If only the Tea Party activists ate rice every single day!

Margaret Thatcher famously commented that there is no such thing as society, in her articulation of a political economic thinking that promoted the individual and individual's rights.  Thatcher and Reagan set the world onto reexamining the role of the individual and the individual's contract with others.  As we look around, it is hard not to notice that we are yet to arrive at any definitive version of the contract--in fact, our disagreements appear to be getting more and more intense on the issue of individuals and society (think Obamacare, for instance.)

An anthropology professor notes in the NY Times forum, "The Stone":

modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

"Plus" is the operative word there.

The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not how we got to be the kind of species we are today.

I don't imagine the patron saint of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, reading that essay and thinking about the ideas discussed there.  It is a shame that from the intellectual weights of a Jefferson and Franklin and more we have now arrived at the likes of Palin as powerful leaders.  This surely cannot be evolution! ;)

So, why the rice, you ask?  There is a reason, dear reader.  Keep in mind that this blogger does not simply rant like how Palin does!

Here is what a report in the Scientific American notes:

research from the U.S. and China indicates that northern Chinese may have a mind-set closer to individualistic Americans than their southern compatriots. And the reason is rice.

Got your interest there?

Farmers north of the Yangtze predominantly grow wheat, and those to the south grow rice. Cultivating rice is very labor- and water-intensive, and it therefore requires sharing resources. Communities have to cooperate to plant and irrigate. Growing wheat requires half the labor and depends more on rainfall patterns, so it can be managed with much less reliance on one's neighbors.

Sets up well for the question, which is:

[University of Virginia doctoral candidate Thomas Talhelm] wondered if agricultural practices could help explain the more individualistic, or Western, mind-set he found in the north compared with the more holistic, or Eastern, way of thinking in the south.

Aren't you dying to know what Talhelm found?

As expected, the researchers found that holistic thought and loyalty were higher in provinces with rice cultivation and that individualism was more common in wheat-farming areas. To see if the rice theory applied beyond students, the researchers also looked at provincial divorce rates, another indicator of individualism. “Wheat regions had a 50 percent higher divorce rate than rice regions,” Talhelm says.

Aha!  There is more:

The rice theory jibes with other cultural research into how agriculture influences thinking, explains Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. For example, Nisbett found that in Turkey, farmers (an interdependent occupation) were much more holistic than herders (an independent occupation).

If only Sarah Palin and the Tea Party nutcases would do some serious reading and thinking before they opened their mouths, and if only people across the political spectrum engaged in reading and thinking!

Yep, from the New Yorker ;)

On noodles, pasta, and ... சேவை

A couple of years ago, when visiting with the parents, father said he felt like eating சேவை.  I offered to help mother in the kitchen, recalling the hours that it took mother to prepare that.

"Oh, you can get instant சேவை from the store" father said.

I looked at mother.  "There is no way I will ever eat that" she declared.  "You can buy it yourself, and make it yourself" she added, as if she was disgusted with the very thought of having to handle that inferior product.

சேவை (Sevai,) as Wikipedia notes (is there anything at all that is not in Wikipedia?) "is a type of rice vermicelli popular in Southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu"  That Wiki entry describes the labor that went into making the traditional way, which is why I offered to help in the kitchen.  Especially when it came to that final step of squeezing the cooked rice dough, which if not carefully done can become rock hard, through the special apparatus in order to produce the fine strands of சேவை.

Ah, those were the days, my friend!

This photo from The Hindu shows how the சேவை is squeezed through

As real men (haha,) my brother and I did not sit down and turn the handle clockwise to squeeze the "sevai idli" through, but stood over it and muscled through as if it were a competition ;)

Wikipedia notes that sevai's sibling, the idiyappam, is an idea that is at least two thousand years old.
Did the idiyappam come first and then the sevai?  Or, the other way around?
Did the idea originate in the old Dravidian culture?  Did they get the idea from the Chinese?  Or, was it the Chinese who copied from the Dravidians?

We might never know.

I wonder whether "the Chinese-American writer and chef Jen Lin-Liu" knows about the sevai and the idiyappam, and, whether then her travels would have taken her all the way to southern India, in her explorations "On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta."  (Maybe I should track her down in cyberspace and contact her about this, eh!)  She notes that the famous Silk Road was not merely for commerce:

I definitely saw evidence that these foods had been passed across cultures in various regions. One vivid example of this was with hand-pulled noodles, called lamian. From my research and through my travels, I saw that the dish was really at its most refined in northwestern China and is said to have been invented by Muslim Chinese. But the dish could also be found farther west in Xinjiang and Central Asia, regions where it is called laghman. My research seemed to point to the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority that live in China and Central Asia, as a group of people who brought the dish farther west, as they are often middlemen and travelers between the two regions.

Central Asia is still a long, long way from my part of the old world.  But, I am never one to dismiss the possibility of ideas diffusing through even back then.

Of course, this is not the first time I am exploring the Indian/Chinese connections, especially with respect to food; last summer, almost exactly a year ago, I noted in this post on a Narasimha temple at Quanzhou:

I suppose between this Chinese guy and a South Indian in Quanzhou, we somehow ended up with the சீனா சட்டி ("cheena chatti"--a wok); ah, recalling the taste of dosai made in that chatti makes me drool!
I wonder if the Quanzhou connection was also how came to enjoy the dish of சேவை (sevai)?  Hmmm ... More drool!

Seems to me that this issue has been "eating" me up for a while, and the news folks continue to "noodle" me about it.  Help!  Help me with some old-style சேவை ;)

Play "Free Rice" and feed the world

About three years ago, one student in an upper division course asked me whether she could share with the class about an exciting and humanitarian game on the web.  I said yes because, more than anything, I was curious myself.

She then told us about freerice.com. It was fantastic when a meeting or two after that, another student informed the class that she tried it over the weekend and donated a lot of rice.  A few months ago I ran into the student who brought this up.  She smiled and said "Dr. Khe, I still play freerice."

Such joys are the immeasurable benefits in being in this wonderful teaching profession ...

It is a vocabulary game, where the more the guesses are correct, the tougher the subsequent questions (words) become.  And the donated rice amount also goes up. 

Freerice.com challenges people to find the correct meaning of a word from four alternatives.
For every correct answer given, 10 grains of rice are donated to countries such as Uganda and Bangladesh.

 One might think that the grains of rice aren't much. But, yes, they quickly add up:

To date it has raised enough rice to feed more than four million people for a day.

Am reminded of the old saying that "little drops of water make a mighty ocean."

The game has a new updated version (which loads a tad too slowly now!)  The good thing is that it is now in Facebook as well. So, all those "Farmville" players can contribute rice too :)

The site's latest campaign comes with the launch of a new version of Free Rice (2.0) that aims to integrate game play with social media such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to drive up the site's popularity and attract new players.

What? you are still here? what are you waiting for? Go play Free Rice and make those contributions at somebody else's expense, and then make yourself a wonderful rice pilaf :)