Muscatine

Look outside lately? It's snowing and or blowing again. Makes me wish I could shed 60 years and get that sled out I got for Christmas so many years ago.

I had-

a good fight going on over on my way about torture. It evolved into abortion somehow. Everybody quit. I musta won. Ho-hum.

It's gonna be-

a l-o-o-ong year.

Eat your rice-

The Good Grain
Rice is high in complex carbohydrates, contains almost no fat, is cholesterol free, and is low in sodium, unless you add salt to the cooking water. Generally all rice - both brown and white - is considered a good source of vitamins and minerals. Although almost all the nutrients are stripped from white rice when the bran layer is removed during milling, ninety percent of all American grown rice is enriched with thiamine, niacin and iron and in some instances riboflavin, Vitamin D and Calcium. White rice because it is enriched has more iron and thiamine than brown rice. Brown rice has five times more Vitamin E and three times more magnesium. Brown rice provides twice as much fiber as white rice, but it is not an especially rich source of fiber. On the other hand, rice bran alone is an excellent source of fiber. Rice is a fair source of protein containing all eight essential amino acids. It is low in the amino acid lysine, which is found in beans making the classic combination of rice and beans, popularly known as complimentary proteins, a particularly healthful dish. Rice is gluten free and easily digestible making it a good choice for infants and people with wheat allergies or digestive problems. A half cup of cooked white rice provides 82 calories; an equal amount of brown rice provides 89 calories.



Rice Facts and History
In Burma a person eats 500 pounds of rice a year, an astonishing figure when it is reduced to a daily consumption of 1-1/4 pounds per day, but perhaps not so astonishing when you consider that Burma is smack in the middle of land where rice cultivation most likely originated thousands of years ago. Radiocarbon dating of strata containing grains of rice found in south China indicate rice was cultivated as far back as 7,000 year ago. Researchers claim rice may have been indigenous to India and then moved eastward to Indochina and southeast Asia.

There are literally thousands, perhaps as many as 40,000 or more, varieties of rice grown on every continent except Antarctica.

In the United States, the average person consumes only twenty-five pounds of rice per year, with about four pounds of that number attributed to the rice used for brewing American beer. But, rice consumption is on the rise. In fact, Americans eat twice as much rice now than they did ten years ago. Marketing analysts attribute this phenomenon to the savvy consumer's awareness of rice as a healthy food. Eating healthfully is certainly a significant part of the picture, but the recent interest in the rice based cuisines of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan and the wide range of different types - as many as twenty five - now available, have also contributed to this swing toward rice. The United States has always been more of a rice exporter than a rice consumer. In the early eighteenth century rice grown along the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia was a major export. A labor intensive crop, many of the wealthiest rice plantations had hundreds of slaves. Familiar with African rice cultivation, the slaves are credited with contributing significantly to the industry before it was destroyed by the Civil War. With the mechanization of agriculture, rice growing moved west to Louisiana. Today enough rice grows in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Missouri to rank the United States as the twelfth largest rice producer worldwide and the second largest exporter of rice (first is Thailand). The United States now exports about half of all the rice it grows.