An intriguing press release from the American Chemical Society says that in some respects black rice is better than blueberries:
“Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants,” said Zhimin Xu, Associate Professor at the Department of Food Science at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge, La. … “If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical material to increase consumption of health promoting antioxidants.”
I like black rice, and I like blueberries, but berries have made all the running lately, what with Pavlovsk and everything, so I thought I would descend into genebank database hell in search of black rice. IRRI would be the obvious first stop in such a search, but I came up empty handed. ((External use of IRGCIS refused to load.)) Next stop, the new kid on the block, Genesys. Fun!
IRRI has not yet supplied Genesys with data on hull colour, but the USDA has, and there were more than 300 mapped varieties of black or purple rice. (Click the pic to embiggen.)
Dr Xu says he’d like to see Louisiana farmers growing black rice, and people in the US embrace its use. Well, as a service to them, either go to Genesys to find the variety information, or play with the Google Earth file directly.
If they can make back rice taste like blueberries, I’ll be impressed. One does not live by antioxidants alone.
“Dr Xu says he’d like to see Louisiana farmers growing black rice.”
Or, we could just buy it from the countries where it is indigenous to. That way, the farmers who actually developed it would benefit from producing it. What a breath of fresh air that would be. Nice niche industries that would make too – different black rice varieties from different countries (and browns, greens, reds, etc as well) – making their way onto the plates of discerning consumers worldwide.
Part of saving landraces of any crop should also be saving the indigenous knowledge and practices that went with each variety. Celebrating and encouraging these farmers to flourish, instead of ignoring them or competing them out of markets would both keep the old varieties around and the farmers who know them.
I agree with Penny. Also, “Consumer Reports” magazine says that rice grown in the U.S. is quite highly contaminated with arsenic (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/11/arsenic-in-your-food/index.htm).
Black rice is delicious! I make a great black rice pilaf!
Thanks for your comment, Jane. But here’s a problem. Would you prefer your black rice from Italy, or from Indonesia, which is where the sample that was then adapted to Italian conditions came from originally.