AFAIK vitamin A deficiency is a recent issue, due to the increased consumption of white rice at the expense of brown rice, which was the traditional way of eating rice for centuries (except among the elite, which had other sources of vitamin A thanks to a more diversified food supply than subsistence farmers).
Golden rice is yet another technological “solution” to a social problem, and unsurprisingly it's also failing for other social issues (fear of GMOs)…
It's not a treatment here (vitamin A supplementation for people with deficiency is, and nobody argues against that), it's more like bulletproof vest in your example. Sure we could generalize bulletproof vest at the same time we're pushing for gun control, but it's not necessarily a desirable thing to do.
Allowing people access to bullet proof vests sure seems desirable to me!
But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And "let people grow this crop" is a much smaller social problem than "dramatically reduce poverty".
> Allowing people access to bullet proof vests sure seems desirable to me!
Maybe, but I'm not sure law enforcement would agree with you, for their own very good reasons.
> But also I think the "treating the gunshot wound" analogy is a better fit. A crop that produces vitamin A is a treatment for population suffering from vitamin A deficiency.
No, it's not a treatment, it's a prevention measure, and its effect is very slow (the population must accept the reinforced food, and incorporate it in sufficient fashion in their diet, and it can take decades before the entire population is positively affected). “letting people grow this crop” is only the very beginning of a very complex social process that you are oversimplifying.
I don't have a particular opinion on the use of Golden Rice nor on GMOs in general, but believing that it will instantly solve the social problem at stake is delusional, and such delusion is exactly part of the lobbying campaign from GMOs industrial, which, unlike GMOs themselves, is a problem.
The only way for such a technological solution to be as effective as advertised, is with strong political support and regulation allowing its very quick generalization (that's what we did with iodized salt) but one must be careful with such an approach, because its effectiveness itself is a danger if things have hidden side effect (see the adverse effects of added fluorine in tap water to prevent dental cavities).
I don't know of anyone who thinks any idea can solve any problem instantly. And I don't see where I've expressed any view of the complexity or simplicity of anything. The discussion I thought we were having is whether it is wise to try a technical solution.
Iodized salt is a good example of a technical solution success story, and the one that was top of mind for me too. I don't think anyone thinks we should have waited for the underlying social problems to clear themselves. It certainly points out that these solutions need to be implemented well and have government support in order to be successful, but that's exactly why people are so upset about the political setbacks to golden rice.
Golden rice is a sort of Ozempic, high tech remediation for the damages of a modern diet. De-modernizing the diet is a better solution where it can be afforded.
Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly? What is your evidence?
I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.
Now if you were to say instead that vitamin A deficiency became a problem in East Asia only with the introduction (millennia ago) of the practice of getting most of one’s calories from rice, I would tend to believe you.
> I always thought that brown rice was eaten mainly by Westerners in the 20th Century whose dietary options were varied and plentiful enough that they didn’t notice the anti-nutritive effects of the bran and germ. And maybe also by East Asians millenia ago when rice culture was new and still being explored.
That's insane. White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it.
> White rice was extremely labor intensive to produce until machines started doing it
Here is someone producing rice without any machine that is “95% white” (less than 5 percent of the bran remains). In fact, when using this primitive tech the bran and germ seem to come off as an unavoidable side effect of removing the husk, which no one suggests should be left on the rice grain and no one eats AFAIK.
To make it easy for you to verify my “95% white” assertion, I have “jumped” to a close-up of the rice just before cooking, but of course to verify that no machine is used, you have to watch from the start of the video (to minute 9).
Nobody said it could not be done. From you video it's hard to judge if it is or not extremely labor intensive, but the description of the video seems to suggest it “the fact that it's very tiring and laborious”. If it takes 2 hours, for instance, of additional work to get such rice for every meal without any nutritional benefit, people aren't gonna do it on a daily basis and only do so for special events and stuff while keeping eating brown rice most of the time.
The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all. The video starts with harvesting the rice and ends with cooking the rice.
If you are not a visual person but rather an auditory person, you can hear a narrator in this next video say, "pounding . . . removes the husk and the bran layers" (emphasis mine). Rice with the bran layer removed is white rice.
The technique (mortar and pestle) depicted in the 2 videos I linked to seems to be able to produce only rice that is between about 90% and 99% white, and to get the 90%-white rice, you probably have to put up with an annoying amount of inedible rice husk in your food because (again) removing the husk removes the bran as a side effect.
The second video goes on to say that "there are some locals" (in the Philippines) who are still using the technique:
> The process depicted in the video is not to turn brown rice to white rice: it is to make rice edible at all.
But what tells you that it is the default process for making rice? There could be an easy process to make brown rice, and this “tiring and laborious” process to make white rice, and such a video would tell you nothing about the former.
> --so, the burden is on you to provide evidence that brown rice can be made at all without using machines that only became available after 1750.
The thing is that the literature talks about the fact that people used to eat brown rice in most of Asia, and when it comes to evidence, an individual YouTube video doesn't weight as much as you think it does. Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries.
>Also I don't know where you got your 1750 figure from, but it's likely to be more like 1950 or even later in most countries.
I picked 1750 because that is the earliest date before which I am sure that the people who eat a lot of rice would definitely not have had access to precisely-machined steel parts.
I strongly suspect that precisely-machined steel parts are necessary to turn just-harvested rice plants into brown rice: older rice-processing methods can only produce white rice (more precisely, rice with at least 90% or 95% of the bran removed whereas modern brown rice has most of the bran intact).
(Precisely-machined parts as also needed, I suspect, to produce rice with no bran at all attached -- 100%-white rice we might call it -- where most of the grains are not broken into pieces.)
Both of the creators of the 2 Youtube videos I linked to say that when they were children, their families of origin used the technique depicted in the videos to get the rice they needed to survive. The technique makes white rice and cannot be modified to make brown rice: one of the creators outright says that the process of removing the husk also removes the bran. If there is some other technique that does not rely on post-1750 technology that can make brown rice (husk removed, but bran left on the grain), why weren't subsistence rice farmers using it? Either it does not exist (my guess) or the rice farmers prefer white rice to brown rice.
I know that many internet commentators say that traditional subsistence rice farmers since the dawn of rice culture ate brown rice. But lots of falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet.
> I know that many internet commentators say that traditional subsistence rice farmers since the dawn of rice culture ate brown rice. But lots of falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet.
Except we're not talking about “people talking about stuff on the internet” but dedicated literature on food production in Asia, which, albeit not perfect, is far less prone to propagate urban legends than internet forums.
The sources are given in introduction to the acoup blog post I posted elsewhere in this thread, and to which you responded:
> I relied primary for this on Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) (1980) and F. Bray, The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986) which were recommended to me by specialists in the field. The latter is a wealth of technical details on rice cultivation, although it is as focused on the transition to mechanization and modern agriculture as to the conditions of pre-modern rice cultivation.)
Again, I know nothing about rice cultivation except what I read in this blog post, but the source is an historian and he himself is quoting the work of people who have dedicated a good part of their academic career to this topic. They might still be wrong − academia isn't perfect − , but it would need far more than a Youtube video presenting one way to process rice as a rebuttal for their work.
For what it is worth, the assertion in the post by acoup you linked to that I am most confident is false is, "prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor".
I believe that to be false because I am confident that using the primitive technique depicted in both of the videos I linked to, continuing to pound the rice continues to remove rice bran with the result that with enough pounding, the fraction of bran left on the grain can be driven down to 0.1% or lower, which I'm sure no one would call brown rice.
This "0.1%-brown" rice might consist mostly of grains that have broken into 2 or 3 or 4 pieces, but I've cooked and eaten white rice like that in the past, which is how I know it is perfectly edible and as far as I can tell just as nutritious as intact grains. (The broken pieces I got were the product of modern manufacturing: probably the factory has an easy way to separate broken pieces from intact grains, and for cosmetic purposes, omitted broken pieces from their product, and then they gave the broken pieces to a food bank or something like that.)
> Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly?
My understanding is that it was the usual way of doing so until mechanization made it affordable.
> What is your evidence?
I remembered reading it on acoup, and that's indeed the case:
> Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
I have evidence that seems to contradict acoup’s assertion that “prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor” at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40258263
>Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly? What is your evidence?
Japanese commoners prior to the post-WW2 era mostly ate brown rice, white rice was eaten only by the rich and powerful.
Even today, "hakumai"/"shiroi gohan" (white rice) still holds some of that special regard compared to "genmai" (brown rice), and that's despite the latter now being known as a vastly superior source of nutrients.
I am not familiar with the food histories of other asian countries, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are similar.
Many people do not find sweet potatoes palatable and won't eat them. Rice doesn't have this issue. The whole point here is to introduce Vitamin A into the food supply of people with limited options at risk of Vitamin A deficiency without changing the diet so as to encourage adoption.
This is no different than when western countries started iodizing salt. It was much more effective at eliminating iodine deficiency than telling people to just eat seafood.
Or by adding back brown rice to cookers. Same deal as whole grain breads, a healthier option. Won't work for sushi, but sushi comes with fish slices on top too, so...
Golden rice is yet another technological “solution” to a social problem, and unsurprisingly it's also failing for other social issues (fear of GMOs)…