CONSUMER CONCERNS… RICE – A FAVOURITE CONSUMER STAPLE

Aug 26, 2018 Consumer Concerns, Features / Columnists

---

BY PAT  DIAL

One of the major and abiding consumer concerns worldwide is food.  They wish to have an ample and continuous supply of good quality food at reasonable prices.  One of the most important and staple foods worldwide is Rice and in Guyana, it is the most important food, even moreso than wheaten flour;  but this has not been always so.
Until the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, plantains and ground provisions were the staple food for the vast majority of the coastal population.  In the last quarter of the 18th century, European plantation owners attempted to introduce new foods to feed their slaves, the most important being ackee from West Africa, breadfruit from the Pacific islands, and rice from the colony of South Carolina in North America.  Ackee caught on in Jamaica and ackee and salt fish is their national dish; and breadfruit, though it never became the staple food as in the Pacific islands, came to be grown throughout the West Indies.
The Carolina rice was also never adopted, since rice-growing required intensive labour and the plantation owners would never deploy their slaves from the sugar-cane fields, as rice-growing would have been merely to feed the slaves and would have earned no profits.  Some escaped slaves who had managed to secure some Carolina seed paddy tried planting it along the rivers, but such cultivations betrayed where they were hiding and this led them to quickly discontinue all rice planting.
Rice was never again grown in Guyana until Indian indentured workers began to plant it.  They brought their seed paddy from India which happened to be the Indian long grain variety and very distinct from the Carolina short grain which had been tried and discontinued in the 18th century.  Despite the many new strains of rice which had been introduced by agronomists in the 20th century, the Indian long grain still persists.
Indian indentures began their rice-planting in the late 1850’s and early 1860’s.  The cultivation was first in small patches of land outside the estates or along the rivers and creeks.  The rice initially reaped was used by families and never sold commercially.  The “milling” of the rice was done by pounding it and winnowing by hand;  rice mills only made their appearance a few decades later.
Rice cultivation gradually expanded and towards the end of the 19th century it came to be sold commercially, and small- to middle-sized mills began to make their appearance.  This new source of demand for machines was welcomed by the British firms that supplied such equipment.  Sprostons was the main such firm.
At the beginning of the 20th century, rice came to be regularly exported and became a foreign exchange earner, and in both World Wars I and II, Guyana’s rice fed the West Indian islands and averted serious food shortages there.  The rice industry came to employ several thousand persons and in colonial times, the Guyana economy was always described as standing on a tripod of sugar, bauxite and rice.
Rice was a very versatile food and was prepared in a large number of ways by menus adopted from foreign countries as well as menus that evolved locally.
Indian indentures brought a large number of menus some of which had been adopted from Central and South-east Asia many centuries before.  Most of these menus have been forgotten, but a few have survived such as khir, a rich rice pudding made from white rice, sugar, milk and strengthened with various spices such as cardamom (elaichee), cloves, dried fruit such as dates and raisins.  Or popped rice which was used in various ways like popcorn or eaten as a morning cereal with honeyed milk.
One rice confection which is nostalgically remembered and was widely sold everywhere a few decades ago was “rice-cake”- very crisp rice sugar-fudged and cut into oblong cakes.  One locally evolved dish is “cookup rice” which contains as many ingredients as one wishes.  The nearest Indian indentured equivalent is khitchry, but its ingredients are much less than cookup..
Rice, though carbohydrate, is considered one of the world’s nutricious popular foods and has sustained hundreds of millions in Asia.  In Guyana, the indentured workers who were the worst paid in the colony and considered the most poorly fed, survived because they ate rice (largely carbohydrate), dal (highest vegetable protein) and tarkari (vegetables)  like bhaji (spinach) and squash and many others which provided vitamins, iron and other necessary food requirements.  This peasant and working-class diet which was regarded rather contemptuously in the past is now known to be healthy.  Indeed, this diet turned out to be more balanced than plantains and ground provisions.
Though the rice industry had been made the shuttlecock of political badminton and had been buffeted about for many years, it has managed to survive and feed the nation and give Guyana a large measure of food security.

---

---