Replacing rice as the world's most consumed food

[Jebus]

Let's pretend we could overcome the masses' psychological attachment to rice and replace it with something better. What should that option be? The food should ideally have an extremely high yield, be nutritious, and require little water to produce.

It is really a shame that governments around the world have done so little to reverse rice consumption. Imagine the health and environmental benefits that could be achieved if it were replaced with something better.

[brimstoneSalad]

If people can get over their aversion to genetic engineering, we could stop rice from producing so much methane, stop it from depositing arsenic in the grain, and load it up with vitamin A, just to start.
Rice could be a great crop, particularly if we add these changes to more antioxidant and protein rich rice strains.

Otherwise, it really depends on the region. Quinoa is a great option in some high elevation areas. Otherwise corn and soy are both high yielding and are good in combination; maybe some kind of corn/soy based orzo could be made to replace rice.

[EquALLity]

Question...

Do you think there's a problem with pasta? It can replace rice in most situations, and it's healthier, because it's often fortified with essential nutrients and can be whole wheat.

[brimstoneSalad]

Question...

Do you think there's a problem with pasta? It can replace rice in most situations, and it's healthier, because it's often fortified with essential nutrients and can be whole wheat.

Whole wheat pasta is pretty good. It would be great if whole wheat orzo was more widely available, but there are some good noodle shape options.

I don't know if white pasta is better or worse than brown rice in terms of health. It is fortified, but the lack of fiber could be a problem.

[EquALLity]

Question...

Do you think there's a problem with pasta? It can replace rice in most situations, and it's healthier, because it's often fortified with essential nutrients and can be whole wheat.

Whole wheat pasta is pretty good. It would be great if whole wheat orzo was more widely available, but there are some good noodle shape options.

I don't know if white pasta is better or worse than brown rice in terms of health. It is fortified, but the lack of fiber could be a problem.

Really? I'm surprised brown rice is as good as white pasta.

Or does that mean white pasta bad? :/ Why does it have to taste better? :///

[brimstoneSalad]

Really? I'm surprised brown rice is as good as white pasta.

Or does that mean white pasta bad? :/ Why does it have to taste better? :///

Whole foods tend to be better. The process of refining wheat to make white flour removes a lot of fiber and beneficial phytonutrients, and a lot of micro nutrients (only some of which are added back in). Phytonutrients don't show up on cronometer, but you can see the difference in other nutrients.

White pasta tastes better because it has more sweet delicious starch in it, and less coarse and gritty fiber. The germ is also removed, which imparts an earthy taste to any flour that isn't freshly ground due to some oxidation.

Most of the time, healthy stuff doesn't taste as good as unhealthy stuff. Although freshly ground wheat flour is both healthier and more delicious than the older stuff, you just pay for it in effort.

[Steve Wagar]

Back to the original question... the truth is, rice is the most consumed food and will continue to be and people in Asia won't give it up. But a lot of work is being done to farm it more environmentally, using less water, and causing less arsenic to pile up in it, e.g.

https://www.voanews.com/a/filling-worlds-rice-bowl-less-water-136445018/150151.html
https://www.edf.org/blog/2013/11/14/how-can-we-grow-more-rice-less-land-water-and-pollution

Anyway, you can reduce the amount of arsenic following these simple instructions:

https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/how-cook-rice-remove-most-arsenic.html

And brimstone, we will "get over our aversion to genetic engineering" once GMO stops being deployed mostly as a tool to increase Roundup use. You and I know GMO's are perfectly safe in principle. It is too bad they are used to extend the reach of factory farming and corporate control of the seed supply.

[brimstoneSalad]

And brimstone, we will "get over our aversion to genetic engineering" once GMO stops being deployed mostly as a tool to increase Roundup use. You and I know GMO's are perfectly safe in principle. It is too bad they are used to extend the reach of factory farming and corporate control of the seed supply.

Regarding corporate control of the seed supply:
Patents can be a problem, but GMOs don't extend corporate control over the seed supply; patents expire, and farmers always have a choice. The available seeds depends on the market.

Here's a good article on the topic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/unearthed-are-patents-the-problem/2014/09/28/9bd5ca90-4440-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html

The story of Big Ag forcing GMOs down the throats of unsuspecting farmers, ensuring that those farmers not only pay through the nose but also can’t save seed and thus have to pay through the nose again next year, is largely fiction. And it’s a story that lots of farmers find really irritating, because it makes them out to be dupes or patsies.

Farmers aren't fools, they're keen business people who understand the bottom line. The article is a good read.

Anyway, MOST varieties of food grown today are patented or have been at one time or another, including Non-GMO seed. This isn't a GMO vs. non-GMO issue.

Regarding roudup use:
They aren't employed for the purposes of increasing roundup use.
The last relevant patents for Roundup expired in 2000 (only four years after the seeds were introduced), so Monsanto doesn't make much profit on Roundup, they have a lot of competition.
Their profit driver is selling seeds, and they produce the seeds that farmers want because they work based on farming methods being used.

The bottom line is cost for farmers vs. output, and these methods work currently... they might not for much longer if we get a lot of resistant weeds, but right now it's economical.

[Steve Wagar]

Farmers aren't fools, they're keen business people who understand the bottom line. The article is a good read.

Thanks, that was a good article. I'm glad to hear that it is not nearly as black and white a subject as I had heard through my limited and somewhat paranoid sources. So long as choice is protected there is hope. While I suppose the injunction against keeping seed (https://monsanto.com/company/media/statements/saving-seeds/) is economically sensible, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the logic of having farmers destroy their seeds and buy them back. It seems like paying twice. I guess that is the problem with patenting lifeforms -- they reproduce themselves. There is no nice way to enforce destruction of seeds; you need seed police, and they have them. And they have at time used their power to ruin farmers who did nothing wrong. It is not that Monsanto or the others are evil; life as we know it would be impossible without them. The problem is just that power corrupts, and the incentive to make money is the cause of most environmental destruction (and use). In all industries, we start to see preservation and expansion of the industry (via lobbying) become a higher priority than the public good it is meant to serve. The problem is that capitalism needs to be regulated by mechanisms that preserve the public good, and representative democracy as we know it is not particularly good at that because it rests on 3 bad assumptions: (a) that representatives represent the interests of their constituents instead of moneyed interests, (b) that elected representatives with no qualifications are now experts, and (c) that voters with no qualifications are qualified to elect their representatives. The biggest flaw in all of these assumptions is not so much that people are ignorant as that they presume people will act rationally, when the truth is that the truth is easily obscured and thus people are easily manipulated.

In theory, farmers can wait for the patents to expire and then be able to keep their own seeds going forward, but that would depend on being able to find someone who kept the original patented seeds without planting them, and then planted them to make more. I suppose the competitors do exactly that, so farmers eventually have the options to buy public domain seeds that they can keep.

And while Monsanto may not sell pesticide-ready seeds to promote pesticide sales, they do sell them because farmers like them, and that is not good news for the planet. We need ways to encourage farmers to stop using dangerous pesticides.

[brimstoneSalad]

While I suppose the injunction against keeping seed (https://monsanto.com/company/media/statements/saving-seeds/) is economically sensible, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the logic of having farmers destroy their seeds and buy them back.

The seeds are typically the product; e.g. corn, soy, canola.
So the seeds resulting from harvest are not destroyed but sold to be processed into flour, feed, etc.
The issue is farmers saving seeds for planting vs. selling them as product, not saving them vs. destroying them.

In the ordinary course of farming (including with GM seed), farmers only destroy seeds if they have become tainted/moldy/dirty/etc. and unsuitable for consumption.
I agree that it would be better to keep and plant moldy seeds, because while it's impossible to pick out the bad ones and use them as food, they may still grow. But given modern techniques this could result in uneven field density which would be a problem without manual thinning.

I agree also that in some cases it might be more efficient for farmers to save seed on site, and to license the technology year by year and manufacture their own seeds for personal use (so they pay a fee rather than buy new seed, to save transportation costs etc.). It's possible that monsanto offers a contract like this. However, due to cross-pollination, the seeds a farmer saves may not be a pure strain so might not be as disease resistant or have as good yield. Farmers probably prefer to start fresh to prevent those issues and ensure good quality seed rather than risk the harvest. It doesn't take much seed to grow a lot of food, so the costs of buying new seed wouldn't be much different from licensing your own saved seed from Monsanto.

And they have at time used their power to ruin farmers who did nothing wrong.

That one is a myth, it's based on Percy Schmeiser:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser

He intentionally grew Monsanto seed as determined by several courts. That article contains only Schmeiser's account, but the courts were very skeptical and believed that he purchased the seeds and lied about it (although this hasn't been proved). There's more detail in the article on the court case itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeiser

All claims relating to Roundup Ready canola in Schmeiser's 1997 canola crop were dropped prior to trial and the court only considered the canola in Schmeiser's 1998 fields. Regarding his 1998 crop, Schmeiser did not put forward any defence of accidental contamination. The evidence showed that the level of Roundup Ready canola in Mr. Schmeiser's 1998 fields was 95-98% (See paragraph 53 of the trial ruling[4]). Evidence was presented indicating that such a level of purity could not occur by accidental means. On the basis of this the court found that Schmeiser had either known "or ought to have known" that he had planted Roundup Ready canola in 1998. Given this, the question of whether the canola in his fields in 1997 arrived there accidentally was ruled to be irrelevant. Nonetheless, at trial, Monsanto was able to present evidence sufficient to persuade the Court that Roundup Ready canola had probably not appeared in Schmeiser's 1997 field by such accidental means (paragraph 118[4]). The court said it was persuaded "on the balance of probabilities" (the standard of proof in civil cases, meaning "more probable than not" i.e. strictly greater than 50% probability) that the Roundup Ready canola in Mr. Schmeiser's 1997 field had not arrived there by any of the accidental means, such as spillage from a truck or pollen travelling on the wind, that Mr. Schmeiser had proposed.

I believe Schmeiser was lying, and that he acquired and intentionally planted GM seed and pretended it was inadvertent for publicity (which he has been milking ever since).
Schmeiser is a politician and a public figure, and stirring up trouble with Monsanto is his claim to fame and has become his career, as he's a sought after speaker in the anti-GMO world.


Monsanto has more explanation, and cites court rulings. More importantly, their policy is pretty clear:
https://monsanto.com/company/media/statements/gmo-contamination-lawsuits/

It is truly as simple as this: Monsanto has a long-standing public commitment that “it has never been, nor will it be, Monsanto’s policy to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.”

They have no interest in bad PR or alienating their customers by suing people for doing something accidental. The suit only happened after Schmeiser refused to negotiate settlement. He wouldn't stop growing their GM seed, and he wouldn't pay licensing fees; Schmeiser claimed he owned the GM seed because it fell on his land and so he could grow and sell it all he wanted.
If he had just said, "sorry, it was an accident, I won't save seed from that field next year" they would have dropped it. They probably even would have paid to clean up his field as they later agreed to do.

The problem is that capitalism needs to be regulated by mechanisms that preserve the public good, and representative democracy as we know it is not particularly good at that because it rests on 3 bad assumptions: (a) that representatives represent the interests of their constituents instead of moneyed interests, (b) that elected representatives with no qualifications are now experts, and (c) that voters with no qualifications are qualified to elect their representatives. The biggest flaw in all of these assumptions is not so much that people are ignorant as that they presume people will act rationally, when the truth is that the truth is easily obscured and thus people are easily manipulated.

I agree it's a problem in many industries. I think the GM industry is pretty benign, but this is a serious issue in other situations like with the oil industry where they have funded propaganda and basically convinced Republicans that global warming is a hoax and convinced Democrats that the only viable competition (nuclear) is too dangerous. Politicians are not well educated enough to rule on these issues, nor is the general population (how many people understand climate science or nuclear physics?).
Fortunately when it comes to GM tech and the implications of patents and yield, farmers are pretty well educated on these topics and know what they're doing, and because they make up a big voting block they have a lot of sway to prevent corporate abuses in plant agriculture... the flip side of that is that farmers are themselves abusing the country by extracting substantial subsidies from government as bribes and promoting animal agriculture. There's no real risk of farmers being duped or controlled by GM companies because they're well informed and in control.

In theory, farmers can wait for the patents to expire and then be able to keep their own seeds going forward, but that would depend on being able to find someone who kept the original patented seeds without planting them, and then planted them to make more.

There are lots of patent expired seeds available, but they're inferior. The thing is that the newest patented seeds are literally better, and it's worth the price to buy them because they get a better harvest and more disease resistance (remember we're in evolutionary warfare with diseases). It's like, why would you use a first generation iphone for "free" when the newest one is so much better and not really that expensive? It would be false economy to use the old seeds. New ones are just worth it in terms of the bottom line, otherwise GM companies couldn't sell seed.

Even if they weren't available, you could make them if you really wanted them. It's not just the seed, but the technology to make the seed which is patented. Once those technology patents expire, it's relatively easy to engineer the traits (or better). It would be a big investment for a single farmer, but graduate students do this kind of thing and a farmer's collective could easily fund it if they wanted a particular GM trait.

And while Monsanto may not sell pesticide-ready seeds to promote pesticide sales, they do sell them because farmers like them, and that is not good news for the planet. We need ways to encourage farmers to stop using dangerous pesticides.

I think enforcement at the government level is the best way. The EPA and FDA already regulate these things pretty well.