Replacing rice as the world's most consumed food

[cornivore]

This isn't very philosophical, but I tried making Spanish Barley instead of Spanish Rice, and ate 3-1/2 quarts of it, must be good... so I'll make it again and maybe call it burgundy barley, since they typically call the other dish red rice.



Looks like someone made a Barley Pilaf too.

Well barley isn't gluten free, so I can see why it wouldn't be considered equivalent to rice for those who can't eat gluten. Otherwise I think it's good for making similar dishes to these made with rice.

The food should ideally have an extremely high yield, be nutritious, and require little water to produce.

Something else to consider about water though is how much it takes to cook the grain. Now looking at a recipe for Spanish Barley or Spanish Rice (by Quaker circa 1969), it says that when the same amount of rice is used instead of barley, it takes one cup less water to cook the rice (for every 3/4 cup of grain). I'm sure that cooking pasta soaks up more water than rice too. Rice also cooks 4 times faster according to that recipe for simmering one versus another, so less energy would be used to cook it than some other grains, and maybe it's more efficient than most in preparation versus production, which could mean there's no practical difference between them.

[brimstoneSalad]

Something else to consider about water though is how much it takes to cook the grain. Now looking at a recipe for Spanish Barley or Spanish Rice (by Quaker circa 1969), it says that when the same amount of rice is used instead of barley, it takes one cup less water to cook the rice (for every 3/4 cup of grain). I'm sure that cooking pasta soaks up more water than rice too. Rice also cooks 4 times faster according to that recipe for simmering one versus another, so less energy would be used to cook it than some other grains, and maybe it's more efficient than most in preparation versus production, which could mean there's no practical difference between them.

Cooking water is dwarfed by agricultural water, although cooking time is meaningful due to energy use. You can cut water and energy use down by using an insulated crock pot or pressure cooker/instapot with a lid. Barely heats up your house at all either, which is a benefit in the summer.

[cornivore]

I guess the same goes for rice cookers (or if that's an instapot)... I just tried some red rice from Thailand, and the cooking instructions listed far less water than it took me to cook it in a regular pot (so that was no different than cooking barley, unless I did this too long—seeing how soft it would get).

Coincidentally, I was wondering why I hadn't seen red rice very often, and found out that (aside from being studied in Italy) it is considered an invasive weed here, because it is a low yield crop. Although there's a recent story about a new kind of red rice, which is higher yield, and grown in the U.S. So I'm thinking rice will be the replacement for rice, as it were. Some say the benefit-cost ratio is the highest on rice farms (compared to wheat and barley). Well, I saw another brand of the imported red rice at a price five times higher in another store, so I guess rice is the gourmet grain for some people (it even cost more than the red quinoa, or tha'ts not exactly a grain).

Anyway, what am I talking about? Corn is listed as the most consumed staple food (here, and here)... looks like more than twice as much maize was produced than rice last year. We need more corn syrup, you see.

[cornivore]

Corn is also as efficient to cook as any other grain, or more than most. I tried eating some white masa with soy sauce, as a replacement for white rice, and it's actually about the same, flavor wise, so I guess all of that cooking is for texture. What a bunch of fluff. You know, grains can be cooked as flour much faster than whole grain, if you like mush. Well, fresh corn is quick to cook in a few minutes, but that's more like a vegetable. A whole grains cookbook says couscous takes 5 minutes to cook in a conventional pot, bulgur takes 10, buckwheat and quinoa take 15, millet and teff take 20, amaranth and kalijira rice take 25, and the rest take 45 minutes to an hour. As ground up flour, though, they all take a few minutes (and couscous is close to being a flour or meal, like cornmeal, except it gets fluffy). I'm not counting instant rice because it is pre-cooked, and has a weird aftertaste to me. Masa (hominy) is pre-cooked to some extent, but the process prevents niacin deficiency when the corn is eaten as a staple food (and includes much more calcium, which is an important finding for populations who do not consume diets high in this essential mineral, according to the FAO). Otherwise, at least one brand of cornmeal is enriched with B vitamins, etc., so corn can be one of the more nutritious grains, particularly if eaten in various forms (and it has higher values of most nutrients than rice, especially uncooked, or rice can also be fortified: "Micronutrient deficiencies of public health significance are widespread in most countries consuming high levels of rice; thus rice fortification has the potential to help aid vulnerable populations that are currently not reached by wheat or maize flour fortification programmes" ).

The most consumed foods have to be the most fortified foods to prevent malnutrition. Another thing is that the more these staple foods can be kept in production, and made equivalent with fortification, the more food security and interchangeability there is, in case one crop got wiped out (if everyone decided to rely on it). I wouldn't recommend relying so much on rice bran though: "Rice bran contained concentrations of total and inorganic arsenic approximately seven and nine times higher, respectively, than those found in the corresponding polished rice. The levels of inorganic arsenic in the three rice types of both polished and brown rice were within the only published regulatory limit of 200 ng/g."

However, man cannot live on maize alone. For one‐third of the world's population, namely in sub‐Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, humans subsist on maize as a staple food but malnutrition pervades. Strategies to further improve kernel macronutrient and micronutrient quality and quantities are under intense investigation. Although exogenous fortification, such as addition of multivitamin premixes to maize flour, has been successful... Maize: A Paramount Staple Crop in the Context of Global Nutrition

It's pretty popular in Asian markets too, besides rice obviously, there's even corn tea. So it is prepared simply for flavor also (there are said to be over a dozen different aromas and flavors in rice, while there are different types of corn as well, such as supersweet). I was thinking rye had a distinctive flavor too, but it was really caraway...