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Rice
If you’ve ever doubted rice’s role in nourishing the world, here’s some food for thought: It’s the key grain food source for half the world’s population. Half. More than three billion people rely on it for survival. For comparison’s sake, it’s to the tropics what wheat is to temperate regions—the main grain. And get this: Most rice is eaten within ten miles of where it’s grown.
Rice’s Taste & Texture
With somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 distinct varieties, it’s hard to generalize about rice’s feel or flavor. Rice is classified mostly by the size of its grain (long, medium, or short) and its texture or color (e.g., glutinous, brown, or white). Some well-known types are:
- Basmati: Aromatic, long-grained rice popular in India. It is aged to develop its unique flavor.
- Brown: Any whole-grain variety with the bran and germ intact is going to provide fiber and be nutritious, chewy, and nutty.
- Sticky: Used for sushi and desserts, it’s very sticky with a short grain.
- Instant: White, precooked, dehydrated rice without the bran and germ that can be reheated quickly.
- Jasmine: Thailand’s aromatic rice comes in brown and white versions and has a subtle floral aroma. It is eaten “fresh,” that is, in the season following the harvest.
- Long-grain: Long, slender grains stay fluffy after cooking and make good side dishes or beds for sauces.
- Risotto and paella: Plump, white, medium-grained rice that absorbs water without becoming mushy.
- Wild rice: Surprise! This is actually a grass seed, not rice at all, and has a rich, nutty flavor.
What’s Great About Rice
Rice that has had only its outer hulls removed, or brown rice, contains about eight percent protein, small amounts of fat, and vitamins and minerals including thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, iron, and calcium. Rice protein has all the essential amino acids for the human body. Though the amount of protein is not high, it is known to be easily digestible. However, what many people think of as rice is a heavily processed version of brown rice. Removal of not only the outer hulls, but also the bran and germ layers, brown rice becomes white—and it loses most of its nutrients.
Milling, rinsing before cooking, and boiling reduce rice’s nutritional value, so although some preparation is necessary for humans to consume rice, less is more in terms of nutrition.
Kashi’s Rice
We source the medium and long-grain brown rice we use in our foods from growers in Arkansas, California, Texas, and Louisiana. Besides playing a vital role in our Seven Whole Grains and Sesame blend, long grain rice features prominently in our organic Strawberry Fields® cereal, a super-simple, super-yummy mix of organic strawberries and raspberries, and crispy rice and wheat flakes.
Origins of Rice
Rice cultivation is so ancient that its exact origination point—or points—may never be identified. What is known is that both botanical science and linguistic evidence indicate that rice cropped up in a broad arc across South and Southeast Asia, from eastern India, through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, northern Vietnam, and into southern China. Some of the earliest evidence of rice cultivation comes from China and dates to between 7,000 and 5,000 BCE.
Rice’s Name
The main cultivated rice plant, Oryza sativa, is an annual grass of the Poaceae family and comes from Asia. (A less-used strain, Oryza glaberrima, originates in West Africa.) O. sativa grows to nearly four feet high, with long, flat leaves and flowered spikelets that produce the fruit, or grain.
Rice has been around for a long time. It appears in the Yajurveda, one of four canonical Hindu texts dating back to between 1,400 and 1,000 BCE, and is frequently referred to in Sanskrit texts. The ancient Indian name for rice, dhanya, means “sustenance for the human race.” And the names for “rice” and “food” are the same in many Asian languages, for example, “shi fan” in Chinese or “kin khao” in Thai.
Rice Around the World
When it comes to what rice needs to thrive, one ingredient is key: water. Rice crops like wet soil, submerged fields and basins, and tropical, semitropical, and temperate climates. Luckily, these conditions exist around the world: As the second-largest crop after wheat, rice is grown in more than a hundred countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The biggest rice producer is China, with 26% of the world’s production. Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States are the largest rice exporters (although to give perspective, the U.S. only makes 1% of the world’s rice!).
Its simplicity and prevalence has earned rice a place on tables everywhere. From the paellas of the Mediterranean and pilafs of the Steppes to the hundreds of ways Asians and Latin Americans enhance rice with spices, nuts, dried fruit, vegetables, herbs, and meat, it’s truly the world’s staple.
More 7 Whole Grains
Learn more about our 7 whole grains with these Grainipedia entries:
