Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought

Abstract

RICE (ORYZA SATIVA) HAS SHAPED THE LIVES OF RELATIVELY FEW WESTERNERS over time. It has dominated the lives of fewer still. While the cereal has been known in the West since antiquity, its production and consumption for the most part have been of only minor importance, occurring at the margin of Western foodways. That we speak of breadwinners rather than ricewinners and pray for our daily bread rather than our daily rice tells us something about the hold of breadprimarily wheat bread-on the Western world. In the East, where the rice plant originated, things are far different; with all due respect to James Henry Hammond, in that part of the world, rice is indeed king. That the Indian word for dhanya, means sustainer of the human race, that the name of the Buddha's father, Suddhodana, the sixth-century-B.c. king of Nepal, literally means pure rice, and that the idiomatic expression Have you eaten your rice today? was a polite way of saying hello in traditional Chinese society only begins to convey the place of rice in the East.2

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