It was only about 7,000 years ago that our ancestors invented ways to domesticate animals and grow grains and fruits, thus changing life on earth, at least for humans, from nomadic hunting and gathering to a more sedentary lifestyle. The plow and the alluvial fields between the Tigris and the Euphrates yielded the earliest known agricultural society.
In those short 7,000 years, humans have developed markets, societies, cities and empires. We gradually invented arts and sciences, religions and politics, money and nuclear bombs. In every field, life is improved because succeeding generations built on the achievements of those preceding them.
Through all human evolution, the tiny, simple, even elegant, grain of rice has sustained us, and contributed to our current expansion to some 6.5 billion people on earth. Perhaps more than any other staple food, rice is ubiquitous, versatile and nourishing. Rice is used in virtually every
diet from Tunisia to Taiwan, from Burma to Brazil. Rice is cooked
in thousands of ways, from the simple steamed rice to elaborate dim sum; poor people mix in other grains to stretch their meager meals while others celebrate with rice wine. Anthropologists would have a field day collecting stories in virtually every culture centering on rice. It is, without exaggeration, the staple of life.
Thus it is disturbing to read in the news recently that the world
is short on rice, that many traditionally rice-exporting countries have stopped their shipment to ensure their own adequate domestic supply, and that food riots have broken out around the world.
Even more disturbing is the cause for this shortage: Apparently some are turning other grains, notably corn, into fuel to run our automobiles and other machines, thus depriving us of a sizable portion of the world’s food supply. And farmers are paid better to produce fuel than to harvest food.
The world is now teetering on the verge of famine in many places at one time. Of course, we have experienced drought, flood, pestilence and other calamities before. From Noah’s story in the Book of Genesis to the Great Leap Forward campaign in China under Mao Zedong, millions of people have perished from lack of food. During World War II, the Japanese burned Vietnamese rice as fuel and caused upward of two million deaths from starvation. Even today, in this rich country, soup kitchens still do a brisk business. In my hometown of San Francisco, Glide Church and St. Anthony feed thousands of people a day.
So, perhaps for the first time in our human saga, we are using grains, on a systemic scale, not to feed ourselves, but to maintain a lifestyle that we either have accustomed to or would like to be accustomed to. Is it possible that we are opening another Pandora’s box?
Vu-Duc Vuong is a teacher and writer in the Bay Area.