Lunch
There was a morning one day last spring; I was biking into work. I work in a library at a large public university so invariably this involves emerging into a roiling bustle of people as I get on campus. On the other side of the street I saw a beautiful women, lovely and graceful. She was in plain fact hot. "I never get to know women like that" I thought. However; as I passed and glanced over I realized it was Huyen Trân. For the remaining fifth of a mile, till I got to the bike rack and locked up, this gave me a few things to think over.
One thing I've never done in the seven or so years I've been writing to this web log is write about food. I know I eat. Well, indirectly I know this. The government's height to weight ratio scale advises me, for the data points at hand, that I am in no imminent danger of starving. I thought perhaps I could write a little about lunch which is really my favorite meal. More particularly by way of illustrating contrast, some of my lunches against some of Trân's
A word about my lunches. If asked in the late afternoon all I could really tell you is that it was probably ham and cheese, or tuna fish, maybe hummus (if I bought lunch out at the food coop that day), but I would be fairly certain it was a sandwich, because it's always a sandwich. Now let's consider five Viet Girl lunches. These are not recipes, I don't know enough about food to set down recipes, more breve descriptive statements based on observation and some restrained inquiry. To the ends of my limited ability to even describe such things. However, I can assure you these all appeared smelled and tasted completely wonderful. Concerning containers and heating, generally it was her preference not to use microwave reheating but to set a tupperware or gladware type container into a larger one of very hot water. For details beyond my notes you will have to ask her.
- Rice (generally ordinary white rice often but not always with soy sauce as accompaniment); mustard greens, a pickeled egg.
- Rice; lettuce & celery, ground fish, with fish sauce and lemon.
- Rice; pulled squid (thin, perforated almost sheet-like in appearance), with red pepper, lettuce.
- Rice; thin tenderloin roast beef, mint, in a thin lemon, garlic & red onion broth (the beef boiled briefly in water salt lemon, skimed, squeezed, dried, then introduced to the broth.) salted and peppered to taste.
- Rice; shredded pork, a thin cabbage soup or maybe it was a stew.
- Bonus round: Rice; a little ground pork, a green onion, with a single, but very large goose egg. Obtained, I was told in Germantown, near Gaithersburg.
As rice seemed to be the unifying principle to Trân's lunches. Some thoughts on rice are appropriate here. What is rice?
Rice - Wikipedia. Rice is a simple grass. There are two (domesticated) species: Oryza Sativa, and Oryza glaberrima. There are three types of the former which constitute most of what we know as rice: Indica, Sinica-Japonica, Javonica. These break down by how they are grown. In a field nourished only by rain water is dry rice. Or dependent on irrigation systems or river flooding and immersed in water for most of their growing cycle is wet rice. This rice is most common and is of traditionally higher yield, but natively rice is a marsh grass and evolved to take in nutrients in a water bourne environment. What meaning has Rice though? At one point Nina, another coworker who is from the Philippines, happened by, "Rice" she said, "My husband likes rice - everyday - I do not like it so much." Trân glanced up at her and briefly a look passed over her face as if some grand apostasy had appeared before her (it was very similar to the look she gave me when she learned I was protestant). She declined to respond. Rice is food. A synomyn complete in itself for the entire idea of nourishment and health. One might almost say Rice is life. If that seems an over-statement, that did not stop the FAO from giving a book that title a few years ago
Rice is life : International Year of Rice 2004 and its implementation [WorldCat.org] ). Even Rice Almanac lets you know from the cover how it feels
Rice almanac : source book for the most important economic activity on earth [WorldCat.org]. In marketing rice: purity and wholeness a perfection of appearence are interwoven completely in the trade. The milling process involves cleaning pearling buffing and polishing steps (with talc) before rice is presented for grading. The best rice is unbroken and jewel-like in appearance. Rice is the embodiment of culture, ways of life. The measure of seasons and days. In the transplanting of the seedlings, a hand-measure of aesthetic and orderly line across the land. Rice exemplfies systematic agriculture, the effect of technology old and new. Rice was a tricky crop and required study of weather, nature and accumulation of knowledge to master. In the last few hundred years it was understood that rice wanted civil engineering; vast manufactured irrigation systems extending hundreds of square miles in order to flourish. This led to rice's triumphant rise from luxury crop; desired and with ancient pedigree, but not dominant. Not widely available at affordable cost - to an international traded commodity and dietary staple. It is with this over arching idea that Latham opens his overview of current rice practices Rice : the primary commodity [WorldCat.org]. This is a small and somewhat recent book on rice. The big book on rice is Grist's
Rice [WorldCat.org]. The last steps in this story are the green revolution of the 60's and 70's, building on the now reliable crops that irrigation systems engendered. And establishment of all-critical milling operations closer to regional centers of production. So that surplus rice could be made a commodity, traded and earn money for the farmer. Since Latham wrote his book, which I read most of, Vietnam has assumed one of the top positions in international rice trade and even has a web site dedicated to just that
Vietnamese Rice | Home. Success brings challenge, though. The rate of ever-increasing yields is tapering off, the rate of world population increase is not. Demand and price are up considerably particularly this year. There is increasing fear that rice could become unaffordable to some dependant on it. This has placed a critical focus on Catholic Charities such as
Operation Rice Bowl. In Asia nearly all cultivatable land is already in production, although in many places capital investment in infrastructure (irrigation) has waned dropping productivity. There has been a diminishing return to investment on new hybrid introduction which must be continued to stay ahead of pests. The increasing costs of modern fertilizers for the hybrids already narrowed the measure of yield against cost. All this has left the International Rice Research Institute - IRRI.org or Rice Web (IRRI) the premier rice reseach institute in Los Banos, Republic of the Philippines, set up with Ford and Rockefeller foundation funding in the 1960's looking for a new break through or new land to bring under cultivation
Addendum: Feeling guilty for have reworked Trân's lunch recipes into a single paragraph rather than a fuller treatment I had originally intended. I talked to her about these few things on rice I had just learned. Discovering then that after Saigon fell and for the years her father was imprisoned, her mother ran a small rice farm, ten acres or so, in the Mekong delta. Somewhere in the vicinity of Vinh Long I think, and this is where Trân lived when she was young. Their farm even included its own milling, polishing grading, and packing facility. Which she indicated was largely run without the contributions of electrical power. She knew all about voracious planthoppers, the problem of lodging stalks, and the protective little fish (and crabs she says) that live in the flooded paddies, which are mostly smart enough to swim away with the water when the paddies are drained. She allowed herself a moment to reflect on the modest fullness and self sufficiency of the small farm life. Trân, it turns out, knew more about rice culture than I will ever be able to learn. But even this teaches me.
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