Dang. Now I'm Hungry.

I don't know about you, but leftover milk, or milk that's past useability, really never appears at our house. But it seems that it does in a lot of houses--in the UK there's 290,000 tonnes of milk wasted each year. All part of that wasted 30-50 percent of food in developed countries.

But over at The Guardian, Rachel Kelly has a few (well, 14) ways to deal with leftover milk. I'm more likely to have made too much rice and be looking for a way to use it that doesn't involve making another stir fry. My favourite use is by making rice pudding.

I brought a rice pudding to one of the Friday lunches we attend at the Centre for Community and Cooperative Based Economies (CCCBE) at the University of Victoria. it was my standard, adjust-for-size recipe:

• a couple or more eggs
• beaten with vanilla, a pinch of salt, some sugar and cinnamon or nutmeg
• some cooked, leftover rice
• a small handful of raisins
• milk sufficient to cover the rice
• remixed and baked at 175C or 350F until a lovely light brown shows up on top and the pudding is set.
• Best served hot with cream over top.

I've eaten this as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and as a snack food, simply because it tastes good and qualifies as comfort food for me (and, nutritionally, isn't too bad either).

But when I presented this for lunch, one of the attendees was confused; a visiting scholar from Iran, this was nothing like the rice pudding he was used to. So the next week, he had his wife create one of her rice puddings. Short grain white rice cooked in milk to create a porridge. Sweetened and spiced with cardamon and cinnamon (among others). Served cold.

And wow! What a difference! Light and flavourful, I was transported to a shady courtyard on a hot summer day. My rice pudding is hearty and filling. This is a cool light treat. Similar ingredients, radically different end result.

This is why I love the whole free trade in recipes thing. There's so much to learn that no one can learn it all. And there are so many great flavours to discover.

 

Forward Only Looks Like Backwards

via Wikipedia

From the Hindu Business Line:

Climate change is inspiring farmers in the Sundarbans to go back in history to a time when their forefathers grew indigenous varieties of rice using green manure.

Giving the modern high-yield varieties of rice a miss, farmers are going back to the pre-Green Revolution days and opting for traditional seeds which have unique properties such as ability to tolerate salinity and floods.

“The switch over was difficult but slowly we realised that our traditional rice varieties like ‘Dudheswari’ has low input costs and tolerates salinity more easily than the modern ones,” farmer Uttam Maity who lives in one of the islands under Pathar Pratima block says.

Rising sea levels, increasing instances of floods and salinity of water due to various factors including climate change is threatening to convert fertile agricultural land into barren wasteland in the Sundarbans.

 Again, the way forward in world food production starts with a retreat from the blind alley of industrial food production.

Peasant Agriculture Is Not Enough

via Naomiklein.orghttp://www.naomiklein.org/main

As Naomi Klein has so ably dissected in her book The Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism has learned how to maximize profit during periods of social crisis. If necessary, these same disaster capitalists (people like Dick Cheney, with his deep ties to Halliburton), will engineer crisis' in order to move additional wealth into their (and their corporation's) pockets. This is one of the reasons that the modern corporation can be seen as psychopathic: what to normal sane human beings seems like horror and destruction (places such as Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan) are seen by disaster capital as opportunities to be created and then exploited. Particularly if public money can be funnelled into their private profits.
it is not new thinking that communities in crisis---crisis such as war or natural disaster or other such upheavals--are communities which are vulnerable. Simply imagining or remembering a crisis in your own family and extrapolating out to a city, country or social grouping should display the degree of vulnerability these communities experience. But what happens when the crisis is planetary?

via Mother Jones

Global warming, or global climate change, is such a crisis. But because it is so slow moving (like an avalanche, it starts slow and build up size and power as it continues), we're having trouble recognizing it. And because the initial effects are felt most in the developing world, we in the developed world (by virtue of our institutionalized alienation from the natural world) can choose to avoid and ignore the first overhangs of snow breaking loose and starting down the mountainside.
Currently, farming is in crisis. A recent Bloomberg article remarked:

The global food system will remain “vulnerable” in the years to come as a growing population boosts demand for crops and climate change makes weather disruption more frequent, according to the World Bank. 

An Open-Source Rice

Tom Phillipot at Mother Jones alerted his Twitter followers to an article on Asian Scientist about a new rice cultivar. In a paper published in Nature Genetics, the scientists involved

• Yusaku Uga,
• Kazuhiko Sugimoto,
• Satoshi Ogawa,
• Jagadish Rane,
• Manabu Ishitani,
• Naho Hara,
• Yuka Kitomi,
• Yoshiaki Inukai,
• Kazuko Ono,
• Noriko Kanno,
• Haruhiko Inoue,
• Hinako Takehisa,
• Ritsuko Motoyama,
• Yoshiaki Nagamura,
• Jianzhong Wu,
• Takashi Matsumoto,
• Toshiyuki Takai,
• Kazutoshi Okuno
• & Masahiro Yano

 state in the abstract:

The genetic improvement of drought resistance is essential for stable and adequate crop production in drought-prone areas¹. Here we demonstrate that alteration of root system architecture improves drought avoidance through the cloning and characterization of DEEPER ROOTING 1 (DRO1), a rice quantitative trait locus controlling root growth angle. DRO1 is negatively regulated by auxin and is involved in cell elongation in the root tip that causes asymmetric root growth and downward bending of the root in response to gravity. Higher expression of DRO1 increases the root growth angle, whereby roots grow in a more downward direction. Introducing DRO1 into a shallow-rooting rice cultivar by backcrossing enabled the resulting line to avoid drought by increasing deep rooting, which maintained high yield performance under drought conditions relative to the recipient cultivar. Our experiments suggest that control of root system architecture will contribute to drought avoidance in crops.

Asian Scientist contascted team lead Yusaku Uga and got more insight into the new cultivar:

The Rice Shortage

A few years back--about 2008--there was rice rationing in the US and a great fear of rice shortages around the world. This lead to a certain amount of panic, particularly in Asia where citizens have traditionally consumed 70-80% of their calories in rice. The story of what actually happened is a combination of non-transparent markets, panic, reasonable actions on the part of governments, corrupt actions on the part of governments and their officials, reasonable actions on the part of consumers, screwy international trade activity, and just a general mess.
NPR ran a great story on the "crisis" and thankfully it's available in a podcast of the show Planet Money.

There's also a short interview with economist Peter Timmer on their website. But what is interesting are the lessons learned from the crisis. If you listen to the whole story, you hear that the lesson that the WTO and  Western economists take away from the "crisis" is exactly the opposite of the lesson learned by the governments involved. The interesting thing is, both sides appear to be right; open markets and transparency are good, but food security is a necessity. The problem is, neither side can see that maybe both lessons need to be learned.