Wild rice, another food ruined by corporations
If you haven’t yet read Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, give it a go. But of course it’s not just tomatoes: the constant drive to grow profits means an on-going effort to cut costs (with concomitant reductions in quality, generally).
Wild rice, for example, is a delicious food, traditionally harvest by poling boats among the rice, bending the heads of ripe seeds over the boat, and whacking them. Some seeds fall into the water, providing next year’s crop.
Industry, though, hates labor-intensive (expensive) methods and works to increase scale by means of machinery. The wild-rice varieties that are hand-harvest are unsuitable for large-scale machine harvesting—the heads shatter too easily, the hull is too thin, etc. So the companies went to work and managed to breed a rice that has a tough, black hull and can be machine harvested. It’s not very good, but: it makes a lot of money.
The Wife just had some of the wild rice I cooked last night. I buy hand-harvested good wild rice. (Note that 1/2 lb costs 8.50 but 1 lb is $12.50: makes no sense to buy 1/2 lb.) She loved it. Note also: like true rice, wild rice contains no gluten.
Memories; my parents ‘farmed’ every square inch of soil on our property in Jamaica, Queens;
tomatoes front and back, from seeds they brought with them from Greece. Every fall they would take in whatever was still green and let them sit for weeks in the attic to turn ripe; they would also produce seed for the next year (making seed from tomato is a messy business).
Every morning, 7 days a week, my father would pick off caterpillars and such by hand, and pull weeds by hand as well. Was it worth it?
If you’ve never had a garden grown tomato you’d never know how much.
The stuff I buy in the stores is nonsense.
I tried growing my own the year after after my mother passed away; I found out that you can’t have tomato plants and lawn sprinklers; water on the leaves destroys them.
Zach
9 October 2011 at 7:53 am