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> Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? Everywhere. > During what centuries roughly? At all times up until at least the l

> Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? Everywhere. > During what centuries roughly? At all times up until at least the late 19th century. > What is your evidence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice > I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored. That's insane. White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it.

hollerith 2y ago
> White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it Here is someone producing rice without any machine that is “95% white” (less than 5 percent of the bran remains). In fact, when using this primitive tech the bran and germ seem to come off as an unavoidable side effect of removing the husk, which no one suggests should be left on the rice grain and no one eats AFAIK. To make it easy for you to verify my “95% white” assertion, I have “jumped” to a close-up of the rice just before cooking, but of course to verify that no machine is used, you have to watch from the start of the video (to minute 9). https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525 https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Nobody said it could not be done. From you video it's hard to judge if it is or not extremely labor intensive, but the description of the video seems to suggest it “the fact that it's very tiring and laborious”. If it takes 2 hours, for instance, of additional work to get such rice for every meal without any nutritional benefit, people aren't gonna do it on a daily basis and only do so for special events and stuff while keeping eating brown rice most of the time.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all. The video starts with harvesting the rice and ends with cooking the rice. If you are not a visual person but rather an auditory person, you can hear a narrator in this next video say, "pounding . . . removes the husk and the bran layers" (emphasis mine). Rice with the bran layer removed is white rice. The technique (mortar and pestle) depicted in the 2 videos I linked to seems to be able to produce only rice that is between about 90% and 99% white, and to get the 90%-white rice, you probably have to put up with an annoying amount of inedible rice husk in your food because (again) removing the husk removes the bran as a side effect. The second video goes on to say that "there are some locals" (in the Philippines) who are still using the technique: https://youtu.be/bkSEpVnlVv8?si=36mTEWV4xM1xtsfB&t=162 https://youtu.be/bkSEpVnlVv8?si=36mTEWV4xM1xtsfB&t=162 --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      > The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all. But what tells you that it is the default process for making rice? There could be an easy process to make brown rice, and this “tiring and laborious” process to make white rice, and such a video would tell you nothing about the former. > --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750. The thing is that the literature talks about the fact that people used to eat brown rice in most of Asia, and when it comes to evidence, an individual YouTube video doesn't weight as much as you think it does. Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries.
      - hollerith 2y ago
        >Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries. I picked 1750 because that is the earliest date before which I am sure that the people who eat a lot of rice would definitely not have had access to precisely-machined steel parts. I strongly suspect that precisely-machined steel parts are necessary to turn just-harvested rice plants into brown rice: older rice-processing methods can only produce white rice (more precisely, rice with at least 90% or 95% of the bran removed whereas modern brown rice has most of the bran intact). (Precisely-machined parts as also needed, I suspect, to produce rice with no bran at all attached -- 100%-white rice we might call it -- where most of the grains are not broken into pieces.) Both of the creators of the 2 Youtube videos I linked to say that when they were children, their families of origin used the technique depicted in the videos to get the rice they needed to survive. The technique makes white rice and cannot be modified to make brown rice: one of the creators outright says that the process of removing the husk also removes the bran. If there is some other technique that does not rely on post-1750 technology that can make brown rice (husk removed, but bran left on the grain), why weren't subsistence rice farmers using it? Either it does not exist (my guess) or the rice farmers prefer white rice to brown rice. I know that many internet commentators say that traditional subsistence rice farmers since the dawn of rice culture ate brown rice. But lots of falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet.

hollerith 2y ago

> White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it Here is someone producing rice without any machine that is “95% white” (less than 5 percent of the bran remains). In fact, when using this primitive tech the bran and germ seem to come off as an unavoidable side effect of removing the husk, which no one suggests should be left on the rice grain and no one eats AFAIK. To make it easy for you to verify my “95% white” assertion, I have “jumped” to a close-up of the rice just before cooking, but of course to verify that no machine is used, you have to watch from the start of the video (to minute 9). https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525 https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525

littlestymaar 2y ago
Nobody said it could not be done. From you video it's hard to judge if it is or not extremely labor intensive, but the description of the video seems to suggest it “the fact that it's very tiring and laborious”. If it takes 2 hours, for instance, of additional work to get such rice for every meal without any nutritional benefit, people aren't gonna do it on a daily basis and only do so for special events and stuff while keeping eating brown rice most of the time.
- hollerith 2y ago
  The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all. The video starts with harvesting the rice and ends with cooking the rice. If you are not a visual person but rather an auditory person, you can hear a narrator in this next video say, "pounding . . . removes the husk and the bran layers" (emphasis mine). Rice with the bran layer removed is white rice. The technique (mortar and pestle) depicted in the 2 videos I linked to seems to be able to produce only rice that is between about 90% and 99% white, and to get the 90%-white rice, you probably have to put up with an annoying amount of inedible rice husk in your food because (again) removing the husk removes the bran as a side effect. The second video goes on to say that "there are some locals" (in the Philippines) who are still using the technique: https://youtu.be/bkSEpVnlVv8?si=36mTEWV4xM1xtsfB&t=162 https://youtu.be/bkSEpVnlVv8?si=36mTEWV4xM1xtsfB&t=162 --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all. But what tells you that it is the default process for making rice? There could be an easy process to make brown rice, and this “tiring and laborious” process to make white rice, and such a video would tell you nothing about the former. > --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750. The thing is that the literature talks about the fact that people used to eat brown rice in most of Asia, and when it comes to evidence, an individual YouTube video doesn't weight as much as you think it does. Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      >Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries. I picked 1750 because that is the earliest date before which I am sure that the people who eat a lot of rice would definitely not have had access to precisely-machined steel parts. I strongly suspect that precisely-machined steel parts are necessary to turn just-harvested rice plants into brown rice: older rice-processing methods can only produce white rice (more precisely, rice with at least 90% or 95% of the bran removed whereas modern brown rice has most of the bran intact). (Precisely-machined parts as also needed, I suspect, to produce rice with no bran at all attached -- 100%-white rice we might call it -- where most of the grains are not broken into pieces.) Both of the creators of the 2 Youtube videos I linked to say that when they were children, their families of origin used the technique depicted in the videos to get the rice they needed to survive. The technique makes white rice and cannot be modified to make brown rice: one of the creators outright says that the process of removing the husk also removes the bran. If there is some other technique that does not rely on post-1750 technology that can make brown rice (husk removed, but bran left on the grain), why weren't subsistence rice farmers using it? Either it does not exist (my guess) or the rice farmers prefer white rice to brown rice. I know that many internet commentators say that traditional subsistence rice farmers since the dawn of rice culture ate brown rice. But lots of falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet.