A love letter to rice

And a peek at my Gohan book tour dates in Australia

“Rice is a beautiful food. It is beautiful when it grows – precision rows of sparkling green stalks shooting up to reach the hot summer sun. It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled in diked, patchwork paddies. It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins like a cataract of tiny seed-pearls. It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced hand, pure white and sweetly fragranced.”

– Shizuo Tsuji, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (1980)

There’s a reason I chose Gohan as the name for my latest cookbook; it means rice, specifically a bowl of perfectly steamed, slightly sticky Japanese rice. It’s also the word you can find used to mean breakfast (“morning rice”), lunch (“noon rice”) or dinner (“evening rice”) and the word you’d shout out to your children to let them know dinner’s on the table.

Rice is my soul food. I could live without pasta for the rest of my life but if there is one thing I crave every now and then when I need to feel nourished, to feel like myself, it’s a bowl of steamed rice.

So I was super curious when food writer Lee Tran Lam recently released a new podcast for SBS called Should you really eat that? quoting an Australian dietician, Susie Burrell, who wrote in this Sydney Morning Herald piece that rice is one thing she’d never put in her shopping trolley — a statement that made me bristle because of course lacks any kind of consideration for cultural importance of foods for like half the planet.

Burrell says, “Although it is considered a dietary staple, white rice lacks the nutrient density wholegrain brown rice offers and with an extremely high glycemic index, is exceptionally easy to overeat. If I am reaching for a family meal base, I opt for wholemeal pasta or quinoa, or serve dishes that use rice as an ingredient with cauliflower rice.”

Let’s be clear about one thing: cauliflower is not rice.

I asked

Laura Thomas, PhD, RNutr

what she thought about this (and I would love to hear what

Anjali Prasertong

aka Antiracist Dietician thinks about this too!) and she made some really interesting points, including:

“The biggest issue I have with these types of lists is that it sets up a 'right' and 'wrong' way to eat based on a very privileged identity. The foods listed are almost always extremely Euro-centric and middle-class, and focus almost exclusively on the nutritional value of food. Nutrition is only one of the many complex reasons we make food choices. Didactic prescriptions like this fail to consider disabilities, cost, cultural preferences, allergies, neurodivergence, or how under late stage capitalism, many of us just don't have a choice.

Looking at white rice through the (admittedly narrow) lens of nutrition, we rarely eat rice on its own. It's usually paired with an egg, meat or fish, with vegetables, or with a sauce (like a coconut based one such as in a Thai inspired curry). The addition of other ingredients adds protein, fat, and fibre that help slow down the release of sugar into the bloodstream after a meal. Similarly, the way some cultures eat rice is as leftovers, like in fried rice. Cooking and cooling white rice produces resistant starch - this means it will have a lower glycaemic load compared to fresh rice which can be helpful for people managing their blood glucose levels (but I want to stress that fresh rice isn't something you need to be afraid of!).

Many of our nutritional guidelines are based on white European ideals that fail to acknowledge that there are dietary patterns outside of the 'Mediterranean' diet (which itself isn't a monolith), that support wellbeing. Again looking at foods through the lens of nutrition misses the richness of culture and history that shapes cuisines. It fails to acknowledge that not everyone wants to (or should) eat like a white European, and that there are tangible impacts of cutting people off from their cultural foodways, or telling them that the foods they are familiar with are 'unhealthy' and need to be given the cauliflower rice treatment. 

No one is eating white rice on it’s own. In Japanese meals, rice is always part of a bigger meal, it’s like the bread at a Tuscan meal — it’s never a meal without it, but it’s the only thing you’re eating.

It is an understatement to say rice is the most important dish in Japanese cuisine. It is the very essence of Japanese culture. It is not only the staple dish of every meal, whether humble or formal course after course degustation, but rice is also vital for its role in making sake and vinegar, ingredients that are so essential in flavouring dishes and preserving food such as pickles – Japanese cuisine wouldn't be what it is without these ingredients. 

Historically, even outside of the kitchen, rice – as none of the plant was wasted – was important also for its use in making paper and glue for books, for fuel, tatami mats and building materials. It was even used like currency.

Japan's available arable land (only about twelve percent) is a small proportion compared to its mountains and forests, but like a lot of Asia, it has very humid summers and a higher than average rainfall. The wet weather, along with the abundant rivers found running through the mountain ranges, is the perfect climate for wet-rice cultivation but not without its challenges.

In the foothills of the mountains of Nagano, I visited Sashara (below) where I was told of the founders of the village, eleven families, who, almost 400 years ago cleared the bamboo in the area to create terraces on the land for rice fields in what is known as the “rice line”, a border of which rice does not grow due to the harsh mountain winters.

The families bonded together in order to cultivate rice.

They diverted mountain rivers into pools to be warmed by the sun before being let out through hand-dug, kilometres-long water network called segi in a shared irrigation system to flood the village's rice fields. This sharing of water resources among rice farming communities was common in Japan and, together with the fact that wet-rice farming was incredibly labour-intensive, meant that living close, working harmoniously together and relying on each was important to successfully grow and harvest the rice.

Each harvest was a joint effort. Each grain of rice a result of the hard work of many.

Rice in Japanese culture was also considered an important form of protein, seeing as for about twelve centuries — right up until 1872 — the killing of animals was condoned and therefore meat was not eaten. “Protein was ingested from rice rather than from meat or milk,” writes historian Naomishi Ishige.

Author Zenjiro Watanabe paints this picture: “The fact that rice is the staple of the Japanese diet was in fact dictated by nature and the Japanese climate. Moreover, the islands of Japan are blessed with abundant marine resources. With no need for meat, a community with a diet of rice and fish was born.”

A bowl of steamed Japanese rice is quite unlike its equivalent in any other culture.

Japan's unique rice cultivar, in fact, is a soft, short grain rice, which when cooked perfectly consists of grains that are incredibly moist and stick to each other, which is part of the secret of being able to eat it easily with chopsticks. A bowl of plain Japanese rice is a canvas to the umami-rich sauces and dishes that are eaten with it, but there are also many variations on the regular bowl of rice, usually seasonal. Chestnuts might be cooked together with rice in late autumn, or perhaps fresh peas in the spring and corn in the summer. My grandmother would sometimes cook the rice in fragrant habucha, roasted cassia seed tea, for a rice porridge, a dish that my mother likes if she isn't feeling well.

Often a plain bowl of hot rice might be served with just a very fresh raw egg yolk and a splash of soy sauce on top, to mix through quickly with chopsticks. When we were children my mother used to scramble the egg for us with the rice, cooking it a bit like a quick fried rice. It is still my go-to comfort food, and my childrens’ comfort too. It is just a bowl full of love.

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— Gohan events coming up! —

I’m getting ready for a book tour in Australia starting in November. As they become finalised I will put them all on my events page here and those that are already open for registry have a link (a few more things to iron out) but for now here is a peek!

Virtual

October 25 — I’ll be in conversation online with Kenji J Lopez for Seattle cookbook bookshop, Booklarder! 12pm Pacific time, register to listen in here.

Sydney

November 23 — author lunch at LuMi dining in conversation with Palisa Anderson (who you’ll also hear talking about living in Japan on Lee Tran’s podcast!)

November 25 — all day cooking class, we will prepare a Japanese breakfast together (here’s why I love Japanese breakfasts most of all). Here is more about my Sydney events for now.

Melbourne

November 28 — author lunch at Ima Project in conversation with Julia Busuttil Nishimura

November 29 — author talk at Books for Cooks with nibbles from Gohan

November 30 — workshop at The Fermentary

Franklin, Tasmania

December 1 — Drinks and Q&A at The Bowmont

December 3 — Japanese home cooking workshop at The Bowmont

Robertson, NSW

December 9 — cooking workshop at Moonacres Cooking School

Canberra

December 6 — author talk at Asia Bookroom

December 10 — drinks and Q&A at Verity Lane

Orange, NSW

December 14 — drinks and author chat with Sophie Hansen (more info TBC)

December 15 — cooking workshop at Sophie Hansen’s farm kitchen