On Brown Rice

In the mornings, before I leave for work, I will start some rice in the rice cooker.

One of my strategies for eating well is to know my weaknesses.  One of my weaknesses is at night, when I’m tired.  I make poor nutritional decisions.  It’s just a bad habit.  When I come through the door, I want to eat something.  I want it to be hot and filling.

If there isn’t something healthy to eat, I’ll scrounge around for whatever I can find.  This can result in less than optimal life fueling.  Impromptu cheese burritos or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I have less will power at night to make good decisions.

I know it’s a habit, and habits are hard.  I have a few strategies to work with this habit.  If you remember the key to successfully changing behavior vis-à-vis habits is not willpower.  That’s a low-percentage bet. “I just won’t eat junky food at night!” is a losing strategy.  The key to changing behavior is to co-opt the habit.

If I start something in the rice cooker, whether it be rice or beans or some other healthier food stock, it can cook all day and be ready to eat when I walk through the door.  Even if I eat the whole 2 cups worth, I’m still coming out ahead of the game by avoiding a sleeve of cookies or chips.  It levergaes the existing bad habit for a better outcome.

Because, at the end of the day (pun intended) I’m just trying to eat better, so making healthier food the path of least resistance is a win.

The people who follow the keto or protein diets don’t like to eat rice.  They consider it a bit like pasta.  White and refined and full of bad carbohydrates.  I get it.  But that’s not the rice I cook.  At a bare minimum I cook brown rice, the brownest rice I can find to buy in bulk.

Which is not as easy to find as you think.  In your standard American supermarket, it’s hard to find high quality brown rice in bulk.  As my radical-vegan friends will tell you the food-industrial complex does not want you eating that.  Well, actually, the food industrial complex doesn’t care what you eat, as long as it is efficient and profitable – which means they want you to buy something more processed.

Why?

Processing is where the food processors make their money.  This, in the business world is known as ‘value add’.  If you can take the raw material and add value to it through processing, you get paid for that value.  If you just pick it and present it, you don’t get paid for processing.

That’s why most of the foods, even the staple foods, like rice, are highly processed in the American supermarket.  That’s where the money is.  It also, by natural extension, eliminates the variety of the raw materials.

Not the variety of the goods on offer.  You can get a constantly changing rainbow of variety in the processed foods.  This variety is created through processing.  You can get the strawberry pancake mix and the blueberry pancake mix and the boysenberry pancake mix, but it’s all the same processed mix.  The same raw materials.

This variety is processed or value-added in the business sense.  The business gets paid for the variety created through processing, and it is their way of differentiating to create premiums that drive profit.

But, the raw material, the grains going into the big machine are the same. Efficient production, since the beginning of the industrial revolution has relied on driving out variability. In production, variability is bad.  Variability reduces quality.  Variability increases costs.

Because of this the varieties of rice and apples and corn tend to be skinnied down to those that can be farmed consistently without variability on an industrial scale.  This is a long way of saying – having varieties of brown rice doesn’t scale well or add to the bottom line.

Those varieties become a specialty business.  The specialty businesses need to charge more because their production isn’t as efficient or at the same scale.  This is a long way of saying, if I want some wild rice to eat, I have to buy it by the small bag and pay 3 times as much as the processed white rice.

Into the rice cooker I put whatever the least processed rice I can find is and leave it to cook all day.  When I walk through the door, I can gorge myself of hot, sticky rice or use that rice as the base for some other foods.  It’s something to look forward to.

The great loss here is that, if you use healthy as your measuring device, the variety is where the value is.  It’s the brown-ness of the brown rice that makes it healthy.  It’s the variability and variety of the wild grains that gives us something unique that we need.  The odd-shaped, the strange-colored, and the unique flavors way out on the tail end of the spectrum are where some of the special stuff our bodies need lies.

Now, before you yell at your phone in a loud, angry, accusatorial manner accusing me of being a hippy-dippy-communist-pinko-anti-business- freak-a-zoid, I have nothing against mass production or efficiency.  I’m just saying it drives out variety.  As a matter of fact, as a dyed in the wool capitalist I recognize that efficiency drives out cost and waste for everyone and for the whole ecosystem – which is a good thing.

I won’t go too far down this path, but one of the promises of the new smart technology is that we may be able to get both mass production efficiencies with mas customization personalization.  And that’s cool.

But maybe we have burned in a cultural groove, a love of mass production and a cultural drive to kill off variety in all it’s wonderful forms? This is the metaphor for our world today.  Why are we constantly trying to drive out variety from our world? Why force sameness on everyone and everything in society?

It is in the variety of our world, each specimen having its own strengths that when combined make us wholly strong and less fragile.

There’s nothing evil in being efficient.  The value of mass production is its efficiency.  That efficiency means that there are fewer resources required to produce the end product.  From the production point of view, it’s a win.  It costs less to make and therefore less to sell.  The percentage of your personal resources and the total resources required to acquire it is smaller as well.

Removing the variability is a great saving.

But it make us fragile and specific.

I think the real goal should be the end goal, whether it’s food or society, to have the healthiest most robust population.

Anyhow, that’s my brown rice story.

Sometimes I make beans.  Don’t get me started on beans.