a lot, probably not a very surprising list, but that
another stuff right after.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
This, Okay, Chuck, I'll give you ten guesses. What continent
(29:36):
produces the most rice?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Is this production?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yes? Production?
Speaker 1 (29:44):
My guess is China?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
No continent?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Oh Asia, Yes, you got it right out of the gate.
Within that I would say China.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, you'd be right. China is the number one rice
producing country in Asia, followed by India. Well, that makes
sense because they both have a lot of land mass.
Bangladesh is a big eye popper because it's not very big,
but it's the third highest producing rice country in the world.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, that's impressive.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
But all ten top ten are Asian, whether Southeast Asian,
South Asian, or Asian proper.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I guess, yeah, I mentioned those states California, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Missouri,
and Arkansas produced the almost all the rice in the US,
which is about twenty billion pounds a year more than
I thought. Obviously nowhere close to being a top ten producer.
But as far as eating rice in the United States,
you're probably eating American rice unless you're going to like
(30:41):
a specialty store, because about eighty percent of the rice
sold and eaten in the US and ninety five percent
of sushi rice eaten in the US comes from US farms.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
That's why when you go to a izakaya in America,
you'll frequently see somebody with a mouthful of rice changing us.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Hey, that's right.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Okay, what about the countries that eat the most rice.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
That eat the most.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
What continent would those be on all ten?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Well, I'm going to say Asia, but I'm also going
to drill down and say China just because of the
sheer amount of people.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Okay, yep, China's number one. Indian is number two, both
because they have a lot of people there. Bangladesh is
number three. Again they really love the rice. Yeah. But
in the top ten list, Nigeria is number ten of
the countries that eat the most rice, And there's something
about eating a lot of rice. It's impressive. Number one,
Bangladesh is number one for eating rice. The per capita
(31:39):
rice consumption per year equals five hundred and ninety two
pounds of rice per person, which is almost two pounds
of rice a day. And that's dry, uncooked rice that
they're counting. This isn't like the wet stuff. Yeah, and
like I said, it's impressive, but it also goes to
it goes to point out or underscore that the developing
(32:00):
status of a country like Bangladesh, because if you eat
tons of rice and you're getting a lot of your
calories from rice, it's because a lot of other foods
aren't available to you because your country is lower income.
So that's why Bangladesh, Cambodia, a Laos, they all eat
the most rice, in part because it's widely available, but
also in part because their economies are still developing or
(32:23):
aren't as developed as countries they eat less rice.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, and that's again those are per capita numbers for
that last list.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah. That reminds me though of when I was a
kid in like first, second, third grade. Maybe we would
once a year at school the school lunch would be
a cup of white rice with a little pad of
butter on it, so that it drove home like what
other kids around the world were eating for lunch that day.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, I thought it was kind of a nice in principle,
but there were always at least one or two kids
who ate that and then also ate their lunch that
they brought from home to like little bastard.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, and I would say that pad of butter is
a bit of a cheat.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Probably probably, but still, I mean I definitely it gave
me paws.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, I mean I like a little butter and some rice.
I mean not when I'm cooking any kind of like
you know, Asian style foods and stuff like that. I'm
not gonna put butter on sushi rice. But if you
give me a you know, a steak and a big
old glava Carolina gold, you can bet your bibby I'm
gonna throw a little butter on that. Salt and pepper.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, I never got into This was definitely not Carolina
gold rice that they were feeding us in styrofoam cups.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
In first grade. It's probably what's the stuff in the bag,
the minute rice or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, like Uncle Ben's or something.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, I mean the only time we see that in
our house. We keep a stash for when the dogs
are tummy sick and you have to boil chicken and
you just have chicken and plain rice, and so we
have those bags that in like camping when I was
a kid. Is that evokes those memories all right?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Like would you just have your pockets full of loose rice?
That's how you'd hike it in.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
So I'd hike it in.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Let's see what else anything else about this? Oh? I
want to point something out there. There is a study
in two thousand and five. Remember I talked about how
people eating rice, the countries that eat the most rice
also tend to be developing. Well, there was a study
from Tatori University. And the reason that stood out to
me is because you and me taught English and tooty
(34:38):
at a high school. Yeah, oh cool, it's very rural area.
She taught it at like a technical school, technical high school,
but she loved it. She went over there for a
year as part of this program. But this Tatori University
study basically found that rice is rice consumption is dropping
off in Asian countries because wealth is expanding in Asian countries,
(34:59):
and they're saying, hey, we love rice, but we also
want that steak.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Like Chuck said, you know, every time you throw a
little another Yumi tidbit out, she becomes that much more interesting.
And I realize how much more interesting both Yumi and
Emily are than either one of us.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yes, it's true, I'm kind of a slope compared to
Yumi for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, congratulations to both of us because
they're both wonderful, interesting women. I mean, Yumi had her
her graffiti tag was apothecary for God's sake.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Pretty great, It's amazing. We already took a second break, right,
this is the third act we're in.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, we're in the third act. So we can have
a little fun with some of these rice dishes if
you want.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Okay, go ahead and fire that gun.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Well, rice, obviously, and a lot of dishes worldwide is
going to be like a bass layer for something, maybe
a curry, maybe a stewed meat or vegeta. Maybe you're
gonna stir fry something and throw it on top of
that rice. That's a great way to eat rice, not
just as a just a regular old plain side dish,
even though that's fine too, But I've had quite a
(36:10):
few of these. I have had jollafrice, Oh yeah, at
African restaurants. Yeah, it's got it's you know, got like
stewed tomatoes, onions, you know, peppers. A lot of these
are kind of similar around the world because it's you know,
it's meager, honest ingredients like you know, garlic and thyme
and ginger and rice and tomatoes and onions like stuff
(36:32):
you get from the ground. Sometimes you can add meat
and vegetables. But jollafrice is good on its own.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah. I looked up a recipe of that, and I'm like,
that is something I'm going to try.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
There's also berryanni.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I am not more I'm more of a curry guy,
so I don't get berryani when I go to Indian
restaurants because it's a little dryer. Yeah, but it's got
some nice flavors to it, for sure, when I have
had it. But it's a rice dish. It's got rice, spices,
some vegetables, usually some kind of meat in there. Yeah,
it's good.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
You're a red curry guy, green red green.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Maybe if I'm at a tie place, but I'm a
tikka masala and buttered chicken person. Man, I could eat
that all day long, every day.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah. No, I mean I've said it before, and I
think it was our Chinese food episode. Like, I could
subsist entirely on Asian cuisine of the time and be
as happy as I've ever been. I don't need the
other foods.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Also shout out sog sog pen yours fine, but chicken
sog is.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
It's the best. Yeah, I did mention Paia earlier. I
love it. If you aren't familiar, it is a Spanish dish.
I think the Moors brought it over the moops and
it is that's right. Oh my god, what was that?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
That was from Seinfeld when George played Trio.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
That's right, that's right, the moops No, sorry, the moops
pie is delicious, though it's you know, you cook it
in a very specific flat bottomed round pan if you
don't have one, like I've cooked it in just cast
iron skillets.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
It's got that clam juice. That's where a lot of
that seafoody flavor comes from. Depending on what kind of
seafood you want, there could be clams, could be shrimp,
could be scallops, could be all that stuff, some saffron,
some like tomatoes that stew up nicely. It's just delicious.
I love a pie. It's it's usually not the kind
of thing you can just get a serving of. You
get like a larger pie for a table.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
That clam juice thing, didn't that remind me? Didn't you
used to make or maybe still do, make Bloody Mary's
with clamato.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Uh? Yeah, that's the only way for me.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
And that's a Canadian thing. And I can't remember what
they call it black really, sir, that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Oh, I've heard of that. I didn't know it was Canadian.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
There's something. There's another rice dish that I've had before.
I don't know if you have. It's called sushi, and
it's made with that short grain rice season with some vinegar.
Like I said. But it actually, and I know we
talked about this in the sushi episode. It grew out
of a way of preserving fish in vinegar. They would
jam some uncooked rice in there with it too, pack
(39:17):
it in there, and I guess somebody said there's a
better way to do this, and that's where sushi came from.
But you can still get that original version called Nara sushi,
which I really want to try. I like pickled anything. Man.
You could pickle an old shoe and I'd be like,
I'll need a little of that.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Sure, we're not going to go down the list of
rice noodle dishes, but we should point out that rice
noodles are a thing. We should mention a few rice
desserts because a really really nice rice pudding, to me,
is one of the more delicious things you can eat.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah. I'm more of a bread pudding guy, but yeah,
I'll eat rice pudding as well.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
That's when you cook the rice with the milk and sugar,
and usually there's like vanilla or cinnamon or something like
that in there.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
I would eat just about anything with condensed milk.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah, that's good stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Oh I have a little tip for you, Chuck. You
may found this stuff. It's ube condensed milk.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
It is the greatest flavor you will ever put in
your mouth. It's insane how good it tastes.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Is it? Do I have to go to like an
Asian mart to get it?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Or is it? You probably order it online? But yeah,
you're gonna find it at an Asian store. More than
maybe target. Okay, there's also mango sticky rice, which uses
that sticky glutenous rice which, by the way, it doesn't
have gluten, it's just glutenous, meaning sticky, starchy.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Gluten with an eye yea, yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Have you heard of polish rice cake or polish rice cake.
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
I had not until this.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
It's basically rice and condensed milk and some other stuff.
But it's a cake with rice. It looks pretty good.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Well, we should talk about mochi at least, because mochi
is a cake and that is made from the glutenous rice.
Is well, and if you've ever, you know, had mochi
in the US, it's probably a little different from Japan
because it's not always a sweet thing there, But in
the US it's usually wrapped around ice cream.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
As most things are.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, and you can buy like the little mochi ice
cream balls or whatever here.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yeah, they're good. A lot of times. In Japan they'll
have like sweet red bean paste inside. That's a traditional
mochi there too, but apparently it's references the rabbit in
the moon. In Japan, it's a rabbit in the moon
rather than a man in the moon, but he's making
mochi up there.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Oh I never knew that.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yep, And we can't not mention horn shatta real quick. Okay, yeah,
I had.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I went to a I had a horse shot a
flight in Mexico City one time on a food tour.
Oh nice, And it was my first kind of real
exposure to it that I think maybe my first real exposure,
and man, it was so different and delicious.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. It's it's rice soaked in evaporated milk, so you know,
I'd like it some cinnamon, some vanilla, and then you eventually,
after it's mush, you strain it so that it gets
any of the grid out. So it's kind of a thickish,
milkyish drink that's amazing on its own. But if you're
into things like rum or bourbon, they mike really well
(42:17):
with hornchhok especially in wintertime.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Very interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Oh yeah, you'll thank me later.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Okay, Okay, I'll pre thank you now because yeah, I
didn't know that was a thing. Oh. I mean, where
do you get horchata here?
Speaker 2 (42:32):
You can buy horn shotta. Those people make it and
sell it here in the United States, meaning companies or whatever.
But it's actually not that hard to make. You might
be better off making it yourself.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
All right, I'll give it a shot. I know that
this stuff we had in Mexico City was like really
really authentic and great.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeaplenty, there's plenty of recipes. It's like five or six ingredients,
all of them easily obtainable. So I say make your
own chuck.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
All right, I'll give it a try.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
That reminds me, what did you think of cherry pop tarts?
Cherry frosted pop tarts?
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yes, follow up? I texted Josh photos. I immediately went
to the store. I bought the cherry frosted pop tarts,
and of course I had to get the cinnamon brown
sugar cinnamon. Boy, those cherries are beeping delicious.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah, I told you They're way better than strawberry, aren't they?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah? I mean they are, They're way better. I did
my butter trick, believe it or not. I've I think
there were four packs in each, so eight total packs,
sixteen total pop tarts. And I've only eaten six total
pop tarts, so three packs.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Since then, I'm really you. You just can't go in
there and house those things in two days.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You can pretty easily. But I think you're showing a
lot of restraint here.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
I feel like I'm showing restraint.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, way to go, man. And are you enjoying them
more than if you just ate them all at once? Nah?
That's awesome. You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
I got nothing else? Grow rice?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, go grow some rice, make your own horshata, make
some sushi, make some sticky rice, make some curries. Just
do all that stuff some jalla rice. Get to it.
And while you're making all that, we'll just go ahead
and read some listener.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Now, well this is from Ted. Ted wrote in because Ted,
I'll just read it. You responded to Ted. You're gonna
send Ted something, which is very nice of you.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Hey, guys, are recently finished listening to the full stuff
you should know catalog? Yeah, big deal for the fifth time.
That's a big deal, Ted.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
For sure. I think it's a big deal if you
listen to it all once.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Oh oh yeah, you're doing your new thing. Yeah, okay,
I like it.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
See it's attached screenshot for proof, Ted, We didn't need proof.
We take you out your word. At least I finished
my most recent listen. Guys, Thanks for all the wonderful hours.
As an appreciation, here are the five things I most
like about stuff you should know. Number one, Josh and
Chuck have character arcs as their lives have changed over
the seventeen years, and they're not afraid to share some
(45:15):
of that personal stuff. That's a big time character arcs.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, I mean seventeen years.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, Like, think about what's happened to anyone over their
last seventeen years, A lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Number two, Josh and Chuck don't talk over each other
like many other podcasters do. We don't often sometimes we do,
but yeah, we usually let each other go right.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah, we try to. I mean every once in a while,
there's a stumble here there, but no, we're pretty good
about that. We always have been.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Yeah. But boy, some podcasts, even some of my favorite ones,
at times I'm like, what is going on? There's like
three or four people talking.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Oh, you can't do that, can't do that.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Number three, I've learned more about movies and popular music
by listening to stuff you should Know than actually by
watching movies or listening to music.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah. I like to think that we have imparted some
pretty cool recommendations over the years.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, I just noticed. Ted said he'd send in five
things he loved the most. There's only four, So I
guess you.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Know, Ted, this is beautiful because I know what the
last one is. Oh.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
I bet that's why he did it. The number four.
Josh and Chuck never make it all the way through
a list, of course, Ted, I'm so dense, I didn't
even get the joke.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
It was a great That was a great arcane in
joke for Stuff you should Note, Ted, Bravo. I'm listening
to the entire catalog five times and we are trying
to figure out something special to get you for it.
So thank you for letting us know that's right.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Thanks Ted.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Thanks Ted. If you want to be like Ted and
talk about how much you like Stuff you Should Know,
or how many times you've listened to Stuff you Should Know,
or whatever you want to say, you can send it
in an email to stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a podcast
called Stuff you Should Know About Rice.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right, kind I just throw out a couple of
stats real quick at at the onset. I would love that,
because this is about rice, the food. Just in case
it was confusing at all.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What other kind of rice is?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
You know?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No, I just wondered. I mean, for all I know,
it's some weird new sex term.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Oh that's rich. Okay, Yeah, you've clearly only seen it
written before.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I guess so. All right, So rice generally is looked
at as the most eaten food in the world. I
think some people might have wheat just ahead of it,
but it's either one or number two. It's grown on
every continent except Antarctica, about three and a half billion people.
(01:04):
It's a staple food, accounting for twenty percent of the
calories consumed all over the world is rice, which is
a staggering number. In Asian countries, fifty percent of the calories.
That's amazing. Fifty percent is rice.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, it is until you realize that pork kracklnes make
up another twenty percent of all the calories consumed worldwide.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yum.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
There's also like something that's worth mentioning too, that rice
production supports two hundred million households in developing countries. That's
how they make their living. Yeah, so to say that
rice is an important crop here on planet Earth is
kind of an understatement. Uh yeah, okay, good, I'm glad
(01:52):
you agree. There's one thing I want to cover before
we move on, because it bothered me, so hopefully it
will bother somebody else, and that's why I want to
satisfy that itch. Okay, I wondered what rice is when
we're eating rice, what is it? It's a seed. The
rice is the seed of the rice plant. Did you
know that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, okay, well.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That was just my new persona.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Here's how we know that rice is a seed aside
from you don't have to be a botanist for this.
You can go to the store and buy rice and
plant it and it will grow a rice plant. So
it's the seed, but it's classified as a cereal, which
is a seed from a grass plant. And so rice
is a seed. Everybody calmed down, that's.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, and I'm clearly joking. By the way. I can't
imagine how many people I turned off with the new persona.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I liked it.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I figure people like, is that what Chuck shaped his
beard for Halloween? Is that new Chuck? I don't like it? Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, that's right, you did. I think you should have
grown the mustache back real quick after Halloween.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Buddy, if I could, I would. I miss that beard
so much.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Already are you growing it back?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I mean I told Ruby Ruby hated it, of course,
but I said Ruby, it's already growing back. I've already
started the second I finished shaving, I started growing it back.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
You're like, I got to hurry up and squeeze Halloween in.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
But the stash look pretty good, though, right.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It did. I liked it a lot. It looks like
a construction worker slash porn star slash yacht rock musician
all rolled into one. Yeah, like Kenny Loggins. I guess.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah. Any anytime you have a stash like that, you're
twenty percent more police officer too.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Oh don't forget that. Yeah, yeah, but you looked a
little more like village people police officer.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Hey, I'll take that any day. Okay, that just sounded
like Kim Katrell.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
You should have been like, oh, I'll take that any day.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
All right, back to rice, because this is the Bulkan
and we can't goof around. We're gonna break down types
of rice. If you look sort of at the top
of the dividing point, you're probably gonna go white rice
or brown rice. I really don't care for brown rice.
I'm not yucking yum. I can't stand the taste.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
It's an acquired taste.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
It's much better for you. They are not different varieties.
But white rice as rice with the brand and the
germ removed. Brown rice, and also red and black rice
still has the brand in the germ, and it's much much,
much better for you than white rice. I just cannot
stomach it.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah. The reason why is because the brand and the
germ are the thing that have all the nutrients. So
if you're eating white rice, it's basically stripped of any
nutritional value whatsoever, so much so that a lot of
rice is actually fortified. They mix the vitamins and minerals
that they strip out back in in different ways.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
That's enriched.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Right, Yeah, let's talk about that real quick. Okay, did
you see the different ways that you can enrich white rice.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
I mean, can't they just kind of like powder coat it.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Sure, powder coating is one, but they don't powder coat
all of it. They pick out select grains of rice,
powder coat them, and then mix them back in with
unpowder coated rice at a ratio of about one to
one hundred.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
What really? And that provides enough good stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I guess. So do you have any other guesses of
how you could enrich rice?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Mmm? I'm trying to think how I would do it now,
I have no other guesses.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
You could coat it in layers, based coat, nutrient coat
to protective top coat. And then the last one is
you can extrude it. So you take rice flour and
you actually make fake rice grains, and you've mixed the
rice powder with the nutrient powder, and you mix those
in with real rice or regular rice. That's how you
do it. I don't know why, but I could not
(05:42):
not find out how you would enrich rice. It just
got me. So I had to go figure it out,
and I wanted to share that, just like sharing the
fact that rice is seed.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
That's right. I love it. Most of the rice that
we you know, kind of buy in stores and know
about is a descendant from the ryz A capital o.
I guess the Ariza sativa that was domesticated in China,
you know, somewhere between eighty two hundred and thirteen and
a half thousand years ago. There are two main subspecies,
(06:17):
Indica into couch am i right, and Japonica. I think
that Indica is more likely to be long grain. The
Japonica is more likely to be short even though there
are exceptions, and the starch levels are different in the two, right.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, I think Japonica has more starch, a certain kind
called amelopectin, which is water soluble, so it makes the
rice sticky. Indica is chuck full of ammelos, which is
a starch, but it keeps the rice separate, or the
rice doesn't stick together, it doesn't actually keep it separate.
(06:56):
And so knowing that and knowing long grain and short grain,
you can kind of start to guess what different varieties
of rice belong to which family.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah, for sure, we don't want to leave out the
or as a glab arima that's African rice, and that
is is grown in Africa. Still it is not as
popular as the Asian or As a variety, but they
have tried to mix the two because there are good
and bad points for both. I think the African variety
(07:26):
is a little heartier and more resistant to disease and
pests and climate issues, which is great. I think water
depth and soil it just seems like a better all
round sort of grower. But the yields aren't as great
and it's harder to mill without breaking. So maybe cross
breeding these two you could come up with like a
super rice.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, I don't know what you'd call it. Maybe Glaborema japonica.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Poof, Yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Let's talk some varieties, shall we.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, we can kind of quickly go through. But Bosmadi
is one of my faves. It's a long grain indicica rice.
South Asian cuisine a lot of time will have bosmodi
or maybe jasmine, also a long grain indica rice. It's
a little stickier than basmadi, a little more floral.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Did you know I've always thought like they added something
to give jasmine rice that smell. Apparently that's natural to
the rice. Did you know that?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I kind of figured that because I just didn't think
they would add a scent to a rice.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I could see that I could see somebody adding a scent,
especially the time they love like orchids and stuff like that.
They love the strings that are lovely, and so adding
a lovely scent to rice makes sense.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah. Two of my favorite rice is right off the bat.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
All right, Well, one of my favorites actually, let's just
go ahead and say it. My favorite is sushi rice.
It's a type of Japonica. Not surprisingly, it's sticky, but
it's not as sticky as another kind of rice called
sticky rice or glutenous rice, and they're not to be confused,
even though they're both pretty sticky. Glutinous rice is naturally
(09:04):
sticky because it's got so much amylopectin starts in it
that it actually the grains actually kind of crumble together
and it almost turns into like a porridge. Like when
you make a batch of sticky rice, it's almost like
a just a big clump that sticks to your fingers,
gets all over the place. You can use just to
hang wallpaper. Sushi rice is sticky. It'll stick together. But
(09:27):
if you ever really look at sushi like a piece
of nageary, you can see the individual grains of rice. Yeah,
but it still sticks together, And the reason why it
really sticks together is because of the treatment it gets
with a little bit of vinegar, salt and sugar concoction
that's mixed in with the rice after it cooks.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
That's right, maybe a manny petty.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I don't get that one.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
You know the treatment?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Okay, do you ever get those?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
No, chuck, eat yourself at least to a pedicure. You
will never not get one again.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Uh we'll talk off air, okay, but I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Just saying you can't surprise those people or offend them.
Somebody who's a professional pedicurist, it doesn't matter what your
feet look like. They will do it. And they yeah, yeah,
not crack a smile.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It's not a hammertoe issue.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Oh okay.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Can we move on to risotto, because if you love risotto,
you're probably looking at one of a couple of things,
both Japonic aversions, either arboreo or carnioli rice risotto. They're
both medium grain delicious. I don't I've made risotto before,
but it's really tough to perfect. Yeah, but one of
my favorite dishes if it's done right.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I made it once or twice too, and it actually
turned out both times. But it is very time consuming
because you add like the broth a little bit at
a time, and you basically have to stir until that
the rice absorbs the broth and over and over and
over again. But when it turns out it's delicious. It's
just much easier to order out though.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah it's a dish. You got a babysit, you know,
you can't walk away.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Similarly, piea is a dish that you have to babysit too,
and that uses a couple of specific kinds of rice
bomba which means bomb because it expands into little bombs
the grains of rice to when they encounter water in Calispara.
And they're both short grain rices, which is strange. There
(11:28):
should be long grain because of the dish kind of
calls for it. But you do not want to use
other short grain rices as substitutes in paea because they're not.
They actually indica type rices like those other two are,
and they'll just cook different and you'll basically ruin your pia.
And who wants ruin pie?
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Now? I used to make pia and I never baby
said it was I doing it wrong?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Oh yeah, I thought like you typically made it outdoors
and you basically had to hang around it while it
was cooking.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I always just baked it in the oven, in the
proper pan.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Maybe that was just a cooking show I saw once,
and they were doing that to seem cool.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
It was like one of those cooking challenges that like
they give them a bunch of restrictions.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
No, weirdly, it was a cooking show. I don't remember
the chef, but Gwyneth Paltrow was standing around there and
it was like first thing in the morning, and they
were both bleary eyed and clearly messed up still from
the night before. But they decided to film that that
episode of the cooking show that day.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
I'm probably not doing it in the traditional style or something,
but it always turned out pretty good. Good. I want
to talk a little bit about Carolina gold. It's one
of my favorite prices. It's in heirloom long grain Japonica.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
You haven't had it, No, I've never had it?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Oh man, is it yourself? Yeah? It's great. Always when
I go to Charleston, I'll pick up a bag of
the local stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Well, pick up two, I will.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Big boy comes in a looking little soft bag too,
you know.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I saw, oh, like a kind of a little burlap bag.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, like a cloth thing.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
I saw there's a company called Antson Mills that they
started making it in the nineteen nineties. I guess at
least for national sale, and their prices aren't terribly bad.
I didn't get to the shipping stage that probably jecks
the price up, but it was like eight bucks for
a pound of this apparently the best rice you'll ever have.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I mean, I think you can just buy it in
publics here, can't you.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I've never looked for it. Maybe I will, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I mean in Charleston, certainly you can buy it at
just Harris Teedter or whatever, because it's local and that's
the deal it was. You know, it comes from the Carolinas,
the lowlands of South Carolina and North Carolina. I think
it was the first commercial rice in the United States
and genetically goes back to South Asia, although the seeds
(13:55):
reportedly arrived to Charleston in the sixteen hundreds from Madagascar,
went away after the Civil War and then came back
into fashion, like you said, in the nineties when Anson
Mill started making it again. But this was a rice
where English colonists, you know, they came here. They hadn't
grown rice very significantly, so they they didn't really know
what they were doing. But enslaved Africans arrived, they had
(14:21):
that experience on how to grow rice, which was it's
a tricky crop and we'll get to all that later.
They had, you know, some lowland wetland cultivation areas in
West Africa. So they came with that knowledge, and you know,
that's how it became a thing in South Carolina, Like
how how to cultivate it and grow it there?
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yep? Then now we have Carolina gold.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
I have to go try because this article, thanks to
doctor Clau for helping us with this, too, made me
very hungry for rice.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
How many of these others do you want to go over?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't know that there's much to go over. There's
black rice, which apparently has anthracyanin's the same pigment and blueberries,
so it's high in antioxidants. Yeah, apparently it was called
forbidden rice in ancient China because only royalty could eat it.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
It's black rice, I think, right.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, black rice, yeah, and then I think it's worth
mentioning wild rice. It's not technically rice because it doesn't
come from a rice plant comes from a different type
of grass that's native to North America. But from what
I see, it's actually even healthier a than brown rice. Okay,
and it's not bad.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Do you like it?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
And you know, I'll quickly shout out calros because when
I used to roll my own sushi, that's what I
would use. Even though it's not exactly sushi rice, I
was told by a chef like that it does pretty good.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Okay, that's a nice little tip from Chuck's kitchen.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
All right, Well let's take a break then. It's a
good start, and we'll come back and talk about that
cultivation I spoke of right after this. All right, rice cultivation,
(16:22):
like we mentioned earlier, started in China, specifically the Yang
Sea River basin could have been like as much as
fourteen thousand years ago, definitely at least nine or ten
thousand years ago. And it's the kind of thing that
happened over time from like wild rice growing just in
the wild after heavy rains, to them saying hey, let's
(16:43):
actually try and farm this stuff, and you know, valleys
would flood and they would say, hey, this is this
is how you grow rice in water. Flooded paddies. I
imagine it was quite a revelation.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I think it made it to South Asia, that
is India by I think eighty three hundred years ago,
and made it to Southeast Age about forty four hundred
years ago. And the whole idea of growing rice, Like
anybody who ever thinks about growing rice, you know, when
you're sitting around thinking about growing rice, you think of
it in paddies, like you're talking about like little flooded
(17:18):
fields usually surrounded by slightly raised dikes or walkways or buns,
and that is a way that rice grows. But it
doesn't actually need a flooded field to grow. It needs
a lot of irrigation, a lot of rainfall. But it
can also be grown on like mountain sides, terraced mountain sides.
(17:41):
That's called upland farming. But lowland part I didn't either.
Usually that's for subsistence that upland stuff, because it's so
much more productive using the lowland method, which is using
flooded paddies. But it only needs flooding a couple of
times during growing the growing season, and they actually drain
(18:03):
the paddy for harvesting. Yeah, but a lot of a
lot of people who cultivate rice just keep it flooded
the whole time because it's a lot easier to not
put water in and out when you need it.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, for sure, as far as you know farming it,
you can be old school. It can be done by hand. Obviously,
they have machinery that can do that stuff now in
a lot of places. The rice plants, you can like
a lot of plants and vegetables and things like that,
and herbs. You can start them out in a like
a nursery bed, transferm over to a paddy, or it
(18:36):
could be a big mechanized system of seed drilling. Or
you can drop rice. You can air drop it into
a flooded field and it doesn't take that long, a
few months, about one hundred and twenty days. And you know,
different varieties. It depends on like the depth of water
for the different varieties and stuff like that, and they
will drain as needed. But just a few months to
(18:58):
grow a successful rice yield.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah. I was watching some mesmerizing videos on growing rice
and one of them was in Vietnam. I couldn't tell
where the other one was, but it was really interesting.
For some reason, I find a rice patty. Fascinating.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Oh same, it's just way, way.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
More interesting than your typical crop field.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah. Agree. Water Yeah, and I thought until yesterday that
was the only way to do it.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Nope, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Cranberries, didn't it. Cranberries that grow in water.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, and like a bog. Yeah, that's deep water. You
have to wear waiters to harvest cranberries. As far as
the commercials for ocean spray that I've.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Seen say, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
So after you harvest the rice, there's a lot of
ways to harvest it. One of the traditional ways is
to just use handsickles and cut the probably the top
half of the plant off. After that, you dry the
rice and what you have is called rough rice, and
that still has the hole on it. It's got what
(19:59):
the prote husk, which you'll sometimes see if you buy
a plant. There's these little holes. Those are rice hucks husks.
I guess they put them in for drainage maybe, I
don't know why else they would. But when you remove
just the husk and leave the rest of the rice alone,
like shucking an ear of corn, but really tiny, that's
(20:20):
essentially the rice husk. Once you take the husk off,
you got brown rice.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, little tiny bits of cardboard ready for eating.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
I mean, I'm with you. It takes a lot for
me to make myself make brown rice when I have
the option of making sushi rice. Yeah, but it is
so much better for you. I know it's but I
don't know if either of us eed enough rice to
really matter.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
I know, no, no, I mean any help problems I
have or not for eating white rice?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
You know, but what about white rice? How do you
get white rice from brown rice? Because that's where you
get it from.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Well, another you got to go through another round of work,
basically and called the milling process that's going to remove
the brand. Sometimes they even if you see rice that
looks like just super pristine and shiny that might have
been polished in a factory somewhere with lucose.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Weird.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And then we talked about you know, some rice even
goes through the enriching process.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Would you like to go over those three ways again? Ah,
that's right, Okay, But.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
You know, we're going to talk a little bit about
the downside of rice because anytime you're talking about like
these major crops or farm situations, it's not always the
greatest for the environment and it takes a lot of
water to grow rice, like you said, if it's not
done in a patty, just tons and tons of irrigation,
which makes it surprising that California, which suffers a lot
of drought, has about half a million acres of rice.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, if you listen to our saltancy episode, that should
be an eye popping number to you. Yeah. That said, though,
rice production still requires less water than any kind of
meat production, any kind of nut production from what I understand,
and a lot of vegetables still use more water than
rice cultivation I guess worldwide. So water use is a thing.
(22:09):
Land use is another thing too, but greenhouse cases seem
to be probably the biggest problem with rice production.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, this kind of is something that I would not
have considered. Again, I was just sort of naive to that.
I usually think of like factory farming of animals and
stuff as being big methane contributors. But when you have
a big flooded rice field, you're also going to have
a lot of microbes in there feeding off of decaying
plant matter, and that's going to create a lot of methane.
(22:40):
I didn't realize it was that big of a problem,
but apparently it is.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
It must be because so much rice is cultivated worldwide
that all combined makes it a problem. One of the
things you can do to reduce methane emissions is to
drain the patties when the rice is at a growing
state where it doesn't need to be flooded, and then
when it needs it again, you can reintroduce the water.
(23:06):
Then you dry it again for harvesting. The problem is this,
and I love stuff like this, even though it's terrible.
I love it when you solve one problem and it
creates an equal and opposite problem. That's exactly what happens
with rice cultivation. When you dry out that paddy, it
exposes the soil and a bunch of nitrous oxide, which
is another greenhouse gas gets emitted. And so if you
(23:31):
just grow it just with soil, it's going to emit
nitrous oxide. It's going to be covered up with the
water and the paddy, and then when you dry it again,
it's going to release more nitrous oxide. So they're trying
to figure out like the balance of which one's worse,
you know, would it be better to just leave it
flooded all the time, would it be better to dry
it because you can take care of the methane, nitrous
(23:55):
oxide goes up. Take care of the nitrous oxide, the
methane goes up. But did you see that thing about
rice fish farming?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Is that like the seawater farming.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
No, this is it's a little different. It's where you
actually you you grow fish, you like farm fish in
your rice paddy, and they actually help take care of
the methane problem by eating a lot of the algae
that would otherwise decompose. So the methane goes down, the
nitrous oxide emissions go down because the paddy's always flooded
(24:25):
because you know, the fish need the water. And I
saw that it increases yields by ten to fifteen percent
because the fish are pooping and sore, the nitrogen cycle
is going a lot, but a lot more frequently. You
don't need to add as much fertilizer, if any. And
they're eating a lot of the pests, so there's a
fifty percent reduction in pests. And I think in some
(24:46):
if you do it right, you don't even need to
use pesticides in rice production. So growing fish with your
rice is like the way to save the planet.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
What kind of fish do you know, I don't.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I don't think it matters. Probably a smallish fish because
there's a a few inches of water that you need
for rice paddies, So it wouldn't have it wouldn't be
like a giant carp you'd be you'd be up the creek,
I think, Or the carp would be if you tried
to grow carp in a fish, Patty.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Right, it wouldn't be say a marlin or great white shark.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
No, no, but that would be something to see.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I did mention seawater rice there, you know, people efforting
to do that kind of thing to you know, grow
it in seawater. Obviously, it's got to be a situation
where they can get a rice variety that can tolerate
that salt content and the alkaline soil. But it's something
that they're looking into that has got a little bit
of promise I.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Think, yeah, because it reduces the land use, right, because
you're not using really valuable land for cultivating rice. Yeah.
There's also the matter of toxins too. I didn't realize
rice was such a downer, did you.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
I did not. I didn't know about the toxins, and
I think specifically arsenic is one of the I think
like lead and cadmium also, but arsenic seems to be
the major offender.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah. And the reason why it's such a deal with
rice is rice absorbs at more than most crops for
some reason. The big downer about the whole thing is
that arsenic is most present in the germ and the brand.
So the type of rice that's most beneficial for you
health wise, brown rice is also the ones that have
(26:27):
the most arsenic.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Aha.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
I found an article that asks if the benefits outweigh
the risk as far as arsenic and brown rice is
concerned twenty twenty three edition of Frontiers and Nutrition, and
they basically said, I don't know, we should do more
study on it. To eat what you want, bub yeah,
I guess, But basically they were like, we don't know.
(26:52):
Why would you even read this article, chump?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
If you're seeking out safer rice, you know there are
people have done studies, consumer reports I think did some
testing for arsenic. Specifically, they found white basmadi in California,
India and Pakistan, and sushi rice from the United States,
maybe not intuitively, has the least amount of arsenic. If
(27:19):
you get rice from Arkansas, Louisiana or Texas, it's gonna
have higher levels of arsenic.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, it's if your soil is more likely to be
contaminated by industrial metals, that rice is gonna suck it up.
And apparently California's soil is less contaminated by industrial metals
and some other states. So from what I could tell,
your best bet is California rice as far as arsenic
(27:46):
is concerned.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, and you know you rinsing the rice helps before
you cook it. Cooking it in the water and then
draining and even rinsing afterward can reduce the arsenic count
even more. But it's not like it's apparently it's not
enough arsenic to really do a ton of damage to you.
But the problem is is children that eat like a
(28:09):
lot of times, you know, you'll have like the processed
rice meal and baby food, and I think that stuff
you can ever tell how much that has been rinsed
or not. This might orthodonist Doctor Blake used to say, So, yeah,
it can be problematic for little bebes and toddlers.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
It can be problematic for you too, like as a
grown up. And yeah, it's not like you would have
to eat a lot of rice to hurt yourself with
say arsenic. But if you eat rice every day, which
a lot of people do, sure you can. And arsenic's
associated with multiple kinds of cancer, diabetes, cardio issues, and obesity.
So you don't really want a lot of arsenic. So
(28:49):
that is an issue with rice, everybody. Let's face it.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Should we take a second break? Yeah, all right, we'll
take another break. Go over some lists of countries wheat right,
a lot, probably not a very surprising list, but that
another stuff right after.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
This, Okay, Chuck, I'll give you ten guesses. What continent
(29:36):
produces the most rice?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Is this production?
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yes? Production?
Speaker 1 (29:44):
My guess is China?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
No continent?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Oh Asia, Yes, you got it right out of the gate.
Within that I would say China.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, you'd be right. China is the number one rice
producing country in Asia, followed by India. Well, that makes
sense because they both have a lot of land mass.
Bangladesh is a big eye popper because it's not very big,
but it's the third highest producing rice country in the world.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, that's impressive.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
But all ten top ten are Asian, whether Southeast Asian,
South Asian, or Asian proper.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
I guess, yeah, I mentioned those states California, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Missouri,
and Arkansas produced the almost all the rice in the US,
which is about twenty billion pounds a year more than
I thought. Obviously nowhere close to being a top ten producer.
But as far as eating rice in the United States,
you're probably eating American rice unless you're going to like
(30:41):
a specialty store, because about eighty percent of the rice
sold and eaten in the US and ninety five percent
of sushi rice eaten in the US comes from US farms.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
That's why when you go to a izakaya in America,
you'll frequently see somebody with a mouthful of rice changing us.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Hey, that's right.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Okay, what about the countries that eat the most rice.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
That eat the most.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
What continent would those be on all ten?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Well, I'm going to say Asia, but I'm also going
to drill down and say China just because of the
sheer amount of people.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Okay, yep, China's number one. Indian is number two, both
because they have a lot of people there. Bangladesh is
number three. Again they really love the rice. Yeah. But
in the top ten list, Nigeria is number ten of
the countries that eat the most rice, And there's something
about eating a lot of rice. It's impressive. Number one,
Bangladesh is number one for eating rice. The per capita
(31:39):
rice consumption per year equals five hundred and ninety two
pounds of rice per person, which is almost two pounds
of rice a day. And that's dry, uncooked rice that
they're counting. This isn't like the wet stuff. Yeah, and
like I said, it's impressive, but it also goes to
it goes to point out or underscore that the developing
(32:00):
status of a country like Bangladesh, because if you eat
tons of rice and you're getting a lot of your
calories from rice, it's because a lot of other foods
aren't available to you because your country is lower income.
So that's why Bangladesh, Cambodia, a Laos, they all eat
the most rice, in part because it's widely available, but
also in part because their economies are still developing or
(32:23):
aren't as developed as countries they eat less rice.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, and that's again those are per capita numbers for
that last list.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah. That reminds me though of when I was a
kid in like first, second, third grade. Maybe we would
once a year at school the school lunch would be
a cup of white rice with a little pad of
butter on it, so that it drove home like what
other kids around the world were eating for lunch that day.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah, I thought it was kind of a nice in principle,
but there were always at least one or two kids
who ate that and then also ate their lunch that
they brought from home to like little bastard.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, and I would say that pad of butter is
a bit of a cheat.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Probably probably, but still, I mean I definitely it gave
me paws.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, I mean I like a little butter and some rice.
I mean not when I'm cooking any kind of like
you know, Asian style foods and stuff like that. I'm
not gonna put butter on sushi rice. But if you
give me a you know, a steak and a big
old glava Carolina gold, you can bet your bibby I'm
gonna throw a little butter on that. Salt and pepper.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, I never got into This was definitely not Carolina
gold rice that they were feeding us in styrofoam cups.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
In first grade. It's probably what's the stuff in the bag,
the minute rice or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah, like Uncle Ben's or something.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, I mean the only time we see that in
our house. We keep a stash for when the dogs
are tummy sick and you have to boil chicken and
you just have chicken and plain rice, and so we
have those bags that in like camping when I was
a kid. Is that evokes those memories all right?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Like would you just have your pockets full of loose rice?
That's how you'd hike it in.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
So I'd hike it in.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Let's see what else anything else about this? Oh? I
want to point something out there. There is a study
in two thousand and five. Remember I talked about how
people eating rice, the countries that eat the most rice
also tend to be developing. Well, there was a study
from Tatori University. And the reason that stood out to
me is because you and me taught English and tooty
(34:38):
at a high school. Yeah, oh cool, it's very rural area.
She taught it at like a technical school, technical high school,
but she loved it. She went over there for a
year as part of this program. But this Tatori University
study basically found that rice is rice consumption is dropping
off in Asian countries because wealth is expanding in Asian countries,
(34:59):
and they're saying, hey, we love rice, but we also
want that steak.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Like Chuck said, you know, every time you throw a
little another Yumi tidbit out, she becomes that much more interesting.
And I realize how much more interesting both Yumi and
Emily are than either one of us.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yes, it's true, I'm kind of a slope compared to
Yumi for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, congratulations to both of us because
they're both wonderful, interesting women. I mean, Yumi had her
her graffiti tag was apothecary for God's sake.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Pretty great, It's amazing. We already took a second break, right,
this is the third act we're in.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, we're in the third act. So we can have
a little fun with some of these rice dishes if
you want.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Okay, go ahead and fire that gun.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Well, rice, obviously, and a lot of dishes worldwide is
going to be like a bass layer for something, maybe
a curry, maybe a stewed meat or vegeta. Maybe you're
gonna stir fry something and throw it on top of
that rice. That's a great way to eat rice, not
just as a just a regular old plain side dish,
even though that's fine too, But I've had quite a
(36:10):
few of these. I have had jollafrice, Oh yeah, at
African restaurants. Yeah, it's got it's you know, got like
stewed tomatoes, onions, you know, peppers. A lot of these
are kind of similar around the world because it's you know,
it's meager, honest ingredients like you know, garlic and thyme
and ginger and rice and tomatoes and onions like stuff
(36:32):
you get from the ground. Sometimes you can add meat
and vegetables. But jollafrice is good on its own.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah. I looked up a recipe of that, and I'm like,
that is something I'm going to try.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
There's also berryanni.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I am not more I'm more of a curry guy,
so I don't get berryani when I go to Indian
restaurants because it's a little dryer. Yeah, but it's got
some nice flavors to it, for sure, when I have
had it. But it's a rice dish. It's got rice, spices,
some vegetables, usually some kind of meat in there. Yeah,
it's good.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
You're a red curry guy, green red green.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Maybe if I'm at a tie place, but I'm a
tikka masala and buttered chicken person. Man, I could eat
that all day long, every day.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah. No, I mean I've said it before, and I
think it was our Chinese food episode. Like, I could
subsist entirely on Asian cuisine of the time and be
as happy as I've ever been. I don't need the
other foods.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Also shout out sog sog pen yours fine, but chicken
sog is.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
It's the best. Yeah, I did mention Paia earlier. I
love it. If you aren't familiar, it is a Spanish dish.
I think the Moors brought it over the moops and
it is that's right. Oh my god, what was that?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
That was from Seinfeld when George played Trio.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
That's right, that's right, the moops No, sorry, the moops
pie is delicious, though it's you know, you cook it
in a very specific flat bottomed round pan if you
don't have one, like I've cooked it in just cast
iron skillets.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
It's got that clam juice. That's where a lot of
that seafoody flavor comes from. Depending on what kind of
seafood you want, there could be clams, could be shrimp,
could be scallops, could be all that stuff, some saffron,
some like tomatoes that stew up nicely. It's just delicious.
I love a pie. It's it's usually not the kind
of thing you can just get a serving of. You
get like a larger pie for a table.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
That clam juice thing, didn't that remind me? Didn't you
used to make or maybe still do, make Bloody Mary's
with clamato.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Uh? Yeah, that's the only way for me.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
And that's a Canadian thing. And I can't remember what
they call it black really, sir, that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Oh, I've heard of that. I didn't know it was Canadian.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
There's something. There's another rice dish that I've had before.
I don't know if you have. It's called sushi, and
it's made with that short grain rice season with some vinegar.
Like I said. But it actually, and I know we
talked about this in the sushi episode. It grew out
of a way of preserving fish in vinegar. They would
jam some uncooked rice in there with it too, pack
(39:17):
it in there, and I guess somebody said there's a
better way to do this, and that's where sushi came from.
But you can still get that original version called Nara sushi,
which I really want to try. I like pickled anything. Man.
You could pickle an old shoe and I'd be like,
I'll need a little of that.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Sure, we're not going to go down the list of
rice noodle dishes, but we should point out that rice
noodles are a thing. We should mention a few rice
desserts because a really really nice rice pudding, to me,
is one of the more delicious things you can eat.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah. I'm more of a bread pudding guy, but yeah,
I'll eat rice pudding as well.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
That's when you cook the rice with the milk and sugar,
and usually there's like vanilla or cinnamon or something like
that in there.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
I would eat just about anything with condensed milk.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah, that's good stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Oh I have a little tip for you, Chuck. You
may found this stuff. It's ube condensed milk.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
It is the greatest flavor you will ever put in
your mouth. It's insane how good it tastes.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Is it? Do I have to go to like an
Asian mart to get it?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Or is it? You probably order it online? But yeah,
you're gonna find it at an Asian store. More than
maybe target. Okay, there's also mango sticky rice, which uses
that sticky glutenous rice which, by the way, it doesn't
have gluten, it's just glutenous, meaning sticky, starchy.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Gluten with an eye yea, yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Have you heard of polish rice cake or polish rice cake.
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
I had not until this.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
It's basically rice and condensed milk and some other stuff.
But it's a cake with rice. It looks pretty good.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Well, we should talk about mochi at least, because mochi
is a cake and that is made from the glutenous rice.
Is well, and if you've ever, you know, had mochi
in the US, it's probably a little different from Japan
because it's not always a sweet thing there, But in
the US it's usually wrapped around ice cream.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
As most things are.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, and you can buy like the little mochi ice
cream balls or whatever here.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yeah, they're good. A lot of times. In Japan they'll
have like sweet red bean paste inside. That's a traditional
mochi there too, but apparently it's references the rabbit in
the moon. In Japan, it's a rabbit in the moon
rather than a man in the moon, but he's making
mochi up there.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Oh I never knew that.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yep, And we can't not mention horn shatta real quick. Okay, yeah,
I had.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I went to a I had a horse shot a
flight in Mexico City one time on a food tour.
Oh nice, And it was my first kind of real
exposure to it that I think maybe my first real exposure,
and man, it was so different and delicious.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. It's it's rice soaked in evaporated milk, so you know,
I'd like it some cinnamon, some vanilla, and then you eventually,
after it's mush, you strain it so that it gets
any of the grid out. So it's kind of a thickish,
milkyish drink that's amazing on its own. But if you're
into things like rum or bourbon, they mike really well
(42:17):
with hornchhok especially in wintertime.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Very interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Oh yeah, you'll thank me later.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Okay, Okay, I'll pre thank you now because yeah, I
didn't know that was a thing. Oh. I mean, where
do you get horchata here?
Speaker 2 (42:32):
You can buy horn shotta. Those people make it and
sell it here in the United States, meaning companies or whatever.
But it's actually not that hard to make. You might
be better off making it yourself.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
All right, I'll give it a shot. I know that
this stuff we had in Mexico City was like really
really authentic and great.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeaplenty, there's plenty of recipes. It's like five or six ingredients,
all of them easily obtainable. So I say make your
own chuck.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
All right, I'll give it a try.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
That reminds me, what did you think of cherry pop tarts?
Cherry frosted pop tarts?
Speaker 3 (43:02):
Ah?
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yes, follow up? I texted Josh photos. I immediately went
to the store. I bought the cherry frosted pop tarts,
and of course I had to get the cinnamon brown
sugar cinnamon. Boy, those cherries are beeping delicious.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah, I told you They're way better than strawberry, aren't they?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah? I mean they are, They're way better. I did
my butter trick, believe it or not. I've I think
there were four packs in each, so eight total packs,
sixteen total pop tarts. And I've only eaten six total
pop tarts, so three packs.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Since then, I'm really you. You just can't go in
there and house those things in two days.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You can pretty easily. But I think you're showing a
lot of restraint here.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
I feel like I'm showing restraint.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, way to go, man. And are you enjoying them
more than if you just ate them all at once? Nah?
That's awesome. You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:06):
I got nothing else? Grow rice?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, go grow some rice, make your own horshata, make
some sushi, make some sticky rice, make some curries. Just
do all that stuff some jalla rice. Get to it.
And while you're making all that, we'll just go ahead
and read some listener.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Now, well this is from Ted. Ted wrote in because Ted,
I'll just read it. You responded to Ted. You're gonna
send Ted something, which is very nice of you.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Hey, guys, are recently finished listening to the full stuff
you should know catalog? Yeah, big deal for the fifth time.
That's a big deal, Ted.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
For sure. I think it's a big deal if you
listen to it all once.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Oh oh yeah, you're doing your new thing. Yeah, okay,
I like it.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
See it's attached screenshot for proof, Ted, We didn't need proof.
We take you out your word. At least I finished
my most recent listen. Guys, Thanks for all the wonderful hours.
As an appreciation, here are the five things I most
like about stuff you should know. Number one, Josh and
Chuck have character arcs as their lives have changed over
the seventeen years, and they're not afraid to share some
(45:15):
of that personal stuff. That's a big time character arcs.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, I mean seventeen years.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, Like, think about what's happened to anyone over their
last seventeen years, A lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Number two, Josh and Chuck don't talk over each other
like many other podcasters do. We don't often sometimes we do,
but yeah, we usually let each other go right.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Yeah, we try to. I mean every once in a while,
there's a stumble here there, but no, we're pretty good
about that. We always have been.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Yeah. But boy, some podcasts, even some of my favorite ones,
at times I'm like, what is going on? There's like
three or four people talking.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Oh, you can't do that, can't do that.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Number three, I've learned more about movies and popular music
by listening to stuff you should Know than actually by
watching movies or listening to music.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah. I like to think that we have imparted some
pretty cool recommendations over the years.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, I just noticed. Ted said he'd send in five
things he loved the most. There's only four, So I
guess you.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
Know, Ted, this is beautiful because I know what the
last one is. Oh.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
I bet that's why he did it. The number four.
Josh and Chuck never make it all the way through
a list, of course, Ted, I'm so dense, I didn't
even get the joke.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
It was a great That was a great arcane in
joke for Stuff you should Note, Ted, Bravo. I'm listening
to the entire catalog five times and we are trying
to figure out something special to get you for it.
So thank you for letting us know that's right.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Thanks Ted.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Thanks Ted. If you want to be like Ted and
talk about how much you like Stuff you Should Know,
or how many times you've listened to Stuff you Should Know,
or whatever you want to say, you can send it
in an email to stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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