Riceless
Comments: 2
Looks like another bad year for the rice harvest.
Japan’s grocers, weathermen see rice bowl half empty
Bennett Richardson, Christian Science MonitorPoor weather this summer has focused fresh attention on this island nation’s staple crop. Temperatures were some two to three degrees Celsius below normal throughout much of the country last month, and rice fields got only about one-third their typical exposure to sunshine, according to the Japan Metrological Agency.
[…] Some observers say Japan may be facing its worst rice harvest in a decade.
This cloudy forecast, however, may not take the toll it once would have on the national palate. A new UN study goes so far as to say that “rice is no longer a staple food” in Japan.
The diet is defintely changing in Japan, and people will pay the price in a generation when heart disease and other ‘Western ailments’ (aka diseases of affluence) start to skyrocket.
When I first came to Japan, I read a report somewhere (can’t remember exactly where, nor can I cite it accurately — but the numbers stuck in my mind) that said between 1955 and 1985 the average height of 15-year-old boys increased by 14 cm. For girls of the same age, the increase was 11 cm. That’s a huge increase in a single generation, attributable to the changing diet (and, undoubtedly, the fact that the post-war food situation in Japan was not good).
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2003.08.13 (Wed) • 10:24
Comments
Posted by peter 2003.08.13, 22:26
Here in the inaka we get a huge bowl of rice with our kyushoku(school lunch) just about every day(maybe yakisoba or udon once a month). Some of my students say they eat rice 3 times a day!
Maybe it’s because rice cultivation is the major industry here and they’re proud of it, but where I live rice isn’t going away anytime soon.
Posted by jh 2003.08.13, 23:03
We’re big-time rice eaters in our family. It’s got to be a better carb to eat than the bread you get here simply because it’s less processed. I do get a bit worried about pesticides, but we generally buy organic unpolished rice.
More worrying is the amount of preservatives that find their way into bread. We once went on holiday for 3 weeks and when we came back discovered that the couple of slices of bread we’d left in the pantry were still perfectly edible —- not a trace of mold —- and the milk in the fridge hadn’t even begun to turn.
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