“No business, no rice.”

I’ve known for many, many years — probably since I was a child — that rice is a staple of the Asian diet. It was just like that, a simple, bare and almost uninteresting fact, rice is a staple of the Asian diet. However, since jft and I have immersed ourselves in Asian culture and food, I now see this staple as more than a fact. I have begun to comprehend and appreciate just how important rice is to the Asian diet, and as a result Asian culture.

We’ve covered six Asian countries now in just over four months: Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia, Vietnam and back to Thailand, in that order. In Taiwan I got my first glimpse of rice paddies while riding the almost sleek and very punctual Taiwanese train system. I was a little startled to see paddies between what looked like industrial buildings, the square pools of water with green shafts waving lightly in the air, covering every piece of water soaked land.

I was finally able to stand amongst the paddies, green and incredibly cool at sunset — truly splendour in the grass — outside of Phitsanulok, Thailand. I’ve since seen more paddies, varying quality of rice piled high in markets and on dining tables, and rice consumed by hand, with chopsticks and with a spoon and fork than I could have imagined.

Sunset over rice paddies outside Phitsanulok, Thailand

And that’s really the first most important thing I noticed about rice: how much rice people eat in south east Asia.

jft and I have relied on the Lonely Planet (LP) series of travel guide books for every country we’ve visited, supplemented by consulting online travel forums for more specific advice and tips the books couldn’t provide us with. Any travel guide has it pitfalls, because after all it is a book, and can easily be out of date by the time you consult it for things like prices and addresses. However, one thing I will give credit to the LP books for doing well is the introductory sections of each country guide, specifically the sections covering history, cultural norms and practices, and, food and drink, an especially important section for us as food enthusiasts. I lapped up these sections of the LP guides, because I love delving into the history and for lack of a better word, pecularities and idiosyncracies of any place I visit, and because I was curious to compare what the LP had to say with what I actually learned and experienced traveling in each country.

For the most part, I was quite satisfied with the background and preparation these sections of the LP guides gave me. I concede it certainly wasn’t the in depth tutelage and drama I have might have gotten from reading books teeming with history, biographies and fictional characters set in the places we visited. I have read my fair share of fiction and non-fiction about the places I am visiting, as well educating myself through museum visits and the knowledge of locals and tour guides. I’ve got a book list a mile long of all the reading I’d like to do about this part of the world both online and in books, perhaps in the future.

But all this grandstanding about being well-read aside, one thing that stood out to both me and jft time and again in the LP books was the oft repeated LP statistic of how much rice was consumed by the people of each country we visited. I unfortunately do not remember the exact numbers of how much rice a person in Cambodia or Vietnam might consume per day. I do recall that essentially the amount of rice consumed on average per person per week was in the neighbourhood of 1 to 3 kilograms, depending on the age and occupation of the person (i.e a young man or woman between 18 and 40 involved in manual labour would consume a lot more rice than a young child or elderly person). I believe this statistic also covers anything made from rice, such as rice noodles, which are popular in dishes in Thailand, Lao and Vietnam.

(If you are curious, a quick Google search about rice consumption per capita should satisfy with more accurate numbers. Some countries we visited don’t make the chart I have linked to, but I assure you they eat a lot of rice in places like Laos and Cambodia, they just have much smaller populations than places like Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, China and India.)

When our host during a homestay in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam asked us how many times a week we ate rice, we had to correct him and say it was more like how many times a month (we reasoned about two times a month in North America) but that our consumption had drastically increased since traveling in south east Asia (our food set photos show good evidence of this). Our host’s body spasmed and he made a retching sound when we told him this figure. This was the most intense physical reaction we received to our response to how little rice we normally consumed. When we told other people in Cambodia, Lao and Thailand who asked us the same question, they either looked a little dumbfounded or puzzled, and since we usually were telling a local this fact of our minscule rice consumption over a meal, it seemed to me they went back to eating their rice or rice noodles with a little more gusto once they heard this disturbing (to them) piece of information.

To left is our Mekong Delta host, the one who spasmed and retched when we told him how little rice we ate on a regular basis in North America

It’s safe to say that people here can’t go a day without rice. Rice consumption is so important that instead of greeting people with “how are you today?” people in Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and I believe also Vietnamese (all linguistically and historically related languages) will ask, by way of politely greeting, “have you eaten rice yet today?”

The only way I have been able to relate to this need for rice is through my hearty appetite for good quality bread, the kind with a soft center and a crisp crust (Italian, French, German, any kind will do), but even then I can go several days or even a week or more without a baguette consumed during a meal. I suppose the big difference is that in North America I get my carbohydrates from a variety of sources: bread, pasta, potatoes, corn, rice and occaisionally other grains like oatmeal. In Asia, everything is made from rice or its gluten: noodles, gruel (like cream of wheat or warm oatmeal), sweets, desserts, wine and liquor (again, our food photo set has a good snapshot of these sorts of things). As a result rice is part of every meal, paired with everything you can from fragrant grilled chicken to steamed Mekong River fish, from sweet red bean paste to heavenly ripe mango.

Even more remarkable than the amount of rice eaten is who eats rice. With virtually no exception that I ever saw, everyone in Asia eats rice, from the time before teeth begin to emerge to when the last tooth is lost (and that can be quite young in a country like Cambodia, where dental hygiene is poor). And from what I’ve seen every domesticated animal eats rice, too. In the village of Ban Sai, near Buriram, Thailand, on the farm where we volunteered for about 10 days, the young family dogs were fed puppy chow mixed with leftovers, which consisted mostly of rice. In Laos, we witnessed the elephants we rode and bathed being fed rice still in its husk. The elephants used their trunks to push the rice into a pile, curved their trunk around the pile and then scooped up a bunch and shoveled it into their mouths. To me it looked about as easy to accomplish as manouvering chopsticks with my feet.

Cows, chickens and roosters eat rice, whether raw or cooked that they find as they root around to fill their often scrawny bodies. I recall even seeing one of the many street cats that would mew to you for food, usually reliable carnivores, eating spilled cooked rice near a vendor’s cart.

I also imagine that in the field or in storage, rice can become food for rodents and other pests. I’ve seen my share of rats and cockroaches in Asia, fortunately no maggots, and its easy to imagine them infesting a poorly kept rice storage area or a field, if they are hungry enough.

All the rice consumed means a heck of a lot of rice grown, and hence a lot of work — in the form of jobs — for the population of each country. In Vietnam for example, 80 per cent of the 85 million person population is rural. Although I don’t have a statistic off the top of my head for how much of that population is dedicated to rice farming, I can guess it’s more than 50 per cent, since in rural areas I saw mostly fields of rice paddy stretching from both sides of the road to the horizon, and since Vietnam is the world’s second largest exporter of rice, after Thailand.

In our travels, we’ve seen and learned about how rice is grown in paddies, harvested, de-husked and polished, a system consisting almost entirely of manual labour in most countries we visited. Except for water buffalo, who are used to plow flooded paddy, and in some areas large mills that de-husk the rice, the planting and harvesting, and even much of the de-husking and polishing all depends on many, many Asian hands and bent backs. It’s really rather startling to see in person and learn from museum exhibits and guides in every country we visited that the tools used to grow rice haven’t changed much in centuries, perhaps thousands of years. And really when you think about, a big American John Deere tractor, plow or harvester, and many other modern farm implements, just wouldn’t get far in the flooded. muddy paddies in which rice grows, with water sometimes up to people’s knees in the rainy season.

I’ve noticed and absorbed all this information about rice, and to whatever degree extended travel lets you absorb cultural impact, I’ve sucked that up about rice as well. I’ve sampled many varieties of rice: Thailand’s Jasmine rice, considered the best in the world (and both jft and I would concur, after eating copious amounts of it during our volunteer farm work in Thailand, and both agreeing we could live on that rice alone and be quite content); Laos’s sticky rice, eaten with the hand, by grasping a clump, rolling it and eating it together with meat or vegetables; Cambodia’s rice, so precious in that country after extensive faminine in the 1980s, the result of agrarian mismanagement and exploitation under the dreadful Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot; Vietnam’s rice and rice noodles in particular, delivered in the form of pho, rice noodle soup, with veggies or any kind of meat, truly some of the best rice noodles I have ever savoured; and rice in Taiwan and Malaysian, but not as much because we weren’t there as long.

Because I’ve only traveled here, and not lived or studied the cultural impact of rice, I can only share what I fleetingly grasped of this cultural impact based on a couple anecdotes.

My first encounter with the effect of rice on the minds and customs of the people who consume it was during a performance of Khmer ancient royal court style dance by young local children. We actually saw this in Thailand, on a tour of the area not too far from where we were doing our volunteer farm work. This north eastern region of Thailand is just a few miles from the border of Cambodia, and in fact was part of the Khmer empire only a few centuries ago. The everyday language of the people in this region is actually Khmer, the Cambodian language, and some of their customs resemble closely that of Cambodia. We have 17 photos posted (the link takes you to the first photo and you can move forward from there in the Thailand 2007 set) of the performance we witnessed. At one point during the performance of fanciful hand gestures and stamping yet elegant foot movements, I realized the boys and girls were making gestures that mimed the planting and harvesting of rice bundles. Before this moment, all the art related work I had witnessed in Thailand pertained to Buddhism. But here suddenly were children, trained to move in what appeared to be seductive ways by a young man who wanted to preserve local tradition, and their moves depicted what you could witness in any rice field, if you could stand and watch a lifetime of growing and harvesting rice on fast forward. I was in awe, because on one hand it was simple, to depict everyday life in art, just as cave drawings, hyeroglyphics, painting and sculpture might do, and on the other hand, it paid hommage to such an important life cycle in the Asian landscape. I was startled that such simple yet exotic movements by children could convey so much.

It wouldn’t be the last time, however, that children in Asia taught me about the cultural importance of rice.

Ironically, it was in Cambodia that I learned much about rice, a country where we witnessed by far the poorest people in our travels. I can say this with a large degree of certainty without pointing to economic indicators, statistics or the country’s tragic history under a Communist agrarian experiment gone awry.

Both jft and I simply noticed big differences from the other countries we visited. We noticed that people and the animals, especially cows, were skinnier than anywhere else we visited. Of particular note, younger children under 5 went mostly shirtless and often naked, and it was the only country where I could see children’ rib cages so clearly, with roundish bellies protuding below. People weren’t starving to death here, but they were getting just enough to eat, barely. And as the LP guide told us, 80 per cent of their diet was made of up rice, with fish and anything green playing second fiddle.

I noted that family homes were rarely made of concrete, almost exclusively of palm thatch and bamboo, whereas in Thailand and even Laos, there was a fair amount of concrete in use to build houses in rural areas. In Laos, we noted that as soon as people had some wealth to speak of, a satellite went up outside thatch homes, even before making a move to build a house from concrete. There were almost no satellites to speak of in Cambodia, save for at nice hotels, but people in rural areas did manage to run televisions with antennas off car batteries.

In Cambodia, roads were horrendous compared to anywhere else we’d been. A mix of sealed and packed red dirt roads took us wherever we needed to go, but pot holes and flying dust, even in the larger and more touristed areas of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, reminded us we were in a developing country. From our own North American experience with government scandals, we knew corruption was a firm part of the political machine just about anywhere. In Cambodia we encountered corruption in the open with bribes exchanging hands for favours, and locals bitter with govnerment officials lining their own pockets instead of bringing prosperity to the whole nation that continues to reel from their time under the twisted leadership of Pol Pot and his cronies.

Perhaps the most jarring indicator that we were in a less developed nation, somewhere poorer than anywhere else either of us had been, were the number of children, from four or five-year-olds to teenagers, following us around and chanting incessantly for us to buy their bracelets, their postcards, their books, their water and a whole host of other trinkets. Many of these kids weren’t in school because their families needed everyone able to walk and talk to do their part to bring in much needed income. Some of these kids told us they were trying to go to school for at least part of the day, however they needed the money earned from selling us things we didn’t need to pay the bribes that would keep their badly paid teachers in the classroom.

Cambodia was admittedly hard to take, mentally and spiritually. It was also hard on our wallets. Food and intracity transportation were a lot more expensive than most of the other countries we visited, and bargaining got us almost nowhere. Whatever budget we had in mind was history here and people were happy to not sell us something if we weren’t willing to pay their price. The main problem was that as soon as locals saw they were dealing with a foreigner, the price for fruit, bread, water, a usually dependably cheap local meal — pretty much anything — went up many times the price a local would pay. So it was in Cambodia that jft and I took more time to talk to the locals we interacted with to find out their back story, because we needed to know if these people really needed to sell us a 900 mL bottle of water for $1 instead of the usual $0.25 or if the books about Cambodia sold on the street really helped a father or mother send their kids to school. In the case of locals missing limbs, it was obvious landmines, still a plight six million strong in Cambodia, had put them in the place they were, unable to work in a field, so selling books about the Khmer Rouge’s secret torture prison, LP country guides, and the history of the Angkor temples seemed to make sense.

But beyond the limbless, we were unsure what to make of people’s stories of past suffering under the Khmer Rouge and current needs only met by giving up work in the fields to come work in the tourist industries. Looking back we probably experienced some truth mixed with duping to part us from our greenbacks (The US dollar is the main currency in Cambodia, and everything is quoted in US dollars. The local currency, riel, is really only good for small food purchases) so they could find a way to rise above their tragic history and all those dusty, pot holed roads. Frankly, I don’t blame them if we were actually duped: the government wasn’t setting any example the people could live by, so why not line your pockets with the money of foreigners for who it was still cheaper to live for two weeks in Cambodia than it would be to live for the same amount of time in Toronto or Chicago?

We eventually encountered some kids saavy to this knowledge, who knew to appeal to our sense of fairness, selling bracelets, fish shapes and country flags all handmade from colourful polyster string.

We were on the beach in Sihanoukville, about five hours east of Phnom Penh, and we were happy to enjoy whatever locals were selling, if the price was fair. We indulged in a manicure for me and massage for jft. We sucked on the best mango we had ever tasted sold to us by a child carrying a basket platter on her head. We dipped fire roasted squid and fresh rolls of tofu and shrimp (rolled in soft rice paper of course) in a sweet chili sauce sold to us by women balancing baskets on a rod carried on one shoulder. At some point in all this finally inexpensive indulgence two girls approached us asking us to buy their handmade bracelets and fun string-made fish. I looked at the fish with some interest because they were pretty, and responded with a laughing “n”o but they continued to pester us. “If you buy fish or bracelet, you buy from me ok? You buy from me only. You promise?” I said “maybe” laughed again, not at them, but because I didn’t want to bind myself to them. Then they strode away.

At some point another kid came to us, and in our exchange it came up that he could weave together a flag of Cambodia using colourful string and small hands. I requested a Cambodian flag and what I thought looked like a girl set to work. When the two girls we had enountered earlier were in our vicinity again, they saw the kid making my flag and abomished me for buying from someone else. I told them the youngster was making me a flag and not a fish or a bracelet. I defended my action, telling them I preferred a flag of Cambodia rather than a fish as keepsake. They replied, “We can make flags, too!” and flopped at my feet in exasparation at the unfairness of it all. They insisted it was only fair I buy from them, too. After some battling, I eventually gave in, and an assortment of bracelets, anklets, 3D fish weaved together from string and the flag were made and sold to us, all the work and money divided fairly amongst the three young people we encountered. It was then it occurred to me to wonder why these kids were rather tough and pushy about their bracelet business dealings. And, hey, why weren’t they in school?

In Sihanoukville, I help Lam, 12, on the far right by holding the end of a flag he is knotting for me, while the two pushy string weavers complete some bracelets for us.

The girls had gone by now, happy that everything had been done fairly and that they had made a sale. I turned to the remaining child string weaver, who was making us one last bracelet and peered at the child with a baseball cap pushing hair into big dark eyes. I realized then I didn’t know if I was dealing with a boy or a girl. I asked and found that Lam, 12, was a boy. His small, agile hands, almost shoulder length uneven hair, and a fine face had duped me to think he was a girl dressed rather like a tom boy. Lam didn’t seem offended by my error.

I then asked Lam how much business he did on the beach, and he replied not much. So jft and I both asked, almost in unison, I think, “so why do you bother?” Lam replied, “Better to try, than to stay home. No business, no rice.”

As I recall, I think I just stared at Lam with some awe after he said. What a wizened thing for such a young person to say.

His answer to me explained everything: why the girls were so pushy about being fair and making a sale, why he was so quietly determined as he knoted and weaved coloured strings, why so many of Cambodia’s children were constantly pestering me to “buy my bracelet, madame!” or pleading with their eyes to buy their set of 10 postcards of their heritage, the ancient Angkor temples, and really why everyone across Asia was eager for my baht, my kip, my riel, my dong and my dollars. Most of these people who serviced me in the tourist industries, who I photographed preparing my noodle bowls, who I bartered with for silk scarves, who I haggled with for a cheap ride to the bus station, I don’t really think they were after whatever I might have as a middle class citizen of the Western world. Really, I don’t think they could care less about how I live and what I have.

To them, rice is king, rice is gold, rice is worth more than diamonds, a BMW, and maybe, just maybe satellite television. If they don’t get any business — be it mine or their neighbour’s — then their won’t be any rice on the table for them or their families. And their families, that’s the clincher really, because ultimately most of these people aren’t in whatever business they are in for themselves. They are usually bringing home money that will support parents, children, sibilings and more often than not, extended family.

I suddenly realized that my foreign investment in Cambodia and most likely all the countries where I bought local goods from locals wasn’t about a money grab, it was simply a way to get to the gold, rice in all its forms, just a little quicker than selling things at cheaper prices to locals.

I’m not sure how much rice I will be eating when I return to North America. I told jft that at the very least when buying rice, I will be looking for the best quality, the best tasting from places like Thailand and Vietnam, because quality and taste does matter. Less flavourful, broken rice can truly break what could have been a delicious meal, at least in Asia. I know for certain that I don’t look at rice in the same way anymore. It isn’t just a simple fact that rice is a staple of the Asian.

In Asia, having enough rice to eat can make or break you. Rice on the table means someone’s efforts in the old quarter of Hanoi, amongst the colonial buildings of Luang Prabang, in the boisterous night market of Chiang Rai, on the beaches of Sihanoukville, in the hawker centers of Penang, and the alleyways of Giayi, and every rural corner of Asia, have made possible another day, and reinforced what song, dance and the mouths of babes have told me: no business, no rice.