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Welcome to Wiser Now’s weekly email blast which reflects my eclectic interests and, I hope, yours. September is National Rice Month, and my goodness, I have found the most astonishing things about it, beginning with the rice field portrait tradition in the Japanese village of Inakadate. (Yes, the sample above really is a rice field.)
I hope you find these offerings fun, and perhaps even useful, and welcome your feedback. (Kathy@WiserNow.com) And if you haven’t yet pressed the subscribe button so this newsletter doesn’t go to spam, please do so now.
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The Quirky Quote
Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.
~ Mitch Hedberg
The Quirky Facts
Humans have been growing rice since 5000 B.C., which makes it the oldest known food that is still widely consumed – so widely that it is now grown on every continent except Antarctica. Plus, because one seed will result in over 3000 grains of rice, it literally feeds billions of people. But I am more interested in the quirkier facts, like:
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- The Great Wall of China is partially held together with sticky rice. While building it during the Ming dynasty in the 15th and 16th centuries, workers used a porridge made with rice along with calcium carbonate as a mortar to hold the wall's stones together.
- You can pop wild rice, like popcorn. Just heat it in a little oil and shake until it pops.
- Although many of us associate “sushi” with raw fish, the Japanese word translates as “sour rice” because the rice used in preparation is traditionally moistened with rice vinegar.
- One genetically engineered food with undeniable benefits related to a range of eye conditions is golden rice (Oryza sativa), which is grown primarily to aid millions of people with Vitamin A deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Check out resources to learn more.
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The Quirky Observation
According to My Modern Met, the Japanese village of Inakadate has been transforming its rice fields into intricate living works of art yearly since 1993, using seven colors of farm field rice and careful planning with the aid of a computer. The designs, known as “tanbo,” can be viewed both by plane and observation stations from mid-June until early October. The portraits featured in the summer of 2022 shown here are Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Japanese 19th/20th-century artist Seiki Kuroda's portrait of his wife Taneko Kaneko. You can see many of the designs from other years here. Or you can simply Google “Japanese rice field paintings – images.”
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But if some rice artworks cover acres of land, others are created a grain at a time. According to this Atlas Obscura article, Guorui Chen is single-handedly reviving Gaolou Rice Strings, a traditional Chinese art that arose in the late 1800s but was lost in China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. He spends many hours separating intact grains from broken ones with a winnowing basket, examining their transparency, and then picking out three grains to glue end to end in a triangle.
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Then comes the real artistry of connecting hundreds of those triangles to form shapes such as flowers, spheres, teacups, and his prize accomplishment of a life-size rooster. Mr. Chen has learned to preserve the delicate hollow sculptures permanently in epoxy resin, a technique that was not open to early practitioners.
He notes that his artistic training and an undergraduate degree in industrial design, make him uniquely equipped to revive the lost art. “I’m like a human 3D printer, envisioning the shapes in my head and then trying to put the pieces together,” he says. But his goal is not to be a solo artist. Mr. Chen is now working full-time in developing and teaching the art.
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And then there are the artists who carve a design in a single grain if rice. Here is a video of Mikhail Myagkov, 35, from Noginsk, Russia, carving a rose. Amazingly, he is not the only single rice grain carver. You can see many more samples if you Google “Vijju Art Gallery – images.”
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Please Spread the Word
This week we’re giving you a fun image for sharing WNW with anyone you know who might enjoy this lighthearted, award-winning e-newsletter.
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For email, just copy the image at right and post it with the URL for the issue you want to share. The URL is always listed later on the day of publication under WN Wed Archive on the Wiser Now menu bar along with the URLs for other recent issues.
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For Facebook and Twitter, when you click on the issue in the Archive, at the top of the screen you will see “Share” with an f for Facebook and a bird for Twitter. Click on them to share to your contacts.
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For all you activity professionals out there, these URLs are also the best way to create a printable copy without your email info at the top.
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Thank you for sharing, and if you represent an organization that would like a customized version or that would consider becoming a sponsor, send me a note at Kathy@WiserNow.com.
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The Questions
- Do you like rice? Do you have a recipe to share? Share it!
- Are you surprised by the art people create with food? Have you ever tried it in a simple or elaborate version? What did you make?
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The Quiz – Free Rice Challenge
According to their website, Freerice “is an educational trivia game that helps you get smarter while making a difference for people around the world. Every question you answer correctly raises 10 grains of rice for the World Food Programme (WFP) to support its work saving and changing lives around the world.”
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You can create your own account on Freerice and challenge yourself to answer questions in any of many categories and multiple subsets within the category as the illustration at left suggests. Some of the other categories not shown are
- Ambassadors for Change - I chose the “Women Leaders” subset for my sample below
- English – I chose “Proverbs” for my sample, but could have chosen vocabulary, grammar, spelling, or root words
- Food & Sustainability – I chose “Foods of the World” for the sample below
- Under History and Geography, I chose “World Heritage Sites” for a sample
- Language Learning has more than a dozen possibilities
- Science has 10 subsets, and I chose “Animals” for my sample
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The format of each fill-in-the-blank question with four multiple choice answers is shown at right. If you click on the right answer, (in this case “play”) it is highlighted in green. If you click on the wrong answer, it is highlighted in red, and the right answer is immediately shown. To save space, I’ve recreated some of the questions in different subject areas below.
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One subject that has a slightly different format is “Famous Paintings” which shows a famous painting like the one at left, and then gives you four artist choices. In this case, the answer is Claude Monet. Depending on your knowledge of topics, some categories are harder than others, and you only get credit for donating rice if you get the answer right. But, especially if you choose a topic you’re good at, it can get pretty addictive. Try the sampling below which is meant only to give you a sense of the range of questions. I expect you will find them easy to answer, but you can check your answers at the end of this document.
What’s the right choice?
1. Probably means: ultimately, likely, chiefly, or seldom
2. Arborio, basmati, and jasmine are all types of what food? Potatoes, rice, wheat, or corn
3. Which part of the body do butterflies use to taste? Wings, tongue, feet, eyes
4. Found in 1974, Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum has thousands of warriors made of what? Bamboo, terracotta, iron, jade.
5. What kind of music did Ella Fitzgerald perform? Country, classic rock, opera, jazz
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The Resources
The photos used in this document are from the websites listed near them or purchased from iStock.
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Answers to the quiz
1. Likely
2. Rice
3. Feet
4. Terracotta
5. Jazz
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My multiple goals are to amuse and inspire you, to share what I and people whom I admire are doing, to stimulate your curiosity, and spur you to action. I hope you enjoyed this offering. You can access previous issues here. I welcome your feedback. (Kathy@WiserNow.com) | | | | | |
