Food: Farming is Only the Beginning
If there’s one point I find myself making over and over and over again about food, it’s that farming is only the beginning.
So do take a look at this great piece in the New Yorker by Nicky Twilley. Local grains enthusiasts have found rice varieties that will grown in the cold conditions of the American Northeast. Great.
The problem is that this doesn’t produce luscious local rice unless the grains can be processed.
Rice is covered by a really hard hull.
And hulling by hand is hard, hard work, even to get brown rice, let alone to polish it to white rice.
Hulling Rice by Hand. Luzon, Philippines, early 20th c. Creative Commons. J. Tewell Collection
This is why when the Japanese started growing rice in Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, they immediately imported mechanical rice mills.*
Haraguchi Rice Mill, Kauai, Hawaii.
So small cheap rice mills are a must in New York and Vermont. And because there are so few growers and because they produce such tiny amounts, the mills must be really cheap and deal with really small quantities. Nicky Twilley describes their savior, who is producing a Rube Goldberg do-it-yourself bicycle-driven table top miller. So again, do read her story.
And what her story goes to show is that transferring farming techniques from one area to another also means transferring (or in this case re-inventing) processing techniques.
If you lived in Japan (or India), you could take your 15 lb bag of unhulled rice to the local vending machine (and here’s another Japanese rice huller) pop in the equivalent of a dollar, select brown, white or mochi rice, tip your grains into a hopper, press the button, and hey presto, your kind of rice will pour out the bottom. As easy as grinding coffee beans.
(In fact, the original machines for rice milling were also used for coffee).
Engelberg huller for rice and coffee. 1904 advertisement, approximately twenty years after the original invention
So will the day come when rice hulling vending machines will be found in the US Northeast? If not, it will remain a hobby crop.
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Thanks to Cara de Silva for pointing out the New Yorker story.
*If you are even on Kauai, do take the tour of the Haraguchi rice mill. It’s a fascinating family and food story (and you get taro thrown in as well). And it’s in the stunning Hanalei Valley.
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