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[av_heading heading=’DALMING | The plural of rice is unli-rice, no?’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY ROMA GONZALES
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Wednesday, June 21, 2017
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THE REMARK that Juan de la Cruz should eat more vegetables instead of rice is a very Asian — very Filipino — version of Queen Marie Antoinette’s supposedly eternal quote “Let them eat cake!” when she was told that the starving plebs do not have any bread to eat.
Historians aren’t sure if the French queen had indeed said such a thing. Sen. Cynthia Villar, on the other hand, was met with harsh criticisms (online and offline) when she stated during a Senate hearing last week: “Ipagbawal na ‘yang unlimited rice, masama yan…Nagkakasakit tayo gawa ng unlimited rice na ‘yan. We should learn how to eat vegetables.”
A friend shrugged her shoulders. “I’m okay with that — as long as they provide unlimited vegetables.”
It’s not only because we have always been a nation of rice eaters (about 101 million) that this remark was offensive. It’s probably also because it’s downright ignorant and insensitive to the plight of the common Filipino.
Despite its continuous price increase in the market compared to the last decades, rice is still the most accessible, cheapest food to turn Juan’s empty stomach to full. For instance, does Senator Villar not know what the struggling student eats when tuition is due and allowance is running low? That’s right, rice and free soup. And say the student is still hungry, what can possibly make him feel full for just P10? Extra rice.
An average Filipino can consume about 120 kg of rice annually. Reducing this could indeed help support the country’s rice self-sufficiency goal. However, saying this is much easier said than done. It is the majority — the poor — that make up the greatest demand for rice.
Based on the Family Income and Expenditure Survey 2012, the poorest households spend 20 percent of their income on rice while the richest spend only about five percent. Why so? It’s logical to say that that’s because the middle class and the rich can actually afford other food like bread, fruits, fish, meat, corn, wheat, and oh yes, vegetables and cakes.
A Rappler article from 2012 cited that the rice demand in our richer neighbors namely China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and South Korea declined since the 1970s according to Southeast Asian Regional Center (SEARCA) for Graduate Study and Research. The higher the income, the lower the demand for rice.
Besides, if we are so concerned about rice self-sufficiency, why is there not enough funding for empowering farmers and modern farming research and technology especially from the private sectors? Why not invest on farmlands and farmhands rather than, I don’t know, converting agricultural lands into residential estates? Yeah.
On the other hand, Senator Villar’s health concern is not unfounded. We should take her seriously on this context. Short-grained white rice can indeed lead to diabetes because of its high glycemic index (GI), which means it is quickly digested thus resulting to blood sugar spikes. The International Diabetes Federation lists the Philippines as a hotspot for the killer diabetes which if unmanaged, can go along with a list of complications such as high blood pressure, kidney damage, and multiple organ failures. As of 2015, there are already 3.5 million cases of diabetes in the country.
With all due respect to unlimited rice and all its fans, the Plate Method says carbohydrates such as rice should only make up ¼ of the plate or meal.
To gradually decrease rice consumption, developing rural areas could help a lot as more Filipinos could have the purchasing power for other food types. On a national scale, we have been struggling to stop needing rice importation despite being an agricultural country for what seemed like forever.
The Department of Agriculture’s campaign for brown rice is a good move for both health and economy although it is yet to gain substantial momentum. Brown rice has a lower glycemic index, making it way healthier than white rice. So do sweet potato (or kamote) and other kinds of rice such as wild rice, and long-grain rice.
However, the majority of the average Filipino is yet to be enlightened on this, and they do cost a lot more. Even so with the health risks, it will take a gradual progress to break from the mere custom of eating what our ancestors consumed from birth to death.
There is no crop in the country as political and cultural as rice. We can discuss it in an economic perspective, and very recently, in a nationally important health view. Our national artists painted and wrote of ricefields and harvest time. It is a representation of our nation — culture, geography and lifestyle. It’s sad to think that every grain now could also represent poverty, class division and crisis.
It seems that rice to us is what bread was to the hungry peasants of the French revolution — we eat it because that’s all we have. And we all know how that chapter ended and what happened to Marie Antoinette and the monarchy, when hunger prevailed.
How different it would have been if they actually looked out their window? What would it take so we can all have cakes?
But that, too, can cause diabetes, eh? (rr_gonzales316@yahoo.com/PN)
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