Eat less, share more; or New doesn't always mean better.

The Washington Post reports the following:

Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice 

that dramatically cuts the calories 

When shared on social media, this photo was accompanied by
the tag, "You've been making rice the wrong way."

Hmm. I think it would seem intuitively obvious that reducing the food value of "the lifeblood of so many nation's cuisine" is an idea whose time should have come and gone without much fanfare.

I know that news has become a business, and it's all about the eyeballs and the clicks. Nevertheless, I find the tag, "You've been making rice the wrong way" to be incredibly condescending, from people who have no discernible  right to a claim of superiority. There's an entire world of possibilities to consider when thinking "outside the box". Their "solution" solves a problem for one person, and inefficiently at that. The same problem can be solved in a way that benefits many people having more than one problem among them.


To deliberately make food less nutritious is, IMHO, silly.

Instead, eat less rice. Feed the hungry with that which you did not consume, and prepare it in such a way that they get the maximum benefit from it. For the record, "eat less rice" = "more rice to go around". You don't get fat and others don't go hungry.



I take strong exception to the statement, "You've been making rice the wrong way". I respond to the authors with this counterproposal: "You haven't been thinking the right way, about people other than yourselves. Get on the ball. There's a whole planet full of people who aren't YOU. Stop eating like a glutton and share."

I should note that this isn't limited to the rice. The article decries the fact that potatoes have the "right kind" of starch (i.e. indigestible) until they're cooked. Then, horror upon horror, they become digestible. I think these people have a very poor comprehension of what constitutes the "right kind" of starch. When it comes to diluting the food or feeding the world, I'm in favor of the world.

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A friend of mine notes that he wonders whether trying to be "sneaky" in reducing the calorie value of what you ingest actually works, or whether it will just make you look for those missing calories elsewhere. It's a fair question, in more ways than one. Not only might you look for those calories from unhealthy sources, but you're also training your body to accept a certain quantity of food as "enough". That might be true when you're cooking the rice, but only then.