Monday, April 14, 2008 Amante: All rice By Isolde D. Amante
THAT Giada de Laurentiis: she made me think about the rice crisis.
There I sat, trying to read the latest sermons in the op-ed pages, when the sight of Miss de Laurentiis smacking her lips after a spoonful of sweet rice pudding dragged me off the couch.
Off to the kitchen, then, where a cup of rice grains promptly plopped into a pot, joined by three cups of milk, some sugar and the lip-puckering zest of a fragrant lemon. A little bowl of raisins sat on the countertop, for the pudding’s finishing touch.
Manang Giada, she made it look oh-so-simple. She didn’t even have to stir the pot.
So back I went to the living room, just in time to hear Vir Sanghvi praise a batch of thin rice crepes, filled with spiced potatoes and lined with butter, “a sure cholesterol catastrophe.” Not that he minded, this Mr. Sanghvi: the screen showed him tucking into one of the famous rice plates of southern India’s Udupi. There, he said, rice “sits at the center of religious belief.” On one such plate, spicy coconut cream and tomato sauces, hot vegetables and coriander-encrusted clams surrounded the real star, a mound of boiled rice, its heat steaming up the television screen. My belly growled.
To temper my rice craving, I turned to the news, but rice appeared everywhere. Television crews showed bare warehouses where NFA-stamped sacks, now empty, sprawled on the floor. Farmers’ cooperatives spoke in defense of their private financiers. (So who really benefits from subsidies?) Spooked by pests and bad weather, Vietnamese officials said they would limit rice exports to make sure their own people had enough. Meanwhile, more rice farmers in the Philippines and China decided it made more sense to leave the paddies to high-rise property developers.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
In the pot that Giada inspired, a thick, yellowish-brown lump of sticky rice lay. I had forgotten the Goldilocks rule of cooking with milk: the temperature had to be just right. I tried two half-hearted teaspoons, but found the results too sad. I carried the failed pudding outside, and the dog looked at me askance. So into the garbage bin that pot of rice went. Since then, for reasons involving vanity and conscience, I have watched carefully the portions of rice I cook or order, and eat. With no influence over hoarders and no control over any rice field, all I can do, like most consumers, is prevent waste.
As if my Giada-induced guilt wasn’t enough, the April 21 issue of Time adds: “Even if Asia manages to keep its rice bowl full, high prices and shortages may still filter down to the world’s poorest countries…
Tight world supplies create a zero-sum calculus. Vietnamese rice going to the Philippines is rice that is unavailable for Africa, or for the NGO’s that feed the world’s most vulnerable populations.” Oh, boy. I will never attempt to cook rice pudding again.
(isolde.amante@gmail.com or http://peryodistang-pinay. blogspot.com)
