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>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

>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 3y ago
Replying to myself with a correction: "the earliest date" -> "the latest date".
littlestymaar 3y ago
> 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. Except we're not talking about “people talking about stuff on the internet” but dedicated literature on food production in Asia, which, albeit not perfect, is far less prone to propagate urban legends than internet forums.
- hollerith 3y ago
  Can you tell me where in this "dedicated literature on food production in Asia" it says or implies that people made or ate brown rice before 1750? I'm interested in learning more and in eliminating any false beliefs I have.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    The sources are given in introduction to the acoup blog post I posted elsewhere in this thread, and to which you responded: > I relied primary for this on Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (1980) and F. Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986) which were recommended to me by specialists in the field. The latter is a wealth of technical details on rice cultivation, although it is as focused on the transition to mechanization and modern agriculture as to the conditions of pre-modern rice cultivation.) Again, I know nothing about rice cultivation except what I read in this blog post, but the source is an historian and he himself is quoting the work of people who have dedicated a good part of their academic career to this topic. They might still be wrong − academia isn't perfect − , but it would need far more than a Youtube video presenting one way to process rice as a rebuttal for their work.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      Thanks for the elaboration. For what it is worth, the assertion in the post by acoup you linked to that I am most confident is false is, "prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor". I believe that to be false because I am confident that using the primitive technique depicted in both of the videos I linked to, continuing to pound the rice continues to remove rice bran with the result that with enough pounding, the fraction of bran left on the grain can be driven down to 0.1% or lower, which I'm sure no one would call brown rice. This "0.1%-brown" rice might consist mostly of grains that have broken into 2 or 3 or 4 pieces, but I've cooked and eaten white rice like that in the past, which is how I know it is perfectly edible and as far as I can tell just as nutritious as intact grains. (The broken pieces I got were the product of modern manufacturing: probably the factory has an easy way to separate broken pieces from intact grains, and for cosmetic purposes, omitted broken pieces from their product, and then they gave the broken pieces to a food bank or something like that.)

hollerith 3y ago

Replying to myself with a correction: "the earliest date" -> "the latest date".

littlestymaar 3y ago

> 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. Except we're not talking about “people talking about stuff on the internet” but dedicated literature on food production in Asia, which, albeit not perfect, is far less prone to propagate urban legends than internet forums.

hollerith 3y ago
Can you tell me where in this "dedicated literature on food production in Asia" it says or implies that people made or ate brown rice before 1750? I'm interested in learning more and in eliminating any false beliefs I have.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  The sources are given in introduction to the acoup blog post I posted elsewhere in this thread, and to which you responded: > I relied primary for this on Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (1980) and F. Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986) which were recommended to me by specialists in the field. The latter is a wealth of technical details on rice cultivation, although it is as focused on the transition to mechanization and modern agriculture as to the conditions of pre-modern rice cultivation.) Again, I know nothing about rice cultivation except what I read in this blog post, but the source is an historian and he himself is quoting the work of people who have dedicated a good part of their academic career to this topic. They might still be wrong − academia isn't perfect − , but it would need far more than a Youtube video presenting one way to process rice as a rebuttal for their work.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    Thanks for the elaboration. For what it is worth, the assertion in the post by acoup you linked to that I am most confident is false is, "prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor". I believe that to be false because I am confident that using the primitive technique depicted in both of the videos I linked to, continuing to pound the rice continues to remove rice bran with the result that with enough pounding, the fraction of bran left on the grain can be driven down to 0.1% or lower, which I'm sure no one would call brown rice. This "0.1%-brown" rice might consist mostly of grains that have broken into 2 or 3 or 4 pieces, but I've cooked and eaten white rice like that in the past, which is how I know it is perfectly edible and as far as I can tell just as nutritious as intact grains. (The broken pieces I got were the product of modern manufacturing: probably the factory has an easy way to separate broken pieces from intact grains, and for cosmetic purposes, omitted broken pieces from their product, and then they gave the broken pieces to a food bank or something like that.)