3 ms·

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

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

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.)