Also I gotta agree with Karen; Cambodia do in fact have the best rice in the whole wide world!

Cheers!

I’ve had a think and I’m hoping this will help to clarify the argument

More on the World’s Best Rice Controversy

Whenever our Thai maid returns from a visit home she brings a few bags of rice with her. Rice grown in her village an hour from Buriram, rice grown by her family, not for sale or export but for consumption. It’s mind-blowingly good, better than any other Thai rice I have ever tasted. When we were living in Saigon a colleague of Dave gifted us a bag of rice that had been gifted to her by a friend whose family lives far beyond the reaches of any of the country’s metropolises. Again – amazingly good. I didn’t care much for Vietnamese rice before we steamed that variety. And the red rice served in Bhutan? Don’t get me started….

The point being that in Thailand, in Vietnam, probably in the Philippines, and elsewhere, it’s probably much as Karen described it being in Cambodia – the good stuff never makes it to the market. Or if it does, it’s to a small market in an out-of-the-way town that you and I will never happen across.

I’ll wait till I gain access to all the rice grown by millions of villagers across Asia that never makes it beyond their own kitchens, before I declare this, that or the other rice to be Asia’s best.

As for the bit about the glamorization of subsistence rice growing in Asia – well, I think Karen’s blog and other writings speak for themselves. (And so does she, quite forcefully apparently!).

At the same time – as the well-meaning folks at IRRI (Dave spent some time there with his folks in the early eighties) found out many years ago – high-yield rice is all well and good from an economic standpoint, but the people who grow it don’t care to eat it. Because, in their estimation, it can’t hold a candle, tastewise, to slower-growing, lower-yielding varieties.

here @ Half Asian Tourist