Rice to Meet You: A Story of Rice Before It Reaches Your Dinner Table

I believe that you clicked into this article because you’re like me - a rice lover. 

One day, I looked at my dinner plate and felt amazed by how far my food has come until it’s being served at my dinner table. Rice from Thailand, fish from Japan and vegetables from an organic shop in Brooklyn. The most diverse food in the most diverse city.

But rice is in danger.

Well, to be exact, “we” the rice eaters are in danger. The yield of rice production in the world is declining because of the change of climate. By saying danger, I don’t mean “Wow, we’re going to starve and die in the next 5 years,” but the change will continue to occur if consumers remain unaware of how the rice on their dinner table came to be. As a food staple for more than 3.5 billion people, or 40% of the world's population, this is a worldwide issue. 

Rice production system is one of the world’s most climate change-sensitive agroecosystems. The change in the climate has led to a shift in the timing of the rice planting season. Droughts have become more frequent, and rainfall has become more erratic. Growing infestations of pests and diseases have become difficult to handle, resulting in more pesticides and chemical fertilizers being used, creating greater detriment to the environment and forming an inescapable loop. 

Thailand, my hometown, is the world’s 2nd largest rice exporter. Check your Trader Joe’s rice. It is probably imported from Thailand. To understand the issue better, I journeyed back home last winter to produce a documentary, Rice To Meet You, aiming to tell a story about the effect of climate change on rice production in Thailand. 

“What questions to ask?” is the thought I struggled with a lot as a documentary filmmaker. Storytelling is about singling out one story and eliminating the others, which is contradicted by a documentary, where one aims to tell a story that’s as close to the truth as possible. Yet that truth is the subjective truth I see through the lens of my personal experience. I came to realize that asking the right questions is what will dictate how the story is going to turn out. And this applies to all fields. 

Throughout my journey, I spoke to people across the rice industry: restaurant owners, Thai rice department government officers, a rice mill factory owner, and rice farmers. Even though all of them are working on the same subject, rice, they all have different guiding questions in mind, hence the work that they deliver are different.

Government: How do we help farmers make a better living? 

Rice mill owner: How do I make more money and maximize profit? 

Farmer: What are the ways I can maximize crop yields? 

Einstein once said: "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Questions are what keep one’s curiosity on track. It is what leads to the solution. 

One sentence that stuck out to me was when Somsak, a rice farmer I interviewed, said, “We grow organic rice for our family, but use chemicals for commercial rice. Because of high standard regulations, it’s difficult to sell organic rice to the mill. We cannot sustain the living.” 

To be able to sell organic rice to international standards, the farm has to pass extensive criteria. For example, they cannot use the regular rice mill to husk the rice, as the chemicals from other farms will get mixed up. This is impossible to achieve, unless one is wealthy enough to own their own mill or pay the factory to clean the system every time it's used.

Eastern Sarus Cranes

Just like every classic expedition, a journey led me to another story. And that’s when I got introduced to the Eastern Sarus Crane, Thailand’s long lost bird, which became extinct from the country in 1964. One might be familiar with the Japanese Crane since it appears in many Japanese artworks. With a little difference in features, the Eastern Sarus Crane lives in the Southeast Asia region. Thailand’s Zoological Park Organization officials put an extensive effort to revive them back into the wild, and they succeeded 40 years later. 

But success is only the beginning of a web of bigger issues. Eastern Sarus Cranes inhabit wetlands, which unfortunately, just like rice, has dramatically decreased in the last few years due to commodification and land uses. And this is when the story of rice comes in. Rice fields are man-made wetlands that offer a perfect living ecosystem for the crane to build a family. The only problem is that most rice fields in Thailand use pesticides and chemical fertilizers, which are not so Crane-friendly.

Sarus Rice is a brand, under supervision of Thailand zoological park officials, dedicated to turning rice fields into a habitable place for Sarus Cranes. Tackling the problem by encouraging rice farmers to grow rice organically, instead of using chemicals. Over many years of community building work with farmers, they have encouraged farmers to grow organic rice, creating enough demand to build Buriram’s first organic rice mill factory. This enables rice farmers to have a place to husk their rice and sell to the market. Organic rice produces less yield in the short term but is more sustainable in the long run. The birds bring tourism, while organic rice adds value to the community, creating a co-independent relationship between the rice, the crane and the farmers. 

The question that the Sarus Rice group asked was “How can we create a habitable place for the Sarus Crane?”, which has led them to the formation of the project. In my documentary journey, I found myself forming new questions along the way, which later became a struggle when finding the right story to tell. It is a living example of a project that is led by “weak questions” as at the end I found myself stressing out over what question to answer and what story to convey. This is something to think about throughout the beginning of the process, not the end. Lesson learnt. 

We often live our lives according to someone’s answers. Rice, for example, is a product delivered by layers and layers of questions and solutions, from rice farmers to restaurant owners. Every rice you eat, depending on where it comes from, how it is transported, and how it is cooked, holds a different story. The simple question of “What rice to eat today?” and “What kind of rice will benefit my body and the world?” can make a big difference in our choice of consumption, which is the reason why all these rice chain productions exist. 

“Every solution comes within us and it lies within the question we ask.” I hope the rice will remind you of this the next time it appears on your dining table.