Rice: A Few More Precautions

Rice safety graph from Healthy Babies Bright Future

Twelve years ago we switched back to white rice because brown rice was found to have higher levels of arsenic. Additional research has now shown that the safest rice is uncooked white rice grown in California [bold added]

The type of rice and how it’s grown and processed can impact levels of arsenic and other heavy metals, experts say. Brown and wild rice often contain the highest levels because the milling process used to create white rice removes the outer layers of the hull, where heavy metals are concentrated.

Lab testing found purchased samples of US-grown brown rice contained 151 parts per billion of heavy metals — 129 of that due to arsenic. Arborio rice grown in Italy, which is typically used to make risotto, and white rice grown in the Southeast US (often labeled as simply “USA”) were almost as high in total heavy metals as brown rice, the report said.

Arborio rice from Italy contained 101 parts per billion of arsenic — total heavy metal load in the purchased samples was 142 parts per billion. White rice grown in the US contained 95 parts per billion of arsenic, with a total heavy metal count of 118 parts per billion.

Basmati rice from India, jasmine rice from Thailand and California-grown sushi and Calrose rice (a form of sushi rice) were at or below the 100 parts per billion levels set by the FDA for arsenic in infant rice cereals. However, the Indian basmati and Italian Arborio varieties contained the highest average levels of cadmium.

The California-grown rice had the lowest overall heavy metal content — 65 parts per billion, with 55 parts per billion from arsenic — making it an excellent choice to reduce overall exposure, [Jane] Houlihan said.

Consumers should be wary, however, of precooked rice, including instant (one-minute and five-minute rice), parboiled (10-minute rice), and ready-to-heat-and-eat packaged rice, she said.

“Studies have shown the processing used to create instant rice can create additional toxins, and the ready-to-heat products are cooked inside the plastic containers, potentially releasing toxic chemicals,” Jane Houlihan said.

The report also says that arsenic and heavy metals can be reduced by soaking rice for at least half an hour, not just rinsing it. This step requires just a little more planning, and we'll start doing it immediately.

Not Getting A Head

In traditional Chinese cuisine no part of the animal is wasted. At the barbecue counter in 99 Ranch a roasted pig's head was placed next to the cash register. That's an impulse purchase that you won't find at Safeway or Lucky.

I proceeded to the refrigerated egg section and picked up a six-pack of century eggs for $6.25. They were imported from Taiwan and boasted "no lead added." Good to know.

I threw a couple of chopped eggs into the pork jook that had been simmering for a couple of hours. They would add complexity to what would have been a plain-tasting dish. There will be enough in the pot to last until Sunday.

Capitalizing on Demand for a Worthy Cause

Last week we wrote about San Francisco's Lily Restaurant, which pulled its popular $72 fried rice from the menu in June.

It was too expensive to produce and threatened to change the retaurant's identity.

Now the fried rice is coming back at $500, with the price bump going to charity.

The first organization to receive donations via crab fried rice will be SF New Deal, a nonprofit that has provided support to small businesses and food-insecure residents during the pandemic. Future proceeds will go to the Rose Pak Memorial Scholarship, which provides college financial aid to Asian American high schoolers in San Francisco, and climate control. [Chef Rob Lam] plans to rotate them out every few months and wants to keep the whole thing going for at least nine months.

I think the reintroduction will be a success. The foodies will be even more excited to post photos that:
1) Show they're able to afford $500 for an exclusive dish;
2) Allow them to signal their virtue as a supporter of worthy causes.

San Francisco's returning to normal.

Rice is Life

We know couples of Asian descent who had newborns during the pandemic. Normally we would deliver baby gifts in person but have been limited to sending cards and gifts via Amazon.

But how may the newborn's parents respond, if they want to send more than a thank-you note?

The insides only come in white (Guardian)

Headline: Japanese parents send relatives rice to hug in lieu of newborns

Parents in Japan are sending bags of rice that weigh the same as their newborn babies to relatives who are unable to visit them due to the pandemic.

The bags come in a wide range of designs, with some shaped like a baby wrapped in a blanket so that relatives can feel as though they are hugging the new arrival while looking at a picture of their face, which is attached to the front.

Your humble blogger thinks the idea is brilliant, but not surprising since it came from the land that made Tamagotchi a world-wide craze nearly 30 years ago. (h/t Tyler Cowen)

A Product That Was Too Successful

Fried rice was one of the first recipes I learned after college.

It appealed to my sense of frugality. Rather than throw out leftovers or quantities of raw ingredients too small to make a meal, I could transform them into a tasty dish that could stand on its own.

Here's my recipe from 2009 (pictured).

Wagyu, uni, caviar, black truffle XO sauce and
more are in this crab fried rice, which Lily
has taken off the menu. (Chron photo)

While fried rice still can be a free or inexpensive option to white rice in Chinese take-out, Asian chefs have been experimenting with the dish by adding costly ingredients and spice combinations. "Seafood fried rice", for example, is a $15-$20 offering on menus, right up there with other entrées.

Noting the trend, the owner of a small Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco decided to offer $72 fried rice over the Christmas holidays. It was intended to be a "stunt" similar to the $295 Le Burger Extravagant in New York.

Chef Rob Lam of Lily Restaurant didn't count on the status-seeking foodie culture of San Francisco.[bold added]

Lily started serving the crab fried rice around Christmas of 2020, two months after it opened, and it was supposed to be a two-week item, Lam admitted — a gimmick for the holidays. “The premise was, let’s do something so over-the-top and bougie,” he said. “We called it the #1 douchebag fried rice.” (On the menu, it was the much more politically correct #1 Dac Biet Fried Rice, with “dac biet” meaning “the works” in Vietnamese.) He expected that most people would see it and chuckle at the gall, then order the pho. They’d probably only sell three a night, if that...

To really land a joke, you have to commit to it, so Lam did. He sourced premium red king crab claws from a Japanese supplier; caviar from the California Caviar company and Tsar Nicoulai. His beef was from a high-end ranch that fed its cattle on olives, granting their meat more umami flavor and healthier fatty acids. He studied the art of fried rice with friend and colleague James Yu, who produces ideally fluffy and crisp wok-seared fried rice at his restaurant, Great China, in Berkeley. Lam’s team picked the meat from king crabs, snow crabs and Dungeness crabs and used the shells to make a stock, which they turned into a concentrated, multispecies crab essence that was folded into butter. Taking all of this trouble was one way to keep his cooks interested in the work during a soul-sucking time when all they were doing was takeout. Plus, the bottom line was that Lam didn’t want to put out crappy food, even if it was just for laughs.

The weird thing was, after all that effort, no one was laughing. Not the influencers, who immediately embraced the dish as the next hot thing to eat in San Francisco. Not the wok cook in the kitchen, deep in the weeds with 20 fried rice orders a night. And not Lam and the restaurant owners, Lily and Lucy Lieu, who suddenly found themselves in an existential crisis, trapped in a joke that kept stretching on and on without a punchline.

It didn’t help that they didn’t make any money on the fried rice with all of its premium, market-rate ingredients, or that customers would only order that and nothing else on the menu. The Lily team started sensing that their biggest draw was taking the business somewhere they didn’t want to go. They worried that doing more dishes in that price range would irrevocably change the public’s perception of who was welcome in the restaurant. “This wasn’t us,” Lam said. “It wasn’t who we wanted to be.”

After several reversed-by-customer-demand attempts to kill the dish, it was finally removed from the menu in June. I like Lily's dedication to its quality and mission. When the Delta variant subsides, we'll put the restaurant on the list of places to check out.

Meanwhile, I've got to do something with last night's rice, and the Spam has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of weeks....

San Tung Restaurant

Seafood fried rice and chicken wings

In the evenings there's at least a 30-minute wait for a table at the San Tung restaurant (on Irving, between 11th and 12th). We piggy-backed off of a parking space from a nearby errand and stopped by for a late lunch. There was a small line, and we were seated in less than 10 minutes.

San Tung's signature dish is the fried chicken wings. I'd tried them before and thought they were over-rated. On that occasion the line was out the door, the kitchen was chaotic, and the wings were good but far from special. Now the coating was crisp, the chicken was moist, and the sweet-hot garlicky gingery sauce made me wish that the lunch menu ($9) had more than six wings.

Next time I won't wait a year before coming here again.

An Environmental Problem to Worry About

From top: lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic (Slideshare)

Consumer Reports has a "troubling" report on heavy metals in American food:

CR bought 50 popular packaged foods intended for babies and toddlers, and tested them for arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury. What we found was troubling. Every food had measurable levels of at least one of the four heavy metals.

Heavy metals have been linked to a host of medical conditions, including cardiovascular, kidney, and bone disease, cancer, and diabetes. The toxins aren't flushed easily, meaning that frequent ingestion at "safe" doses may lead to harmful accumulations. CR has advice on what consumers can do:

While you might not be able to eliminate heavy metals from your food, adults and children can follow these steps to minimize risks:

Limit consumption of foods that tend to be higher in heavy metals...

Eat an array of fruits, vegetables, and grains. "That helps you avoid overconsuming any one type of food, plus a varied diet has many other health benefits," says Amy Keating, R.D., a Consumer Reports nutritionist. And getting enough calcium, vitamin C, selenium, and certain other nutrients may offset some of the harm from some heavy metals.

Rethink rice prep. To help reduce arsenic content, rinse rice, cook it in a lot of water (as you would pasta), and drain it afterward.

Your humble blogger stopped eating brown rice five years ago. The benefits of higher fiber weren't worth the cost of higher arsenic consumption.

Another piece of advice: avoid eating food imported from China. The potential toxicity of imported foodstuffs is due to decades of rapid economic development: 20 percent of China’s farmland is polluted with heavy metals.

My hunch is that this environmental problem is more likely to kill us than climate change.

Going with the Grain

We had been eating brown rice for over a decade because of its putative health benefits but switched back to white when Consumer Reports warned against the higher arsenic content of brown rice in 2012.

Our consumption has diminished because of heightened attention to carbohydrates, but each year we still buy 1-2 50-lb. bags of Calrose from Costco for $20 a bag. Rice goes well with hundreds of main dishes and is an ideal emergency provision because it can be stored for over a year in a dry container.

And it's always nice to have a quantity around to dry one's cellphone in a hurry...

Step Away From the Green Onions

As one who makes fried rice regularly, I was alarmed by the following news item: [bold added]

A Florida man was found “covered from head to toe in pork fried rice and a red sauce” following an attack yesterday by his ex-girlfriend, according to cops who arrested the woman for domestic battery.

Once the California legislature hears about this, they'll require that I get a fried-rice license, which means taking classes, passing tests, apprenticing under a fried-rice master or mistress (which admittedly could be fun), and, of course, paying a license fee.

At least the weapon was gluten-free.

Fried rice transforms leftovers into something tasty. Shown below are before-and-after photos using hot dogs that would otherwise have gone into the compost bin.

Before You Really Need To

Rice paddy near Sacramento (bizjournals.com)

Barron's: rice prices may spike this year. The reasons are current low prices that discourage planting and bad weather [bold added].

Prices have been on an almost continuous slide for the past 17 months, discouraging growers even as demand increases. Rice is trading around $10 per hundred pounds, down nearly 40% from the end of 2013.

“Current levels of supply against demand are very similar” to the food crises of 1972-74 and 2006-08, says Shawn Hackett in a recent edition of the Hackett Money Flow Report.

The stocks-to-trade ratio, a measure of how much rice is in storage relative to how much is shipped around the globe, is 225%, a tad lower than the 233% seen in 2007-08 when prices started to surge, according to the Firstgrain Rice Market Strategist newsletter. The lower ratio means smaller stockpiles. [snip]

Hackett sees unusual weather harming crops. Specifically, he pinpoints a “super” El Niño weather system in the Pacific Ocean as a potential problem....El Niño tends to cause droughts in the summer and floods in the fall from typhoons in all three countries, which produce about a third of the world’s rice.

You may not speculate in commodities, dear reader, but do yourself a favor and pick up that 25- or 50-pound bag of rice before you really need to (white keeps 4-5 years, brown lasts 6-8 months).