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Inside America’s Food Supply Chain Under Covid-19 | Forbes

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Inside America’s Food Supply Chain Under Covid-19 | Forbes

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Inside America’s Food Supply Chain Under Covid-19 | Forbes

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Inside America’s Food Supply Chain Under Covid-19 | Forbes

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Komiku - It's time for adventure ! vol 3

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Rice as Conundrum, Krytonite, and Solace

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Rice as Conundrum, Krytonite, and Solace

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Just over 4:30. "Rice: From Convenience to Cuisine"

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Audio of Chopping Coconut (Soundscape for Donna's Story) 

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Audio of Chopping Coconut (Soundscape for Donna's Story) 

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Rice as a conundrum, kyptonite and solace

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Rice as a conundrum, kyptonite and solace

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Here's the latest version of the rough draft. It obviously needs to be cut wayyy back. I'm working on it. :)

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Sustenance: Stories at the Intersection of Culture, Health, and Memory

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The National Rice Awareness Month (NRAM) is celebrated in the country every month of November annually by virtue of the Proclamation No. 524 series of 2004. This year's theme "Quality Rice, Quality Life" focuses on improving farmers' competitiveness to produce quality rice and instill the values of responsible rice consumption among consumers, thus contributing in achieving sufficiency in the country.

Rice is life especially for Filipinos and other Asians. Even with the availability of other staple foods such as noodles and bread, rice remains to be the primary choice for staple food in the Philippines. Rice, locally known as "Palay" (un-milled rice), "Bigas" (milled rice), and "Kanin" (cooked rice) is much more than food. It is a grain crop that has historical and cultural significance. In fact, it is commonly associated with many rituals, traditions and cultural practices in the country and are deeply woven in Filipino culture for years in different areas of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

A Filipino meal cannot be complete without rice. It is rarely missing on the table, be it breakfast, lunch, dinner or even snacks and huge gatherings. Average of the Filipino diet is based on this crop. It provides half of the calorie requirements and is a rich source of carbohydrates and other nutrients such as protein, fiber, calcium, iron and more. Aside from the diet and culture, rice also plays a huge part on providing income sources for Filipino families especially the farmers who work day and night just to provide food not only to their own but to all Filipinos that are dependent on rice to sustain the day-to-day nutrient needs.

To sum it all, rice is very essential to the lives of Filipinos, may it be for culture, for consumption, for nutrition or for labor. Thus, aside from protecting its value, we should also appreciate the efforts of the farmers who do the hard work for us to have rice on our tables. Let us help and support them in every way we can by patronizing their own produce to help them earn for their families. After all, when there is rice, there is no hunger. Support our farmers, support local rice!

References:

"Rice, much more than food" from http://thingsasian.com/story/rice-much-more-food#:~:text=In%20the%20Philippines%20rice%20is,woven%20into%20the%20Filipino%20culture.&text=The%20average%20daily%20intake%20of,an%20important%20source%20of%20carbohydrates.

"Rice: A Filipino constant" from https://www.bar.gov.ph/index.php/digest-home/digest-archives/364-2011-4th-quarter/2047-rice-a-filipino-constant

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The importance of Rice to Filipinos' lives

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The National Rice Awareness Month (NRAM) is celebrated in the country every month of November annually by virtue of the Proclamation No. 524 series of 2004. This year's theme "Quality Rice, Quality Life" focuses on improving farmers' competitiveness to produce quality rice and instill the values of responsible rice consumption among consumers, thus contributing in achieving sufficiency in the country.

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50 Reasons to Love the World - 2021

Why do you love the world?

"Because when I heard the drums of the masqueraders in Sierra Leone and looked into their mirrored crown, I saw my forebears and I saw myself and every other human being." - Michael W Twitty, author and historian
More Reasons to Love the World

Just before the American Revolution, a woman whose name I may never know disembarked a ship in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, destined for a rice field. She was a member of the Mende people of Sierra Leone. Her back bore the letters "R.A.C.E." - Royal African Company of England - seared into her flesh with a brand. The ship on which she was brought started its journey in Liverpool or London and made its way south along the upper Guinea Coast. It waited at Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone estuary, bobbing in the water, waiting for supplies and a cargo of "choice healthy slaves" that would be sold at auction by scramble on the deck or by the wharf when it landed at its final destination: the swampy, moss-draped Carolina Lowcountry.

The journey of rice to the US is the journey of the people whose labour and knowledge led to its successful cultivation. Between 1750 and 1775, the bulk of more than 50,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped from the aptly named Rice Coast, the traditional rice-growing region between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and the western Ivory Coast where part of my African forebearers are from, and whose heart is in modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US' eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean. In the antebellum South, if cotton was the king of commodities, then rice was the queen. And the queen brought incomparable economic power, transforming Charleston, and later Savannah, into thriving cosmopolitan ports.

The women who brought this know-how were precious cargo. In their heads rested more than four millennia of experience, from the days of rice being gathered wild to its domestication around 3,000 years ago. And in their wombs lay the potential for centuries of wealth for their slaveholders at the expense of human dignity and the US' "democratic experiment" their descendants would ironically lay the economic foundations of.

Long before their arrival, there was likely Oryza glaberrima, or "African rice" - one of only two main species of cultivated rice in the world along with Oryza sativa, or "Asian rice". Indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa and brought by enslavers on the Middle Passage, African rice was used to feed the enslaved from Senegambia in the late 1600s, as well as the famous "seed from Madagascar", an Asian variety of rice. By the 18th Century, at the encouragement of Europeans, Asian rice varieties had spread across West Africa on coastal plantations, allowing enslavers to provision slave ships with both types of rice in order to feed their colonies in the New World.

The difference between rice at home in West Africa and rice in the American South was more than just freedom versus enslavement. There were new dangers, from pathogens and parasites to alligators and snakes to sunrise-to-sunset labour patterns that added hours beyond the equatorial 12-hour day. Surrounding these pains were the threats of punishment, torture, sale and separation from loved ones. It was bad enough to be in exile, but to constantly have social and spiritual ruptures impacting this new existence created an aspect of almost-constant terror.

While the labour of producing rice made others extremely wealthy, these men and women's persistence was undergirded by immense private joy. In their world, the shared tasks allowed the most experienced and quick-working enslaved labourers some time to cultivate their own rice patches and gardens, and hunt and fish on time away from their "task" or assigned acreage of rice. They used their mortars and pestles that pounded the rice in the same communicative musical ways as their African foremothers. They wove baskets; carved pestles; knitted nets to catch fish, shrimp and crabs; and built coops from palmetto stalks to raise the chickens and guinea fowl (also arrivals from West Africa) that pecked in their yards. These animals were served with the rice - West African recipes that morphed to suit the plantation world. All of it was an unsubtle affront to exploitation and assimilation. It was a resistance that was easily ignored but pervasive.

Not long after the nameless woman's arrival, thousands upon thousands of enslaved African South Carolinians made their escape to the British line during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). She was not likely one of them, probably with one or two children that would prevent her from easily escaping. Many would end up in Nova Scotia, Canada, or would end up back in her homeland of Sierra Leone. As the planters regained control after the revolution, a new variety of rice would emerge, guaranteeing enslavement would go nowhere until the Confederacy's surrender: Carolina Gold. Carolina Gold still has mysterious origins, but genetic research from 2007 suggests it may have come from a Ghanaian variety named Bankoram, one of 20 landraces with which Carolina Gold shares genes.

From the kitchens of the Lowcountry, Carolina Gold would eventually entice diners with influences drawn from the indigenous peoples of the South-east US, as well as the traditions of southern England, French Huguenots, Germans of the Palatinate, the Spanish and Sephardic Jews, the latter two bringing in culinary influences from Moorish Spain and older contributions from the Middle East.

However, the most important cultures of the Carolina rice kitchen were the people doing most of the cooking: the Mende, Temne, Fula, Limba, Loma, Bassari, Sherbro, Kru, Balanta and other West African peoples, as well as the Afri-Creoles of Barbados, the mother colony of Carolina. Parallel with a similar rice tradition in southern Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley - also established by colonial powers; in that case, the French - it was the culinary experience of centuries in Africa that would shape a cuisine that would come to define the American South.

You may also be interested in:
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In the rice kitchens of the American South, Africans introduced the preference that once the rice was steamed, each grain was meant to be cooked separate from the others, each on its own. The only rice that was cooked until sticky was used to make fritters like calas, sold hot and fresh on the streets of New Orleans, or to make pudding or any number of breads or sweets. Rice for savoury purposes was nearly always paired with the Afri-Creole "trinity" of tomatoes, onions, and bell or hot peppers, or was laid out as the bed for traditional West African staples like okra, peanuts, black-eyed peas, greens or stews made from a combination of these or starring seafood or chicken. My grandmother and my mother, my best culinary teachers, passed down to me recipes like Country Captain (a Southern response to curry-based dishes brought by British traders via India), rice steamed with the trinity and one-pot meals of smothered chicken and rice.

To this day when I cook my rice, every grain is separate and distinct. When I made my pilgrimage to Sierra Leone in 2020 where my ancestors came from, I watched the painstaking process used to process rice. The people were extremely proud of their relationship with the crop. From the pounding and beating in the mortar with the tall, long pestles to the confidence they used to winnow the grain with the beautiful grass baskets that mirror the ones sold in Charleston and Savannah, I felt the deep connections with the Lowcountry. Every single time it ended up in fragrant plump grains that were separate, soft with a body you could feel on your teeth.

From 20 years steeped in this work, researching and travelling and cooking, I have realised you can eat and enjoy food and still comprehend the chain of human experience that led to your plate. The point is not that the traumas incurred outweigh the urge to eat or the hunger for texture or flavour. Alongside survival and the desire for food that satisfies us, the next need we have is to give meaning to our material culture. One ingredient may not mean the same thing to someone else, or it may tell a very different story.

My story is told in many ingredients, not just rice. But when we invoke rice, we are talking not only of West Africa but Madagascar, where other forebearers of mine derived; over to East Asia, where they had roots; but also over to India and the Middle East, where other distant forebearers of mine dwelled; to Italy and Spain, where still others on my family tree would also appreciate the grain. To be a descendant of rice people is to be connected to huge swaths of the globe, from China to Mali to Latin America as well as the US South.

I may never know that Mende woman's name, but now I call her Mama Wovei, the "Elder Mother" in Mende, her ancestral language. Elder Mother had a daughter circa 1770-1780, whose name has been lost, and she had a daughter named Nora around 1800. Nora had a daughter born in Charleston in 1828 named Hester, sold to slaveholders in Alabama at the tender age of 12. Hester had a daughter named Josephine just after the US Civil War, and she had a daughter in 1890 named Mary, who would bring Clintonia Hazel into the world. Clintonia bore Patricia in 1948.

One year before Patricia went to join her forebearers and I inherited the pots and skillets that made those rice dishes that blessed our tables, I had the pleasure of introducing her to the woman who disembarked from that ship so long ago. Over an atlas showing her journey, she met Mama Wovei, her great-great-great-great-great grandmother. As we traced her path with our fingers on the page, crossing the Atlantic in seconds on what took her months, I asked Mom about the best thing she ever made. She said, "A little boy named Michael, I cooked him low and slow."
Michael W Twitty is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and historian. His latest book, Rice, is available now. Join more than three million BBC Travel fans by liking us on If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "The Essential List". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Facebook, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
BBC Travel celebrates 50 Reasons to Love the World in 2021, through the inspiration of well-known voices as well as unsung heroes in local communities around the globe.

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It built cities and fed colonies, but it turns out enslaved Africans didn't just plant the cash crop - they likely introduced its cultivation to the US.

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If you're a relative newcomer to this part of the world, you might wonder why Lowcountry natives spend so much time talking about rice and its relationship to the history of South Carolina. The great volume of publications and conversations about rice reflect the grain's importance in our community's shared history, from the earliest days of the Carolina Colony to the present. Rather than burden you with a chronological overview of an epic narrative, I've boiled this delicious topic down to ten talking points that you might use when you break bread with friends and family.

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the artist Jonathan Green on a series of projects involving rice and rice history in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. His enthusiasm for this topic is infectious, and his basic premise is intriguing. Rice, says Jonathan, is the epitome of the shared nature of our history in South Carolina. Rice is the nexus of a myriad of traditions and stories, each of which forms a part of our shared identity as South Carolinians. Just about everything and everyone we love in South Carolina's deep and sometimes-painful history, has some connection to the story of rice in this state. In an effort to build a better sense of togetherness in our communities during this age of divisiveness and prejudice, Jonathan suggests we should embrace rice as our common ground, a topic around which we can build a productive conversation, and something with which we can quite literally share a meal. In the spirit of thanksgiving, therefore, I invite you to consider giving thanks for rice and all that it did-both good and bad-to forge the community we now inhabit today. In an effort to facilitate conversations about rice, I've assembled a list of talking points in roughly chronological order. I call this list, "Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Lowcounty Rice." These ten items are my personal, subjective choices, of course, but they are based on my experiences in examining historical documents, talking with experts, reading their books, and years of talking to audiences who are curious about South Carolina history. I invite you to consider my top-ten list, and then perhaps create your own.

1. Rice defined early South Carolina.

Rice wasn't South Carolina's first major industry, it was never our only industry, and, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, it wasn't even particularly profitable. Nevertheless, rice was the one crop that set South Carolina apart from every other part of colonial British America and, ultimately, the United States. For example, if we could travel back in time to the eighteenth century, and ask your average American, or even your average Englishman, "what's the difference between Virginia, South Carolina, and Barbados?", the response would have been something like this: Virginia grows tobacco, South Carolina produces rice, and Barbados grows sugar cane. Now, early Virginians grew more than tobacco, and Barbadians planted more than just sugar cane, of course, but those crops dominated their respective landscapes and economies. Similarly, early South Carolina certainly grew a lot of other crops besides rice, but rice dominated our landscape, our economy, even our way of thinking.

How did rice change our way of thinking? Think about this: The cultivation of rice is a backbreaking business that requires one to work long hours in the direct sun, frequently while standing in either water or mud, surrounded by mosquitoes, horseflies, snakes, and even alligators. In the earliest days of rice experimentation in South Carolina, European colonists decided that white folks were simply not cut out for this kind of labor, but-they told themselves-dark-skinned Africans were perfectly suited to this sort of difficult and dangerous work. Rice became a major crop here in the very early 1700s. In the three decades prior to the ascendency of rice, South Carolinians had imported a relatively small number of enslaved Africans by way of the Caribbean islands. Once rice gained a foothold as a viable, profitable crop in South Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, that racial way of thinking about labor paved the way for the large-scale importation of enslaved people from Africa, while at the same time discouraging the immigration of poor white laborers from Europe. South Carolina's long-term commitment to the cultivation of rice on an industrial scale thus not only defined our economy, but also permanently shaped the demographic profile of this state.

2. The origins of South Carolina rice are obscure.

It seems like such a simple pair of questions-when was rice first planted in South Carolina, and where did that rice come from? In reality, however, there are no easy answers. Over the past two centuries, a number of historians had taken a crack at these questions, with varied results. If you peruse various South Carolina history books in the library, you'll find a variety of answers based on a variety of authentic historical documents. Unfortunately, none of these materials provide a verifiable date, or a definitive country of origin for the first grains of rice planted here. The first English settlers who established Charles Town in 1670 brought a small parcel of rice, along with instructions from the Lords Proprietors to see if it would grow here, but there is absolutely no surviving evidence that anything came of that attempt. By July of 1699, however, we know that samples of South Carolina rice were being test-marketed in London, and the grocers there encouraged planters here to raise more of it.

In February 1715, a New Englander named John Thurber presented a petition to the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly, asking for a gratuity "for bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this Province." The House then voted to give Thurber a reward of £100, but nowhere in the surviving records does it mention when Thurber brought this rice to Carolina. According to several rather vague, anecdotal accounts published later in the eighteenth century, the first Madagascar rice came to South Carolina in 1696, while others say it was definitely in the year 1704, but nobody mentions whether or not this was the work of John Thurber or another agent. More recently, anthropologists and historians have been debating the identity of the precise species and variety of the so-called "Carolina Gold" rice, and questioning whether Madagascar was truly its place of origin. In short, the jury's still out on this matter, and we need further investigations, both of a documentary nature, and archaeological. Why archaeological? Think about this: deep in the mud of the old, abandoned rice fields in the Lowcountry, there are probably ancient grains imported from distant lands waiting to be discovered and studied.

3. Plantation owners capitalized on African rice knowledge.

South Carolina began as an English colony in a land already populated by indigenous peoples. The early European colonists more or less brushed the native inhabitants aside and began transforming the landscape to suit their European ideas and ways of life. The colonists were driven by ideas of commerce and profit, but because the land and climate were unfamiliar, they embarked on a good bit of experimentation in the early years. England isn't known as a rice-producing nation, but three centuries ago the English understood that rice was an important food around the Mediterranean basin, and poor English folk occasionally ate imported rice. As I mentioned earlier, rice was one of many crops that the English colonists experimented with in early South Carolina, and by the turn of the eighteenth century they determined that rice could be a very profitable crop in the fertile, swampy soils of the Lowcountry.

At that same moment, at the turn of the eighteenth century, English colonists in America were just beginning to invest more heavily in the African slave trade, and suddenly there was a confluence of two streams of profit. The Carolina colonists needed to acquire a lot of labor and a lot of agricultural experience to turn rice into a profitable crop, and, in the growing population of West Africans brought to Carolina, they found a wealth of built-in experience. The people of the coastal regions of West Africa have been growing rice for millennia, and knew far more about the cultivation of this temperamental plant than any Englishman did. In short, the white folks who got rich from growing rice in colonial South Carolina owed their fortunes to the agricultural experience of their enslaved work force. The methods, tools, and language of Lowcountry rice have far more in common with the culture of coastal West Africa than with any European precedent. Recent books by Judith Carney and Etta Fields-Black, just to name two authors, prove this assertion beyond any doubt. The cultivation and the success of rice in South Carolina was a collaborative effort between two very different cultures, and that collaboration left a permanent stamp on the history of South Carolina.

4. There were two types of rice cultivation: inland rice and tidal rice.

Rice requires a lot of fresh water, not salt water, to grow. Fields of rice have to be flooded periodically to kill weeds and competing plants, and then drained to allow the rice plants to mature. In order to successfully grow rice, therefore, you have to have a workable plan and a network of physical infrastructure to control the flow of fresh water. South Carolina colonists developed two contrasting methods of rice cultivation in the eighteenth century.

Most, but perhaps not all, of the earliest rice fields in South Carolina, up to the period of the American Revolution, used a watering system that we call the "inland" method. This method drew fresh water from man-made reservoirs to flood embanked fields of rice at the requisite times. These reservoirs were filled by water from a nearby swamps or rivers, but sometimes they relied entirely on rainfall. In any case, rice plantations using the "inland" method were relatively small, perhaps a few hundred acres at most, because they required a great deal of labor to create and maintain the reservoirs, and also because they depended entirely on water sources that were sometimes plentiful and sometimes scarce. You can see the vestiges of inland rice fields in many of the tree-filled swamps that border local thoroughfares like Bee's Ferry Road and Palmetto Commerce Parkway, just to name two examples.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a different method of water management began to gain ascendency in the Carolina lowcountry. The so-called "tidal" method uses the natural force of the tides to draw water onto, and then out of a rice field. Twice every day, on a predictable schedule, tidal waters pushed by ocean currents power several miles into the coastal rivers of South Carolina. A flowing wedge of salty ocean water pushes back the fresh river water, and Lowcountry planters, and their African work force, learned to use that regular ebb and flow of safe, fresh water to flood and drain their rice fields in a systematic and controlled manner. The "tidal" method requires a lot of knowledge and experience to avoid letting salt water flood the crop, but the perpetual, predictable motion of the tides allowed for the creation of larger and more profitable rice plantations.

The "tidal" method did not entirely replace the older, "inland" method, but it did become the predominant method in nineteenth-century South Carolina, on plantations adjacent to rivers such as the Cooper, the Waccamaw, and the Santee. Perhaps you've walked around the old tidal rice fields at Middleton Place, or driven through a network of them bordering the causeway that leads across the Combahee River on your way to Beaufort.

5. To control the flow of water on rice fields, enslaved South Carolinians moved a volume of earth comparable to that of the pyramids in Egypt.

If you've ever flown in or out of the Charleston airport, you've probably looked out the window and admired the natural beauty of the winding rivers meandering through the swampy Lowcountry. You may not have realized it, but you were probably seeing lots and lots of abandoned rice fields. Prior to the twentieth century, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of acres around here were actively used for growing rice. Growing rice on such a large scale required a vast network of hydraulic systems to facilitate the requisite flooding and draining of the fields. Creating a hydraulic system meant clearing cypress swamps, building earthen embankments, dikes, causeways, reservoirs, and wooden flood gates, called trunks, to control the flow of water. In order to plant hundreds of thousands of acres of rice, Lowcountry planters needed miles and miles and miles of earthen embankments and thousands of complex, hand-crafted wooden trunks. In recent years, archaeologists and historians have been working to document the remnants of these man-made features that survive, mostly forgotten and overlooked, in the forests and riverbanks of the Lowcountry. After the rice industry collapsed more than a century ago, the rice fields slowly returned to their original, forested condition, but if you know what you're looking for, you can easily recognize the remnants of miles and miles of rice dikes and embankments all over the Lowcountry.

And who built these features? It was done entirely by hand by many thousands of enslaved Africans, and perhaps a handful of white laborers. Those enslaved people received no compensation for their hard work, but they created a topographical legacy that we often overlook today. During the era of rice cultivation in South Carolina, enslaved Africans moved earth on a massive scale, comparable to the combined volume of the great pyramids in Egypt. The fact that you can still see the fruits of their hard labor while walking through forests, and from the window of an airplane, and even satellite images of the Lowcountry, is an enduring memorial to their ingenuity and hard work. It is, as Jonathan Green says, the sculptural legacy of enslaved Africans on a massive geographical scale.

6. Rice cultivation was hard work, but it wasn't all done by hand.

If you've ever visited a museum of any kind in coastal South Carolina, I'm sure you've seen old photographs of people using large wooden mortars and pestles to process rice. You know, you put a handful of rice in a bowl-shaped piece of wood-a mortar-and beat it using a long wooden stick with a fat, rounded tip-a pestle. The object isn't to pulverize or grind the rice, like you would corn or wheat, but rather to remove the outer hull that sheathes the edible grain. During the era of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some unknown proportion of the rice produced in South Carolina was processed by hand using wooden mortars and pestles, but not all of it. As the decades progressed, a larger and larger proportion of the Lowcountry rice crop was pounded by machines, not humans. Early South Carolina rice planters certainly did not display progressive thinking in their use of enslaved labor, but many were actually quite receptive to new ideas about mechanization. Just like capitalists today, if they could find a machine that could do the work of twenty people, they invested in the machine.

As early as 1733, the government of South Carolina awarded bounties and patents to anyone who could demonstrate a piece of machinery that could process rice more expeditiously, and thus create more profit for the colony. Rice milling machines, technically pounding machines, borrowed technology from water mills, windmills, steam mills, and even animal-powered devices to convert kinetic energy into profitable work. By the end of the eighteenth century, most of our Carolina rice was being pounded by machines that used cam-shafts to raise and lower a series of wooden hammers, like the engine in your car uses cam-shafts to raise and lower the pistons that power your wheels. Drive down Lockwood Boulevard in downtown Charleston and look at West Point Mill, or drive down Washington Street and see the old facade of Bennett's Mill behind the Harris-Teeter grocery store. These are just two examples of the many, many rice mills that once dotted our landscape. We're talking about millions of bushels of rice grains being processed every year for export, far more than could ever be done by hand with mortars and pestles.

7. Rice generated a polarized pair of cultural identities in South Carolina.

The production of rice on an industrial scale in early South Carolina made some folks very, very rich, while at the same time it also kept other people trapped in a state of terrible oppression and poverty. The exportation of large quantities of rice generated tremendous wealth, but that wealth remained concentrated in the hands of a small minority of white planters. Because of the system of chattel slavery that existed here from the founding of the colony in 1670 to the general emancipation of 1865, the laborers who actually planted, tended, harvested, and processed the rice received none of the profits from its sale. The lopsided economics of this situation became part of the permanent fabric of our culture, manifest in traditions and objects all around us. For example, the great wealth acquired from the exportation of rice allowed white planters to build grand, luxurious houses, to import expensive luxury goods, and to cultivate a peculiar, leisurely way of life that involved dancing, music, drinking, politics, and dueling, among other things.

Simultaneously, South Carolina's early obsession with the rice economy induced white planters to import more and more Africans to work their fields, and to create plantation infrastructures that forced tens of thousands of enslaved people to work in relative isolation. Working the fields from sunrise to sunset, and denied access to the material wealth of the white community, the enslaved children of Africa managed to keep alive many vestiges of their traditional cultures. In short, I'm talking about Gullah, or Gullah-Geechee culture in the Lowcountry. Gullah isn't just a language, it's a complex array of words, images, sounds, beliefs, and attitudes that represent a unique, local synthesis of African and European-American culture. And it's still an important part of our culture today, more than one hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery. This polarized pair of cultural identities-the great material wealth of Lowcountry planters, and the great cultural legacy that we call Gullah-are the twin cornerstones of our cultural identity. They are, in a nutshell, the things that draw millions of tourists to Charleston every year, and make our community such an interesting place to live.

8. Rice formed a staple part of the South Carolina diet.

Although it might seem like an obvious part of our history, the local consumption of rice is a more complicated topic than you might expect. In fact, there are at least two different ways to look at it. First, let's consider the diet of the folks on the lowest end of the socio-economic ladder. Prior to the end of slavery in 1865, farmers in South Carolina weren't just growing rice to feed themselves and their immediate families. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, rice was being grown in an industrial scale in South Carolina, and the vast majority of it was exported overseas. The poor, enslaved people who grew the rice and prepared it for market had to eat too, of course, and so rice formed a staple part of their diet. But they didn't get the best grains of rice. Instead, the enslaved people usually ate what was called "broken rice"; that is, fractured grains of rice that had been damaged during the process of hulling or pounding it. This broken rice couldn't be sold for much profit, so it was set aside to feed enslaved people and animals. In order to dress up this broken rice and make it more palatable, enslaved cooks created new dishes, like Hoppin' John, that made the most of leftover grains.

On the opposite end of the economic ladder, the rich white planters of early South Carolina proudly served rice at the fanciest tables in the land, because rice formed the bedrock of their great fortunes. Many visitors who came to the Lowcountry from up north, or from England, found it very odd to see rice on the tables of rich folks. To most outsiders, especially those from the north of Europe, rice was traditionally regarded as a poor man's food, but here rice was proudly consumed by folks from all walks of life. In early South Carolina, rice was our common bread, if you will. It was the main ration for enslaved people. It was served to prisoners incarcerated at the District Jail and at the City Work House; as rations for children at the Orphan House and for the aged and infirm at the Poor House; rations for soldiers, and for the policemen who patrolled the streets. In times of war in South Carolina, rice was even used a legitimate form of currency. In short, South Carolinians consumed rice out of bare necessity and out of pride in the lifestyles it created.

9. The rice industry in South Carolina continued after the Civil War and ended before World War II.

The cultivation of rice on an industrial scale required a huge amount of labor. From the beginning of this industry in South Carolina, white planters depended completely on the forced labor of enslaved Africans. With the demise of slavery at the end of the American Civil War, the rice industry managed to continue for a while, albeit on a smaller scale. In the years immediately after the war, many planters and freedmen-formerly enslaved people-negotiated contracts to continue planting and harvesting rice as before, although the laborers now received pay for their work. As the years went by, the number of acres being cultivated and the number of workers laboring in the fields steadily declined as folks moved on to new pursuits that were more profitable. Some white planters stuck with rice well into the twentieth century simply because it was a traditional pursuit, something that their families had done for many generations, and they were reluctant to let the traditional die. At the same time, many formerly enslaved people and their descendants continued to grow rice after emancipation because it was all they knew, and they had to feed their families somehow.

Following the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, cheaper Asian rice displaced South Carolina rice from most American and European markets. South Carolina acreage devoted to rice declined steadily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as hurricanes and blights damaged crops and poor profits induced local planters to find other occupations. By the late 1940s, large numbers of South Carolinians had abandoned traditional agriculture and moved to cities and suburbs, where they found jobs in factories and, increasingly, tourism. You might hear some locals proclaim that South Carolina's rice industry ended abruptly, say, after the Civil War, or after the destructive hurricane of 1911, but the real story is much more nuanced. Yes, South Carolina's rice industry collapsed more than a century ago, but traditional rice cultivation continued to persist on a much smaller scale.

10. Rice is again being commercially grown in South Carolina.

Although rice ceased to be a viable cash crop in South Carolina many years ago, rice continued to be grown by a few folks in the Lowcountry for their own consumption, and by a few folks as a sort of heritage crop. In recent years, there has been a great resurgence of interest in rice, both as a food and as a cultural artifact. Conversations about rice and its history have spurred many chefs to showcase rice in a variety of new dishes, and rice is now very much in vogue in restaurants and in cookbooks. More specifically, folks have been celebrating the variety of rice that made South Carolina famous-the so-called "Carolina Gold" rice. In fact, there is now a non-profit " Carolina Gold Rice Foundation," headed by Glenn Roberts, who is also the founder of a for-profit endeavor called Anson Mills, which specializes in the cultivation of heirloom grains, legumes, and oil seeds. Glenn and his allies, including David Shields at the University of South Carolina and chefs throughout the nation, are spreading the word about the value of Carolina Gold rice, not only as a tasty food item, but as a symbol of our shared cultural heritage.

In short, rice is making a comeback in South Carolina. It will never be a big industry again, but it's something that the community can rally around. For example, Middleton Place Plantation, on the banks of the Ashley River, has started planting rice again, albeit on a small scale. Tens of thousands of tourists visit that plantation every year, and most of what they see reflects the lifestyles of the rich and famous. By planting rice and inviting visitors to witness the process of raising, harvesting, and processing rice, Middleton Place is offering a window in to the lives of the enslaved majority whose labor generated the immense wealth that the Middleton family once enjoyed.

The story of rice in the history of South Carolina is a deep and complex narrative that includes many different facets and tangents. Whether you're interested in agriculture, engineering, architecture, economics, ethnography, biography, cuisine, language, music, or the arts in general, almost every avenue of study in early South Carolina is connected to this state's former obsession with rice. My goal for today's program was to provide a brief overview of a complicated but important topic. If you'd like to dig deeper into rice history in the Lowcountry, I've prepared a list of selected book titles to get you started. There's a vast amount of material on this subject, both in print and online, so I encourage you to visit your local library and explore. The story of rice isn't just in books, however. It's also a story you can see and experience at a number of local plantations and parks, and it's in the genealogy of the people that you meet. While the introduction of rice more than three centuries ago helped to plant the seeds of inequity and division in South Carolina, this tiny grain has endured and evolved into the symbol of the shared nature of our community's history.

Suggestions for Further Reading about Rice History:

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Doar, David. Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Charleston: Charleston Museum, 1936. Reprint, 1970.

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Easterby, J. H. ed. The South Carolina Rice Plantation, as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945.

Edelson, S. Max. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Fields-Black, Edda L. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Heyward, Duncan Clinch. Seed from Madagascar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937. Reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and the Making of South Carolina: An Introductory Essay. Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1995.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Porcher, Richard D. and William Robert Judd. The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

Salley, A. S. Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina. Columbia: The State Company, for the Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1919.

Smith, Hayden R. Carolina's Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Tuten, James H. Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.

Williams, Roy III and Alexander Lucas Lofton. Rice to Ruin: The Jonathan Lucas Family in South Carolina, 1783-1929. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019.

Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.

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Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Lowcountry Rice

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If you're a relative newcomer to this part of the world, you might wonder why Lowcountry natives spend so much time talking about rice and its relationship to the history of South Carolina. The great volume of publications and conversations about rice reflect the grain's importance in our community's shared history, from the earliest days of the Carolina Colony to the present.