From Japanese sushi to Kabuli pulao, rice appears on many tables around the world. It’s so culturally important that the first thing people will say to each other is "Have you eaten rice yet?” in many parts of Asia.
But there’s no denying people’s interest in other alternatives (such as quinoa and cauliflower rice) and their concerns over the staple’s high GI levels and potential for food poisoning.
One of the complicated things is there's so many mixed messages about whether rice is good for you.Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition & Food Sciences, University of South Australia
In this episode, Lee Tran tries to make sense of these mixed messages with dietitian Dr Evangeline Mantzioris.
She discusses the culinary and cultural impact of rice with Chat Thai’s Palisa Anderson, who tells us about a Thai rice that’s so reportedly amazing, it makes you forget about your husband.
And Little Lagos’ Adetokunboh Adeniyi shares his jollof rice memories and recalls lockdown-era battles to secure basmati.
While the people of European background were scrambling for toilet paper, all the ethnic people were scrambling for rice!Adetokunboh Adeniyi
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Palisa Anderson: In Thai, the name of it is Leum Pua, which means 'this rice is so good, I've forgotten about my husband'
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: While the people of European background were scrambling for toilet paper [laughs], all the ethnic people were scrambling for rice.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: One of the complicated things is there's so many mixed messages about whether rice is good for you.
Lee Tran Lam: Rice is the star of so many national dishes and it feeds half the planet, so why do some people consider it a nutritional villain? And are they right?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you be consuming more tea, less coffee, should you skip the rice, bread, seafood or cheese? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast.
(Rice being poured)
Today’s episode is on rice.
From Egyptian koshari to Indonesian nasi goreng, rice is a common – and welcome – sight on tables around the world.
Wedding rice is served in East India, while the quality of your Kabuli pulao is a sign of whether you’re worthy marriage material in Afghanistan.
So I was confused when dietitian Susie Burrell named white rice as something she’d never put in her shopping trolley. Should we actually be avoiding something that’s foundational to so many cuisines around the world? Let’s talk to some food-savvy people and figure this out.
Palisa Anderson: Hi, I'm Palisa Anderson. I am a second-generation restaurauteur of my mother's pioneer restaurant, Chat Thai in Sydney. I had a show on SBS called Water Heart Food.
Lee Tran Lam: Want to know how important rice is in Asia? Just listen to how people greet each other. In Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines and many other parts of the region, the first thing people will say to each other is "have you eaten rice yet?" For Thai speakers, it’s the same, too.
Anderson: The first greeting is always "gin khao yung" – or “taan khao yung”, which is a little bit more polite – is your have you had your rice today? And it's the same across most Asian cultures. So when we say “have you eaten rice today?”, it's “have you had a meal today?” So the fact that the word is interchangeable for a whole meal – and rice is the word for the meal – really represents a lot.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s the same in Japan where rice is built into the name for the meal. Breakfast basically means morning rice, lunch is noon rice and dinner is evening rice.
Rice isn’t just in the foundations of the language, it’s also fundamental to the cultural – and literal – landscape of Japan, where Palisa lived for many years. She remembers seeing photos of rice farmers displayed prominently next to the rice at the supermarket checkout, and seeing people farming rice everywhere.
(Water streaming and harvesting noises)
Palisa Anderson: You see the old oba-chans, the old grannies, out there harvesting – hand-harvesting! – the rice, drying it out.
Japan in the autumn is the most beautiful place, especially in the countryside because you see them cutting the beautiful golden stalks of rice, and then lying it down to dry before they come and they bundle it and then they hang it to dry even further.
When I lived in Japan, I did eat every single grain of rice ’cause I could appreciate how much work that actually went into growing and processing that rice.
(Rice being poured)
Lam: If you’ve ever been to a restaurant with an elaborate tasting menu, where you’re presented with endless courses of well-crafted wonders, well this experience is indebted to the kaiseki tradition, which began in Japan many centuries ago. Kaiseki was the OG version of fine-dining and when you enjoy it today, rice is its headlining star.
Palisa Anderson: In a kaiseki meal, rice is the ultimate dish, it's the last dish that you get, and whether it's served plain with some pickles – seasonally, it changes. So in the autumn, you get chestnuts and maybe some abalone in the summer, it could be red beans, and bamboo shoots in the springtime, so that combination always changes, but it's always cooked so perfectly.
Lee Tran Lam: Rice is so important in Japan that sushi chefs are judged on the quality of their rice – not their fish. And it’s not the only place where rice is highly prized.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: Hi, my name is Adetokunboh Adeniyi. I run Little Lagos restaurant in Sydney and Lekki by Little Lagos in Brisbane.
There is a popular saying in Nigerian households: there is rice at home. We have it in the morning. We have in the afternoon. We have it at night. And for our parents, they just couldn't fathom the idea of buying food when there is rice at home, literally.
Lee Tran Lam: You might have noticed the increasing popularity of West African jollof rice. It’s named after the Wolof tribe, and the tomatoes the Portuguese introduced to the region in the 1400s richly flavour the grains in this one-pot dish. In recent years, the hot topic of who makes better jollof rice (#jollofwars) has involved entire countries (and their political figures), inspired a diss track and even became a key plot point in shows like Atlanta and Ted Lasso. That’s because jollof rice is a widely beloved dish.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: We would dream of the days that we're going to a birthday party and we know there will be jollof rice there. It's also a celebratory food or an occasional food – so Christmas yes, absolutely; Eid, any other kind of like events happening in the household. Yeah, I think we would have it every Sunday, if my mum was in a good mood.
It kind of cuts across all the tribes in Nigeria – every single tribe kind of eats jollof rice. You start going into Western Africa – Liberia eat jollof rice; Ghana, they eat jollof rice; Sierra Leone, even Guinea. And of course, we have to pay respect to the original owners of jollof rice, which is the Senegalese.
(Cooking and stewing noises)
The basic ingredients that you need would be your tomatoes, capsicums, habaneros, your onions – it's kind of similar to what the Spanish do with the paella. So you're essentially cooking rice in a stew, a thick gravy stew. But what makes that whole art form very tricky is that you're supposed to cook rice in water. So when you're trying to cook rice in a stew, it's very challenging.
Lee Tran Lam: The key is not to burn the rice at the bottom of the pot or let the rice become too soggy.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: Otherwise it's gonna look like a risotto and nobody wants a jollof rice that looks like a risotto. The most popular one is the one that's called party jollof, which is also known as smoky jollof. The name is self explanatory. It's cooked at parties.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s also the type he serves at his restaurants. He likes using basmati rice, for its texture and flavour it unlocks with the tomato stew. The scented long-grain rice originates from the Indian subcontinent and its name means 'fragrant' in Hindi. You’ll recognise it in biryani and other dishes from this area, but these grains are also soaked, drained and then spiced in a Kabuli pulao, Afghanistan’s national dish. Many people love basmati, something he became keenly aware of when COVID lockdowns led to a shortage of this rice.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: Because the borders were closed, they weren't able to bring in more rice. So there was this scramble for rice by everyone, because again, almost every ethnic person eats rice [laughs]. It was all of a sudden, it was like – while the people of European background were scrambling for toilet paper [laughs], all the ethnic people were scrambling for rice.
It was hilarious for me, because I didn't care about toilet paper, I want rice!
(Rice being poured)
Lee Tran Lam: But not everyone shares his appreciation of this grain.
In a September 2020 article in The Sydney Morning Herald about the seven items a dietitian always puts in their shopping trolley (and four they don't), I was surprised to read that Susie Burrell avoids white rice altogether.
This is what the dietitian wrote: “Although it is considered a dietary staple, white rice lacks the nutrient density wholegrain brown rice offers and with an extremely high glycaemic index, is exceptionally easy to overeat. If I am reaching for a family meal base, I opt for wholemeal pasta or quinoa, or serve dishes that use rice as an ingredient with cauliflower rice.”Personally, I think because people have such wide-ranging dietary circumstances, it’s great that we have a variety of rice to cook with today – from brown rice to substitutes like cauliflower rice, which Susie Burrell mentions. But all these culturally significant dishes we talk of – Kabuli pulao, Indonesian nasi goreng, West African jollof rice and many more – are typically made with white rice.
So what does Adetokunboh think about this dietitian’s wholesale avoidance of white rice?
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: I will not be accepting an invite for dinner at that person's house [laughs]. Nah, I'm joking, I'm joking. I can understand where she's coming from actually. I'm also someone who's very conscious about my weight and my health, my fitness and all of that. So yes, I can completely understand that white rice already has a bad reputation as being carb-heavy, make you fat and all of that. That's why people just run away from it or people think oh, yeah, you know, if I eat this, it's, it's bad for me.
Lee Tran Lam: Although Adetokunboh gets this perspective, he doesn’t actually agree with it. He points out he’s not a dietitian like Susie Burrell – but he is shaped by his personal experience.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: I've eaten rice my whole life, everyone I know, my friends, my family, we all eat rice, all our life, and we definitely not – we don't think rice is the enemy at all.
Lee Tran Lam: Maybe it’s not so much a question of quitting rice altogether, but how much rice you eat and what you actually eat with rice.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: Last night, I had rice with a spinach stew: efo riro, which is like this yummy spinach and I’ve got vegetables on the side and I’ve got the rice and then I add some plantains.
Jollof rice, we can eat it by itself – you know, with tomatoes, capsicums, your onions, we eat a lot of rice with stews as well. And some of those stews can be very healthy.
(Rice being poured)
Lee Tran Lam: I should point out that even though rice is a staple that’s literally eaten by half the planet, there are some people who may need to be cautious when consuming rice. People with diabetes, for instance, may need to be careful with a carb-rich food like rice, in order to keep blood glucose levels or so-called sugar spikes under control. It’s something that’s recommended in smaller serves for them. To give us a clearer picture about rice and its health impacts, let’s chat to an actual dietitian.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I'm Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, currently the program director of nutrition and food sciences here at the University Of South Australia. I'm also an accredited practicing dietitian. I've had almost over 30 years in the area of nutrition.
Rice has always been part of my diet and my upbringing. My background is Greek and my mum used to cook with rice a lot. We've got dolmades, which are vine leaves, and they're stuffed with rice and they had lots of beautiful herbs in there and that was probably my all-time favorite meal.
(Rice-cooking sounds)
Lee Tran Lam: Steamed, stewed, spiced and fried grains of rice have appeared in so many dishes around the world over the years. Yet today it’s not uncommon for people to refuse rice with their meal because they’re convinced it’s bad for you. Are they onto something or is rice unfairly maligned?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: One of the complicated things is there's so many mixed messages about whether rice is good for you. I think if we break it down, it comes down to both the type of rice and how it's cooked. So white rice is basically brown rice, but brown rice – to get it to white rice – the husk is taken off and it's polished up to look beautiful as it is.
Lee Tran Lam: Stripping that outer husk also strips many nutrients from white rice.
By retaining that husk, brown rice has more dietary fibre, which makes you feel fuller for longer. And it has more B1, which is vital – not having enough vitamin B can be pretty dangerous. In Japan, soldiers were fed white rice because it had a longer shelf life than brown rice – but the polished white grains made them prone to beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency that can be deadly. On the Gastro Obscura website, Anne Ewbank points out that during the 1904 war between the Japanese and Russian empires, beriberi killed 27,000 troops, “compared to 47,000 men killed by actual war wounds”.
Today, white rice is enriched with B vitamins, but brown rice is generally better for you. So does that mean brown rice should always be your number one choice?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: This is my personal view, I think you've also got to really enjoy the meal. So another favourite Greek dish I've got is called youvarlakia avgolemono salsa and that means little meatballs with an egg lemon sauce.
(Sound of egg being cracked and rice being cooked)
Lee Tran Lam: She points out when she switches it from the traditional white rice to brown rice …
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: It's just not the same thing.
Lee Tran Lam: But there are other rices. Wild rice, although a little pricier, gets a lot of nutritional ticks. And among white rice varieties, basmati is a better pick than jasmine because it has a lower GI. So you’ve probably heard people describe high-GI foods as giving them bigger and quicker sugar spikes, and low-GI foods as making them feel satiated for longer. GI has been referred to as a useful tool for people with diabetes. Here’s a proper explanation from Dr Evangeline about what the GI, or glycemic index is and why it matters.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So it's how quickly the blood glucose level rises after you've consumed a particular food. And the quicker it rises, the more likely it is that it's going to go over the safe limit that we call and cause potential problems for your health in terms of, you know, increasing your risk of metabolic disease and all those sorts of things. But you don't often eat rice in isolation.
For example, both of those, my favourite Greek dishes that I mentioned, have lemon added to them. And when you add acidity to food, it drops the glycemic index of that food. So talking about rice out of context, out of the meal, is a little bit weird, because everything else that's consumed is also important.
People often talk about rice, one of the reasons they avoid it is because they’re concerned they'll gain weight from it. And yes, rice does have kilojoules or calories, whatever you like to call it. And so yes, if you eat more than your daily quota of energy, kilojoules or calories, you will gain weight – that will happen whatever food you consume. So it's a really difficult one to answer, because yes, it is true, but it's context based.
Lee Tran Lam: Because are you replacing that rice with something a lot worse? And if you’re sizing up whether you should be eating rice – again, it depends on your portion and what you’re eating that rice with. If the grains are sharing a bowl with, say, some corn, avocado and tomato, well, these ingredients won’t kick up your kilojoule count too much, and they also add a lot of nutrients. Ditching rice isn’t exactly the answer – because carbs are vital to your diet, Evangeline points out, and it’s good to have a variety of them. Rice also has another nutritional ace up its sleeve: it contains resistant starch, which is a kind of fibre.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: The interesting thing with rice is that you can increase the resistant starch in it by cooking it and then cooling it. And you can even heat it again, it doesn't drop that resistant starch level again. So when you think about a lot of rice dishes, they're cooked and cooled, and then heated again: risotto, which can be done; your paella, arancini balls, sushi rolls.
Lee Tran Lam: She says bowel cancer is one of the most preventable cancers in Australia – and increasing your intake of resistant starch and fibre can help. So embracing these cooked-then-cooled rice dishes sounds good. But, and here’s the but …
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: But on cooking and cooling rice, we have another problem. We joke about it with the students, we could say it's a very serious problem. And that's because it's caused by a bacteria called Bacillus cereus. And what it does is, it's everywhere. It exists as spores, it's on our food, it's in flour, it's on rice, it's going to be on pasta. And what happens is when you cook it, you're activating the bacteria, and they release more spores, and they also release toxins. Rice is the famous one or infamous one I should say – the longer you leave it at room temperature, the more of these spores are going to be released, then the more risk you are of having food poisoning. And there's always a story every year about a uni student who's eaten the leftover bowl of pasta or rice that hasn't been refrigerated, and they've kept it out for a day or two or three or four and think it's okay.
Lee Tran Lam: But it’s not okay, they usually end up pretty sick from nausea, diarrhoea or vomiting or tragically much worse. In 2008, a 20-year-old student in Belgium ate spaghetti that was left out for five days and died of liver failure.
Bacillus cereus is heat-resistant – so cooking your food again won’t solve the problem, but this kind of food poisoning is still easily preventable.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: That's the important thing with rice and pasta, you need to pop it in the fridge so that you keep it safe. So we have a bit of a complex story there with rice, don't we? You can cook it and cool it and it's good for you. But cool it really quickly and put it back in the fridge, so it doesn't do any harm.
If you've left food out for more than two hours, it can't be returned to the fridge. And once it's been left out for more than four hours, it can't be consumed because the bacteria in there would have replicated to a dangerous situation.
Lee Tran Lam: Although we mainly covered white and brown rice in this episode, there are so many vibrant grains we didn’t even touch on.
Palisa Anderson: Rice isn't just one thing. There's so many different varieties in the rainbow of rice. It’s like anything in your diet – diversity is the best key.
So last night we ate one of my favourite red rices, it's called Khao Niew Leum Pua. It's actually sticky rice, it's a red sticky rice. In Thai, the name of it is Leum Pua, which means 'this rice is so good, I've forgotten about my husband'.
That's how reverential rice is to Thai people. Rice is better than your husband. Ah, it's delicious. It's nutty. It's rich. It has a lot of fibre in it, because it’s a whole husk. So when it cooks, it gives you a real kind of popping chewy texture.
Lee Tran Lam: And the way we can use rice actually goes well beyond the different types we can cook with.
In Japan – a country that was once called the "land where the vigorous ears of rice ripen" – people would buy houses using rice as currency. Leftover parts of rice were incorporated into pastes for book binding and traditionally used to produce everything from pickles to face scrubs. And so many of the country’s dining staples – from soy sauce and miso to sake – are made with koji, a starter that’s derived from rice.
Palisa Anderson: Rice is more than just the grain. It's like, what do we do with the rest of the plant as well, right? Like in our traditional cultures, that was our building block for our homes, literally.
And not just in Thailand – in Japan as well. Tatami mats are made of rice stalks. I lived in one of those old Japanese houses where the tatami mats would change and so your tatami mat in the late summer would be green, because the stalks are still green. The smell of your house was incredible, because it's the smell of drying rice stalks in your house. And then over the, over the year, it would slowly dry out and start to get kind of that beautiful kind of light golden straw colour brown and then in the springtime, you’d change it again.
Lee Tran Lam: Rice also has an incredible bonding power.
Adetokunboh Adeniyi: When we first open, the first group of people that used to come in, no questions asked were Vietnamese people, Chinese, Korean, Filipinos, Cambodians. They just used to stroll in because what they used to do was, they used to look up the menu, and they would read all the description and they would go, “yes, I know what that is. Yes, rice, rice rice. Yes, yes, yes, done!”
I'm saying they're Vietnamese because of their background. These kids are all born and raised in Australia. So one of the things I realised was, the same way Africans never move away from the cuisine no matter where they are in the world, they were the same. The Vietnamese kids grew up eating Vietnamese food. They were still very connected to their culture. They would come in, they would eat everything, they would bring their friends in. I was like, “oh, it makes sense now.” Rice was such a connector for all of us. Because all of us ate rice.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford, Joel Supple & Caroline Gates, for their contributions and guidance. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we’re chasing carbs and leaving a trail of crumbs as we explore our changing attitudes to bread. Follow on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
