Dressing up your rice

I've talked about this before, and I'll undoubtedly talk about it again. Rice is often eaten with something on it or mixed in it to give it more flavor. Furikake, which according to this posting was invented about  a century ago and was meant to be a calcium supplement, is the flavor supplement of choice for children anytime and many adults at breakfast. This morning I topped some rice with plain boiled shiitake leftover from our oshechi.

I suspect that part of the reason furikake and similar toppings are so common is that plain white rice is just that, very plain. In the U.S., how many people eat bread or potatoes without putting anything on them? Butter is the most common flavor supplement. How many people, in Italy or anywhere else, eat spaghetti totally plain? So why is it that some (many? most?) Japanese eat their plain white rice totally unadulterated at least part of the time?

I think it comes down to the iconic statue of rice in general which, to modern Japanese, has become synonymous with white rice. Rice is and has long been one of the symbols of Japan and the Japanese. Back in the Edo Era, the 17th, 18th, and first half of the 19th centuries, Japanese scholars started a custom of writing what have come to be called nihonjinron, essays about what it means to be Japanese. One theme common to most of these essays is a statement that Japanese rice is the most delicious and most nutritious rice in the world. I think it's fair to say that neither of these statements is correct. Certainly if you want to talk about nutrition, there's no contest. Most Japanese rice these days is eaten as white rice, and few nutritionists would be willing to defend white rice as nutritionally superior to brown.

Those few are, of course, mostly Japanese. My wife recently showed me a book by a Japanese doctor that claims, among other things, that there's a poison in rice bran that must be removed if you want your mitochondria to function properly. Some years ago a Japanese newspaper printed a series of articles that made a related claim. The idea was, as I recall, that Japanese are genetically (I think the article said racially) of the Mongolian type, and thus, for proper development of the brains, Japanese children needed to be brought up in extended , not nuclear, families, on a diet rich in fish and (of course) white rice.

Possibly the greatest absurdity of the argument that Japanese rice is the tastiest in the world is that it's generally put forward by people who have never tasted any non-Japanese rice. The import of rice is extremely tightly controlled. Rice sold for consumption in the usual way, as opposed to rice used in the factory construction of food, is 100% Japanese. Certainly the 19th century Japanese scholars who trumpeted this idea had never tasted imported rice.

Personally, I find Japanese brown rice compares favorably with other brown rice. It's only when you strip off those outer layers that it seems to fall behind Indian basmati and Thai Jasmin rice for flavor.

But enough of that. I was talking about toppings, to give rice flavor. One of the resons that's so necessary now is that white rice has taken over about 99.5% of the rice consumption activity. I don't know exactly when that happened, when the Japanese changed from eating the whole grain to eating only about 65% or less. The technology for polishing rice is old. But rice used to be consumed mostly by the samurai class, who collected it as rent. Most people were farmers who had to pay rice as rent to whatever samurai family was their overlord. Whatever rice they could keep after the rent was due was no doubt eaten whole, to save money and maximize the productivity of the field, and also, of course, to maximize nutrition, though that probably wasn't the conscious intention of the farmers. What did they know, right?

Actually, they may have known quite a bit, since it was the custom in rural districts, even as recently as the 1980s, to serve rice mixed with millet or barley to school children once or twice a month. I suspect that the custom of eating rice mixed with other grains was widespread, but documentation has so far eluded me. Probably the scholars who used to write about rice and extol its virtues didn't really know much of anything about how most of their fellow countrymen lived.

Sometime in the 19th century, starting in the cities with the merchant class, rice on the table changed from brown to white.This was an expression of growing affluence, and also of varied diets, which allowed people to survive even though they were throwing away the B vitamins and magnesium found in the outer layers of their rice. Now, white rice is so dominant that I've only ever seen it in a restaurant once, and never in a private home except my own, in all my years living in Japan. Furikake, however, is found everywhere, providing a little flavor where flavor has been removed in the milling process.