White Rice, White Bread
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EVEN IN THE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS of data in the World Wide Web, my searches for the origin of "white" rice have been fruitless. I did find a few sites that looked very authoritative, and I wrote asking for help with the white rice question. Anna Arsenal, at International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), was kind enough to do some sleuthing of her own, with better results than mine.
On the kids' page of the IRRI Graindell site, she discovered some info about the history of rice in the Philippines. It said that whole, brown rice was "popular among Filipinos until the early 1950s." In those days, the rice was pounded by hand (in a mortar and pestle or stone grinder) to dislodge it from the hulls. Then came milling machines capable of producing "polished" rice -- stripping away the bran layer (where most of the nutrition resides), creating the ghostly white appearance that subsequent generations of diners have come to identify simply as "rice."
I suppose it was enjoyable not to have to pound rice by hand ... and the white stuff was sweeter and fluffier and rather exotic ... and before long it was what everyone wanted. White rice was classy, aristocratic; brown rice was peasant food.
I HAD A MUCH EASIER TIME finding information on the history of white bread, which seems to have been created significantly earlier than white rice. According to a British website, bakersfederation.org.uk, the quest for white flour was happening as early as 1700. "...the introduction of sieves made of Chinese silk helped to produce finer, whiter flour and white bread gradually became more widespread." Also at that time, "Wheat began to overtake rye and barley as the chief bread grain."
Here's something wild, from 1757: "A report accused bakers of adulterating bread by using alum, lime, chalk and powdered bones to keep it very white. Parliament banned alum and all other additives in bread but some bakers ignored the ban." I wonder why we have developed such a fascination with white foods!!
In 1826, wholemeal bread was still being eaten by the military, and was acknowledged as being healthier than the white bread of the aristocracy. And then, in 1834 ... the rollermill was invented in Switzerland. Instead of crushing the grain, the rollermill tore it into 3 distinct parts: bran, germ, and endosperm. It became customary to discard the bran and germ (and eventually to sell them separately as "food supplements") -- leaving just the endosperm, which is little more than starch. (Remember, in childhood, using your mom's white flour to make paste? Imagine what it does in our intestines!)
In Mexico, the fluffy white stuff is called pan Bimbo ("Bimbo bread")!
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Rollermills became economical in the 1870s, and bread consisting of almost nothing but nutritionally impoverished endosperm -- previously the food of the upper classes -- was within the grasp of the general population.
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"What do you call a highly refined wheat product that has been stripped of 11 known vitamins, half a dozen nutritionally significant minerals, as well as the essential fatty acids? Some would say nutritional junk.
"Well, add back four of those lost vitamins and one mineral, iron. What would you call the product now? The government calls it ENRICHED FLOUR."
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WE STARTED "ENRICHING" flour during World War II. Apparently the government truly wanted to improve the health of Americans ... but our mania for white fluffy stuff was so entrenched, there was no way to get people to eat whole grain breads again. So we began loading the fluff with 3 B vitamins (Niacin, Riboflavin, and Thiamin) and a mineral (Iron).
DID I MENTION BLEACH? You know, the stuff they sell in supermarkets, in white plastic jugs. The stuff that will eat holes in your clothes (and the fumes will eat holes in your nervous system and your lungs, if you're careless enough to get a few whiffs). Well, way back in the 1890s, someone got the brilliant idea of adding chlorine bleach to flour! Because it made the flour whiter!! And it also made the dough more elastic, better able to trap the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast -- which made lighter, fluffier loaves. (Of course nowadays there's a rather widespread realization of the insanty of this, and unbleached flour is widely available.)
Aside from the so-called enrichment and the bleach, the starchy, nutritionally vacant endosperm masquerading as flour was also subjected to a boatload of chemicals, for the simple reason of creating uniformity and making a white powder that was easier to work with. Here's a partial list of these additives:
- Aluminum chloride
- Azocarbonamide
- Benzoyl peroxide
- Calcium propionate
- Calcium sulfate
- Nitrogen dioxide
- Potassium bromate
- Potassium iodate
As Dr. Hall points out, "You won't find any of these chemicals in the home kitchen. Only trained personnel, wearing protective gear, can use them." And he says, "The toxic effects on human consumers of the chemically treated baked goods have never been investigated."
 HE MENTIONS an experiment designed by one of his own students, however. The idea was to feed "enriched" breakfast cereal to pregnant mice, and study the effects on the offspring. There was also a control group of mice, fed whole grains. It seemed a worthwhile experiment ... but the mice eating the enriched breakfast cereal didn't live long enough to give birth; they were all dead within a week! (This might be worth considering, next time you're tempted to shell out 3 or 4 dollars for a few ounces of super-whoopty-doo breakfast cereal.)
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THEN, OF COURSE, THERE'S WHITE SUGAR -- Oh my gosh, we're not going into that now....
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SOME OF US CHOOSE to avoid all this danger and complication, labor and expense, and simply eat whole grains as Mother Nature provides them; the only processing involved is hulling and soaking and cooking them (with a bit of sea salt). And others have chosen to avoid grains and grain products altogether....
Steak 'n' Eggs
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LATELY THERE'S BEEN a great uproar about Dr. Robert Atkins, "who launched the low-carb, high-protein Atkins diet 30 years ago, and practised what he preached" (as reported in the TIMES (of London) ONLINE). After "a lifetime's righteous consumption of steak, eggs and bacon to the exclusion of bread and pasta," swearing that "this was the surest route to weight loss and coronary health," Dr. Atkins died in April 2003, at the age of 72. He fell and bonked his head on a New York City sidewalk!
"And then the trouble started," according to the TIMES. "The state of Dr Atkins's heart and arteries instantly became a subject of fevered speculation...." What caused him to fall? Was it a heart attack?
He spent several days comatose in the hospital before dying, and afterwards his family did not allow an autopsy. But now a cardiologist in Nebraska has somehow obtained a medical report on Atkins, from the New York City Medical Examiner's office, and has made it public. "It turns out that Atkins died obese, with a history of heart disease...." (The TIMES again).
HIS WIDOW, VERONICA, "issued a statement acknowledging that her husband had been diagnosed with a heart condition known as cardiomyopathy about three years before he died, and that he had had a cardiac arrest in April 2002." (This from Reuters AlertNet)
"But she said the condition was caused by a viral infection, and rejected any suggestion that he had died of a heart attack. 'My husband's health problems late in life were completely unrelated to his diet or any diet,' she said."
Hmmm...it seems to me that the condition of our body is always closely related to what we've been feeding it. Maybe the Doctor's guru status made him exempt from the laws of the universe, to which the rest of us are subject. Or maybe it was just a very big virus; it's reported that Atkins' weight at check-out time was 258 pounds. (It's also being claimed that 60 of those were acquired during his final few, comatose days in the hospital!!)
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IN ANY CASE, there must be millions of his disciples who have been dutifully munching their bacon and eggs and steak and butter, now wondering about the wisdom of it.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS, we're all going to check out sometime. There's no diet and no magic formula that can keep a single human body functioning forever. As many wise ones have observed, every death is truly a suicide; we each pick our own poisons along the way. The day we die, our corpse will provide a marvelous record of that suicidal trajectory -- but how to choose what to feed ourselves in the meantime?
The number of new "diets" being cooked up every week (and the claims for them) are absolutely mind-boggling. There are countless fortunes to be made, and tens of millions of people looking for someone to follow. Do the folks who create these diets really understand the workings of the universe? Do they know anything about the 2 fundamental energies that create everything in our world? Are their diets born of a holistic view of anything, or merely micro-scopic reasoning or a few months of trial-and-error experimentation with a select group of subjects?
WHAT TO EAT, and when, and how much? How to cook it -- or not to cook it? What to combine, what not to combine? After almost 30 years of attempting to answer these questions for myself, I must say that Macrobiotics -- the study of Yin and Yang -- is by far the most helpful curriculum I've found. Concerning diet, it's the only one that seems based on an understanding of reality (instead of micro-scopic reasoning or a few months of experimentation with selected subjects).
[NOTE: I suggest reading my Yin and Yang article, because my take on yin and yang is very different than what Macrobiotics teaches as yin and yang!]
DIET GURUS COME AND GO as surely as the phases of the moon. I'll stick with my understanding of yin and yang.
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