People have said to me before, non-Chinese friends.
“How do you all eat so much rice and stay skinny?”
And I'm like, “What do you mean by that?”
Once you smell rice,
you're like, gathering time for the whole family together.
I don't eat rice at every meal.
But I eat it at least once every day.
It’s a staple dish. You don’t even think about it.
Most Chinese people would say they can’t live without rice.
But how did this simple grain become
ubiquitous with Chinese food?
This is Eat China,
where we uncover the stories of the food we eat.
In this season, we’re going back to basics,
to the building blocks of Chinese flavor.
Hello J Lou.
Hi!
So, I heard you broke the internet this week.
Uncle Roger, you don’t let her use the colander today, okay?
No, no colander.
Meet J Lou, a French-Chinese content creator.
She makes videos about her multicultural upbringing.
Her fans call her the “Rice Queen.”
Born and raised in Hong Kong,
she says rice was a big part of her childhood.
My mom used to, if I couldn't finish the rice, she would say,
“Think about the farmers who grew the rice.”
I think rice is super important in every Chinese household.
I mean, every movie scene or TV show scene
involving a dinner or lunch,
you always see everyone having their own bowl of rice.
China and rice go back forever.
The first rice farm was discovered in Shangshan,
a site about 200 miles south of Shanghai today.
Researchers say it was built about 10,000 years ago
by a group of hunter-gatherers.
Slowly, the practice of farming rice spread.
And people came up with their own ways
to grow the crop based on the local climate.
Rice consumption also grew as people stopped hunting for food
and ate what they farmed and reared instead.
In the 1970s, rice got supercharged when Chinese scientist
Yuan Longping created a hybrid rice variety.
This was a more resilient,
high-yield rice that would grow in varied climates,
and thrive in more countries.
Rice is the staple food in southern China
because the grain thrives here.
This is Alan Wong.
He’s been a rice farmer in Hong Kong for the last 10 years.
It’s above 10°C (50°F) here.
Places with temperatures around 20°C to 30°C (68°F to 86°F) also suitable,
are also suitable,
especially Thailand and Vietnam.
They harvest 3 times a year.
Colder regions like northern China
only get a harvest once a year.
So they tend to rely on wheat crops,
which grow better in dry and cold climates.
Different places suit different types of rice.
It depends on the temperature, climate, and soil.
Rice from northeastern China is popular and tasty.
This is a variety called Japonica rice,
and it grows in colder climates.
Each grain is round and short
and the texture’s sticky and chewy, like glutinous rice.
Places in the south, on the other hand, produce Indica rice.
That’s a long and thin variety
with a texture that’s fluffier and lighter.
This type of rice makes the perfect Cantonese fried rice.
Alan’s rice farm is a one-and-a-half-acre paddy field
southwest of Hong Kong.
Each batch takes around 4 months to grow.
The harvest happens every July and November,
and the yield depends on the weather.
It’s not great this year.
Some rice hulls are empty,
or what’s inside them is very small.
Because this year, it rained suddenly,
and the temperature went up and down unpredictably.
And there was a typhoon.
When it’s blustery, the grains brush against each other
and become damaged.
Alan produces 500 to 700 kg (1,102 to 1,543 lb) of rice
of rice each harvest.
He sells them online
and in stores and pop-ups around the city.
I was your average white-collar worker.
I worked in property management,
but around 2010, 2011
I didn’t want to work anymore, so I quit.
I thought (farming rice) seemed quite fun, so I started this.
I think rice is like, everyone can have their own version.
I definitely prefer it harder.
I would say, like a bite of meat.
I would need like 2 bites of rice to go with it.
I don’t know. It's just like the perfect ratio.
It’s kind of like the central piece of the dinner table.
You have all your dishes around,
but rice is what ties everything together.
When I go to France to travel, and it's been like 3 days
with French food and obviously I'm French as well.
But I don't get full without rice a lot of times.
J Lou, who has over 1 million followers
across social platforms, calls her fans “#ricefam.”
I started sharing how much I liked rice on Instagram.
My followers, then they picked up on that.
They created that. They started calling themselves a “ricefam.”
In my DMs every day I get different memes
or people’s rice meals
or a baby like having rice all over their face.
It’s great to have created this whole like “ricefam” community
where everyone can kind of share the love of rice.
But today, some avoid rice because carbs have a bit of a bad rap.
White rice and white noodles or rice noodles,
then it tends to be simple carb.
It's a myth that carbohydrates causes weight gain
because anything you eat, whether it's carbs, protein, and fat,
and if you're eating more than you burn off,
you're going to gain weight.
In the opposite, if you eat less than you burn,
then you're in a calorie deficit,
then you're going to lose weight.
But the truth is, Asians don’t eat as much rice as you think.
When I look at how I traditionally ate at home,
it's like, yes, there's rice,
but there's also a lot of vegetables.
Yes, there's also fish.
They're also eating a lot of other things to balance the diet.
In 2021, China’s health commission said that
over half of the country’s adults are overweight,
while nearly 1 in 6 are obese.
And it’s not because of rice.
There is also diversity in body shapes and sizes
within the Chinese community.
I just think that you don't see it.
I think you just don't see it in the media.
There has been a lot of increase in convenience foods.
A lot of families don't have as much time
to cook and prepare meals as they used to.
That’s also the globalization of bringing
American fast food chains into China.
Regardless of what the no-carb camp says,
rice is still a huge staple in this region.
In 2021, people in China consumed 155 million tons of rice.
And farmers have been working hard to meet domestic demand.
In the same year, farms in China harvested
a record 212 million tons of rice.
It’s tiring. In summer, we feel exhausted
even if we only worked a short while in the field.
But does it mean going to work at the office is not tiring?
We just work in different ways.
The first day I came here, I knew I couldn’t leave
even if I couldn’t walk anymore.
If (my customers) think it’s tasty, it’s fresh, it’s sweet,
am I happy? Of course I am.
We gonna talk about the flavor enhancer
that everyone loves
and loves to hate.
Why do we still use MSG and is it okay?
Stay tuned to find out.