Rice Growing Quotes

Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.

You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die. And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

God, teach me to be patient, teach me to go slow, Teach me how to wait on You when my way I do not know. Teach me sweet forbearance when things do not go right So I remain unruffled when others grow uptight. Teach me how to quiet my racing, rising heart So I might hear the answer You are trying to impart. Teach me to let go, dear God, and pray undisturbed until My heart is filled with inner peace and I learn to know your will.

But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.

Friends are hard to find. In a lifetime you only get a few. And when you find them, you always know them by sight and heart alone, you always grow a little bit taller in your soul, and you know you have been blessed just to know them.

a laotong relationship is made by choice...when we first looked in each other's eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us--like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love--true-heart love--must grow.

It's not hard to grow when you know that you just don't know.

Things began to go wrong when I was seventeen. My band’s twenty-year-old lead guitarist earned seven years in jail for a drug-fuelled spree of violence. The other band members were quick to let go of their musical dreams, but I never did. They did the ‘mature’ thing: after writing off the band as a teenage fantasy, they got real jobs and made some money. They called it growing up. I called it giving up.

Flowers grow beneath her feet, but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams.

A parable: The Monk and the Minister Two close boyhood friends grow up and go their separate ways. One becomes a humble monk, the other a rich and powerful minister to the king. Years later they meet. As they catch up, the portly minister (in his fine robes) takes pity on the thin and shabby monk. Seeking to help, he says: “You know, if you could learn to cater to the king, you wouldn’t have to live on rice and beans.” To which the monk replies: “If you could learn to live on rice and beans, you wouldn’t have to cater to the king.” Most all of us fall somewhere between the two. As for me, it is better to be closer to the monk.

And I knew only what all men know, that the cycle of winter and spring and all growing things has within itself some sublime truth that restores without myth or language.

They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want communism." "They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." "If Indochina goes--" "I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans.

To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.

I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat? -Lestat

But when you are fighting for your rice bowl, you don't think about how many hands were needed to grow the grain. You only think about who's out to steal your portion. Do you see?

As rice grows riper, the lower it bows its head. Never lose your humility while you grow.

So rest and relax and grow stronger, Let go and let God share your load, Your work is not finished or ended, You’ve just come to “a bend in the road”. “When you ask God for a gift, be thankful if He sends, not diamonds, pearls or riches, but the love of real true friends.” “It takes a Mother’s Love to make a house a home, a place to be remembered, no matter where we roam.” “When you are in troubled and worried and sick at heart And your plans are upset and your world falls apart, Remember God’s ready and waiting to share The burden you find much to heavy to bear– So with faith, “Let Go and Let GOD” lead your way.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

We spend too much time cursing time—time waits for no man, time will tell, oh, the ravages of time, time flies! We don’t think about the gift of time. Time gives us the chance to make mistakes and correct them, to regenerate, to grow. Time gives us the chance to forgive, to restore, to do better than we have ever done in the past. Time gives us the chance to be sorry when we fail and the chance to try to discover in ourselves a new heart.

When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.

Lie quiet and you will lapse back into peace again. Be like the god Heimdall before the battle call, so still that you can hear the wool grow on the backs of sheep, and the grass grow far away in the lands where the snow melts.

An alien calm crept slowly over me. It was dark, full of bitterness and growing fascination.

That’s our damnation,” he whispered. “Our moral improvement has reached its finish, and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds.

If you plant rice, you will grow rice. If you plant fear, you will grow fear.

You are the son of the Lord God! She said. That’s why you can kill and bring back to life, that’s why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that’s why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that’s why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you’re a boy, that’s why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he’s made you a child, then he’s made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else.

The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie. This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift.

If a writer's work lifts you, remain loyal to that experience, even after you've grown beyond it. The book did what it did at the time that you needed it. Don't put it down for not being able to grow with you. It did its job.

... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.

The Sucking [of the blood] mesmerized me; the warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart - only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the bet began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that that threatened to go on without end.I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness;

Sometimes I thought about my future, because Lynn said I should. She said it was hard to tell at this point, but someday, if I didn't go to Africa to study animals, I might be a beautiful genius tennis player. I didn't worry about it one way or another. I didn't care if I was a genius or if I was pretty or if I was good in sports. I just liked to listen to Lynn and to talk to Bera-Bera and to eat rice candies. The lady who used to live down the street could take all of her top teeth out of her mouth. She wasn't allowed to eat chewy candy. I could eat any kind of candy I wanted because I still had my baby teeth. If they rotted, I would simply grow more teeth. That was pretty great.

It's the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that's the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it's wondrous to me. They make me think of the wild flowers that grow in the cracks of pavement, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.

I come and stand at every door  But none can hear my silent tread  I knock and yet remain unseen  For I am dead for I am dead  I'm only seven though I died  In Hiroshima long ago  I'm seven now as I was then  When children die they do not grow  My hair was scorched by swirling flame  My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind  Death came and turned my bones to dust  And that was scattered by the wind  I need no fruit I need no rice  I need no sweets nor even bread  I ask for nothing for myself  For I am dead for I am dead  All that I need is that for peace  You fight today you fight today  So that the children of this world  Can live and grow and laugh and play  - The Girl Child

I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.   Here

Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing States, yet no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis. It

Deep love-true-heart love-must grow. Back then I didn't yet understand the burning kind of love, so instead I thought about the rice paddies I used to see on my daily walks down to the river with my brother when I still had all my milk teeth. Maybe I could make our love grow like a farmer made his crop to grow-through hard work, unwavering will, and the blessings of nature. How funny that I can remember that even now! Waaa! I knew so little about life, but I knew enough to think like a farmer.

Also, I thought, I can always delay the murder. . . . I can let my mind have this company it craves and I can always kill him later on. But I'm sure you know such reasoning is false, because once we grow to love a person, we are not likely to want that person's death.

Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef,The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for. I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV. Soufflés, shepherd's pie, gizzards. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

We don’t think about that enough. We spend too much time cursing time—time waits for no man, time will tell, oh, the ravages of time, time flies! We don’t think about the gift of time. Time gives us the chance to make mistakes and correct them, to regenerate, to grow. Time gives us the chance to forgive, to restore, to do better than we have ever done in the past. Time gives us the chance to be sorry when we fail and the chance to try to discover in ourselves a new heart.

It's always the young ones who end it. The ones for whom mortality holds magic. As we grow older it's eternity that is our boon.

She was an old soul. He wanted her to question everything. He wanted her to grow up to be strong and intelligent. He wanted her to be a leader.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.

I miss the flowers; more than anything else I miss the flowers,’ she mused. And sought after them even in the paintings which we brought from the shops and the galleries, magnificent canvases such as I'd never seen in New Orleans-from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like to those states when I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps. Paris flowed into these rooms.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

Realizing that it was essential to proceed with patience, I scraped alternatively with my right and left paws, but my teeth stayed stuck in the rice-cake. Growing impatient, I now used both front paws simultaneously. Then, only then, I found to my amazement that I could actually stand up on my hind legs. Somehow I feel un-catlike. But not caring whether I am a cat or not, I scratch away like mad at my whole face in frenzied determination to keep on scratching until the fiend in the rice-cake has been driven out.

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.” Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third. The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein; 138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron—pointing to a possible epidemic of anemia. In 2018, a team led by Chunwu Zhu looked at the protein content of eighteen different strains of rice, the staple crop for more than 2 billion people, and found that more carbon dioxide in the air produced nutritional declines across the board—drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Really everything but vitamin E. Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people. In previous centuries, empires were built on that crop. Climate change promises another, an empire of hunger, erected among the world’s poor.

FINDING FAITH IN A FLOWER Sometimes when faith is running low And I cannot fathom why things are so, I walk among the flowers that grow And learn the answers to all I would know. For among my flowers I have come to see Life’s miracle and its mystery, And standing in silence and reverie, My faith comes flooding back to me.

I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry. And everything that happened to me, everything both great and small, was something I had to learn! There was room for it in the infinite mind of the Lord and I had to seek the lesson in it, no matter how hard it was to find. I almost laughed. It was so simple, so beautiful. If only I could keep it in my mind, this understanding, this moment—never forget it as one day followed another, never forget it no matter what happened, never forget it no matter what came to pass. Oh, yes, I would grow up, and there would come a time when I would leave Nazareth, surely. I would go out into the world and do what it was I was meant to do. Yes. But for now? All was clear. My fear was gone. It seemed the whole world was holding me. Why had I ever thought I was alone? I was in the embrace of the earth, of those who loved me no matter what they thought or understood, of the very stars. “Father,” I said. “I am your child.

Come now, Richard," he said, "don't be foolish. Those were what are called trick babies. They were born in a house of prostitution; and they'll live out their lives that way...but I'll tell you what strikes me, Richard, about the whole matter. It's the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe, to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that's the word. The adjust and they reach for the starts in their own way. I tell you it's wondrous to me. They make me think of the wild flowers that grow in the cracks of pavements, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.

By Mendel’s time, plant breeding had progressed to a point where every region boasted dozens of local varieties of peas, not to mention beans, lettuce, strawberries, carrots, wheat, tomatoes, and scores of other crops. People may not have known about genetics, but everyone understood that plants (and animals) could be changed dramatically through selective breeding. A single species of weedy coastal mustard, for example, eventually gave rise to more than half a dozen familiar European vegetables. Farmers interested in tasty leaves turned it into cabbages, collard greens, and kale. Selecting plants with edible side buds and flower shoots produced Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, while nurturing a fattened stem produced kohlrabi. In some cases, improving a crop was as simple as saving the largest seeds, but other situations required real sophistication. Assyrians began meticulously hand-pollinating date palms more than 4,000 years ago, and as early as the Shang Dynasty (1766–1122 BC), Chinese winemakers had perfected a strain of millet that required protection from cross-pollination. Perhaps no culture better expresses the instinctive link between growing plants and studying them than the Mende people of Sierra Leone, whose verb for “experiment” comes from the phrase “trying out new rice.

And I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their intangibility promised to us wrongly... wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it’s like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it’s like snow. There’s something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.

there is a widespread notion in some of the most energetic contemporary Christian movements that the biblical call to reconciliation is solely about reconciling God and humanity, with no reference to social realities. In this view, preaching, teaching, church life and mission are only about a personal relationship between people and God. Christian energy is focused on winning converts, planting and growing churches, and evangelistic efforts. We have heard pastors say, “We appreciate the work you’re doing, but as the leader of my church I’m called to stay focused on the gospel and not get distracted by other ministries.” For them, Christianity is exclusively about personal piety and morals.

African red rice is a sacred plant to many of the people who still grow it. It is intimately associated with the ancestors; it was even used to start a revolution in colonial Senegal. According to my friend Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam, “a young, handicapped Jola woman named Aline Sitoe Diatta” had a vision during a drought from the Jola Supreme Being to return to the ancient rituals of their ancestors, and to abandon the broken Asian rice given to them by the French colonial authorities during World War II. It was not enough to grow and cultivate the rice; the Jola were to return to traditional forms of land management and respect for sacred woodlands. Aline Sitoe Diatta met her end in exile in Timbuktu, ultimately dying of starvation. Rice has a long history with culinary justice.

When we came out of the cookhouse, we found the boy's father, the Indian man who had been grazing the horses in the pasture, waiting for us. He wanted someone to tell his troubles to. He looked about guardedly, afraid that the Señora might overhear him. 'Take a look at me' he said. I don't even know how old I am. When I was young, the Señor brought me here. He promised to pay me and give me a plot of my own. 'Look at my clothes' he said, pointing to the patches covering his body. 'I can't remember how many years I've been wearing them. I have no others. I live in a mud hut with my wife and sons. They all work for the Señor like me. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read or write; they don't even speak Spanish. We work for the master, raise his cattle and work his fields. We only get rice and plantains to eat. Nobody takes care of us when we are sick. The women here have their babies in these filthy huts.' 'Why don't you eat meat or at least milk the cows?' I asked. 'We aren't allowed to slaughter a cow. And the milk goes to the calves. We can't even have chicken or pork - only if an animal gets sick and dies. Once I raised a pig in my yard' he went on. 'She had a litter of three. When the Señor came back he told the foreman to shoot them. That's the only time we ever had good meat.' 'I don't mind working for the Señor but I want him to keep his promise. I want a piece of land of my own so I can grow rice and yucca and raise a few chickens and pigs. That's all.' 'Doesn't he pay you anything?' Kevin asked. 'He says he pays us but he uses our money to buy our food. We never get any cash. Kind sirs, maybe you can help me to persuade the master . Just one little plot is all I want. The master has land, much land.' We were shocked by his tale. Marcus took out a notebook and pen. 'What's his name?'. He wrote down the name. The man didn't know the address. He only knew that the Señor lived in La Paz. Marcus was infuriated. 'When I find the owner of the ranch, I'll spit right in his eye. What a lousy bastard! I mean, it's really incredible'. 'That's just the way things are,' Karl said. 'It's sad but there's nothing we can do about it.

To understand how seriously the people of Noto take the concept of waste, consider the fugu dilemma. Japanese blowfish, best known for its high toxicity, has been a staple of Noto cuisine for hundreds of years. During the late Meiji and early Edo periods, local cooks in Noto began to address a growing concern with fugu fabrication; namely, how to make use of the fish's deadly ovaries. Pregnant with enough poison to kill up to twenty people, the ovaries- like the toxic liver- had always been disposed of, but the cooks of Noto finally had enough of the waste and set out to crack the code of the toxic reproductive organs. Thus ensued a long, perilous period of experimentation. Locals rubbed ovaries in salt, then in nukamiso, a paste made from rice bran, and left them to ferment. Taste-testing the not-quite-detoxified fugu ovary was a lethal but necessary part of the process, and many years and many lives later, they arrived at a recipe that transformed the ovaries from a deadly disposable into an intensely flavored staple. Today pickled fugu ovaries remain one of Noto's most treasured delicacies.

Sam didn't need to hear the rest of it--- which was that before heading to the recycling center I planned to watch a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For research--- or so I told myself. The show had to be wildly inaccurate when it came to vampire details, but after two days of processing what had happened with Frederick the other night, my panic over the situation was fading. And my curiosity was growing. What was it like to be an immortal who drank human blood? Did Frederick's heart beat? What were the rules governing how he lived and ate... and died? It wasn't much, but without getting back in touch with Frederick himself, Buffy was about all I had for guidance. It had to be more accurate representation of vampires than Twilight or those old Anne Rice novels, right? Plus, it was an enjoyable show. The fact that Buffy also showed romantic human-vampire relationships had absolutely nothing to do with my interest, of course. Neither did the fact that I hadn't been able to get Frederick's pleading eyes, or his assurances that he would never hurt me, out of my head since the morning I first woke up on Sam's couch.

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said. "How do you prepare it?" I asked. "Slice and eat." The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!

You know what? You're kind of growing on me too." "Like mold?" I ask. "No, you smell too good," he says, turning his back to me. "I know your kitchen is well equipped. I hope you have a rice steamer." "Duh," I say, mentally kicking myself for my unprofessional response. "Of course I do." I walk over to the cabinet and step up onto my toes, but I can't reach the damn contraption. Charles steps up behind me, reaches over my head, and grabs it before it tumbles on my head. For two brief seconds, his body presses into mine, his hands steadying my waist. I swear he's breathing me in. And I'm doing the same. He grabs the steamer, sets it on the counter. But he only shifts slightly, and there's clearly something wrong with my legs; they won't budge. I think I may be paralyzed. "Did my mother make you the perfume you're wearing?" he asks, his breath on my neck. "Uh, yeah, she did." "The base notes smell delicious on you," he says, his voice husky and hot. My spine tingles. A drop of perspiration beads on my forehead. I clamp my lips together before I tell him he smells delicious too and that he's invaded my thoughts ever since I first met him on the street.

They look like glittering golden cubes!" "And they're melting across the chicken breasts?!" "Wait a minute... OH! MORPHING FURIKAKE RICE!" "WELL, WELL! WHAT HAVE WE HERE?!" "The chicken's already savory and robust aroma... ... is growing even richer and stronger!" "A Furikake topping? At a glance, these look like cubes of some variety of aspic..." "The First and Second Seats were already over the moon about this dish." "Are you saying it is now even more delicious?!" "Aah! Unbelievable! Already the rich scent of roasted chicken tickles the nose!" "Hmph..." "This...? This flavor! I can hardly believe it! The warmth of the chicken has caused the aspic cubes to begin melting into a thick jelly... ... adding new and luxuriant layers to both the flavor and the texture of the dish! The salty savoriness of its flavor seeps quietly into the crispy rice crackers... ... while the scrambled-egg sauce is infused with an even more decadently creamy texture! "The sheer perfect balance of the dish is positively divine! Flavors clash and meld, amplifying and accenting each other in complete harmony! What creative originality! Who would have thought that one simple addition would add so much depth and complexity to the entire dish?!

The lumbering bagos and topheavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle. All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel- drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

Someone once asked me if I’ve ever been in love. .. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Out of all the billions of people in the world, I’ve had a few mysterious encounters, a few scattered occasions where I met someone who seemed to awaken some unknown part in me. On the rare occasion, I’ve lost myself in someone. I became so consumed with her that I lost all sense of time and space. I forgot where I was, what I was, who I was, until there was only the two of us, melting together like a soul on fire, and the world around us faded into oblivion, until we were the only thing left in the entire universe. I felt my skin tingle and my heart grow so full I thought it might explode, and I could not stop thinking about her, and I saw the untapped potential of an alternate future flash before my eyes, all the myriad memories of passion and pain and searing romance all overlapping, layers upon layers, like the stars. Then the world returned and there we were again, two ordinary people full of desperate, trembling longing, with only a dim recollection of the moment we both shared. But the vision of that alternate future still lingered in my mind’s eye. In that world between worlds, I could still feel her, could practically taste her on my lips. Have I ever been in love? I’d like to think so. Because if that’s not love, then I don’t know what is.

In the night I awoke. Was this my own voice reciting what was written? “ ‘And every secret thing shall be opened, and every dark place illuminated.’ ” Dear God, no, do not let them know this, do not let them know the great accumulation of all of this, this agony and joy, this misery, this solace, this reaching, this gouging pain, this . . . But they will know, each and every one of them will know. They will know because what you are remembering is what has happened to each and every one of them. Did you think this was more or less for you? Did you think—? And when they are called to account, when they stand naked before God and every incident and utterance is laid bare—you, you will know all of it with each and every one of them! I knelt in the sand. Is this possible, Lord, to be with each of them when he or she comes to know? To be there for every single cry of anguish? For the grief-stricken remembrance of every incomplete joy? Oh, Lord, God, what is judgment and how can it be, if I cannot bear to be with all of them for every ugly word, every harsh and desperate cry, for every gesture examined, for every deed explored to its roots? And I saw the deeds, the deeds of my own life, the smallest, most trivial things, I saw them suddenly in their seed and sprout and with their groping branches; I saw them growing, intertwining with other deeds, and those deeds come to form a thicket and a woodland and a great roving wilderness that dwarfed the world as we hold it on a map, the world as we hold it in our minds. Dear God, next to this, this endless spawning of deed from deed and word from word and thought from thought—the world is nothing. Every single soul is a world! I started to cry. But I would not close off this vision—no, let me see, and all those who lifted the stones, and I, I blundering, and James' face when I said it, I am weary of you, my brother, and from that instant outwards a million echoes of those words in all present who heard or thought they heard, who would remember, repeat, confess, defend . . . and so on it goes for the lifting of a finger, the launching of the ship, the fall of an army in a northern forest, the burning of a city as flames rage through house after house! Dear God, I cannot . . . but I will. I will. I sobbed aloud. I will. O Father in Heaven, I am reaching to You with hands of flesh and blood. I am longing for You in Your perfection with this heart that is imperfection! And I reach up for You with what is decaying before my very eyes, and I stare at Your stars from within the prison of this body, but this is not my prison, this is my Will. This is Your Will. I collapsed weeping. And I will go down, down with every single one of them into the depths of Sheol, into the private darkness, into the anguish exposed for all eyes and for Your eyes, into the fear, into the fire which is the heat of every mind. I will be with them, every solitary one of them. I am one of them! And I am Your Son! I am Your only begotten Son! And driven here by Your Spirit, I cry because I cannot do anything but grasp it, grasp it as I cannot contain it in this flesh-and-blood mind, and by Your leave I cry. I cried. I cried and I cried. “Lord, give me this little while that I may cry, for I've heard that tears accomplish much. . . .” Alone? You said you wanted to be alone? You wanted this, to be alone? You wanted the silence? You wanted to be alone and in the silence. Don't you understand the temptation now of being alone? You are alone. Well, you are absolutely alone because you are the only One who can do this! What judgment can there ever be for man, woman, or child—if I am not there for every heartbeat at every depth of their torment?

You eat one meal a day, only what is given. Through these practices of surrender there grows a ripening of trust as the heart learns to face the mystery of life with patience, faith, and compassion. Monks must go out each morning with a bowl for alms rounds. This is not like street-corner begging. For me, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Just as the sun rises, you walk across the green rice paddies to small villages with packed earthen lanes. Those who wish to offer alms wait for the monks to come and bow before they offer their food. Even the poorest villages will offer part of their food to make merit and as if to say, “Even though we are poor, we so value what you represent that we give of what little we have so that your spirit may be here in our village, in our community, and in our society.” Alms rounds are done completely in silence. When you receive the food, you can’t say, “Thank you; I appreciate the mango you gave me,” or “Thanks for the fish this morning; it looks really good.” The only response you can make is the sincerity of your heart. After you receive this food, you take it back to support and inspire your practice. When the villagers value the monk’s life and give of the little they have, you must take that. The extraordinary generosity of the village brings a powerful motivation in a monastery. The rules about alms food govern monastic life. Monks are not allowed to keep food overnight or eat anything that’s not put into their hands each morning by a layperson. This means that monks can’t live as hermits up in the mountains far from the world. They must live where people can feed them. This immediately establishes a powerful relationship. You must do something of enough value that they want to feed you. Your presence, your meditation, your dignity, has to be vivid enough so that when you bring your bowl, people want to offer food because that’s the only way you can eat! This creates an ongoing dynamic of offering that goes both ways, from those who are in the process of being initiated in the monastery, and those of the community whom it benefits.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

BEAUTIFUL LILY PETALS Walking down our street towards the house I notice some beautiful white lily petals on the pavement in front of a neighbour’s house. But how did they get there? It’s too early for lilies … and where are the plants? No matter, lily petals are always lovely and uplifting. In folk medicine lily petals have been used for removing calluses, warts, boils, bruises, pimples and earache. Possibly someone nearby is growing a medieval herb/medicine garden. It’s only as I get closer that I realise they are actually discarded prawn crackers. Next to them lies a pile of mouldy-looking fried rice.

The fact that students will no longer put up with such things, that students have decided to no longer let reactionary professors finish their speeches, and that those in earlier semesters will therefore not continue to lose valuable years before they finally see through the sham but begin to study and learn in critical fashion much earlier than preceding generations – this fact does not make the university “non-functional as a center of research and learning” – as R.W. Leonhardt would have it. On the contrary, this is precisely what makes it functional. The students have learned through bitter experience – such as the opening ceremonies of the University of Hamburg – that they cannot achieve their goals by being quiet and well-behaved. They have to be noisy and persistent. They have understood that ceremonious orderliness does not allow room for critical content or democratic discussions, and that certain professors will have to suffer some unpleasant experiences if they refuse other forms of discussion. -Ulrike Meinhof responds to critics demanding the class of 2014 grow up and listen to Condoleeza Rice and Christine Lagarde, 1968, Counter-Violence

If we are at a constant state of peace it is easier to have mental clarity. With mental clarity it is easier to memorize, retain, and recall the word of God. The more you grow in the Lord in these areas the easier it becomes to retain the word of God if applied correctly. Much like the statement, “the rich get richer” even so the “godly get godlier.” The best way to exercise ourselves mentally is also the same way we exercise ourselves in godliness. As we exercise ourselves towards godliness, we obtain the mind of Christ. A mind which is a loving, sober, holy, and a peacefully, wise mind. When seeking to memorize large amount of text it causes stress on the brain. As it is written, “And further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh.” Ecc 12:12  If we are not at peace within ourselves, but tired or stressed out already, then it only adds fuel to the fire. A fire we are trying to put out. Similarly, if we are overly excited it can also be difficult to tame our mind. An overly excited mind can act like a raging bull trampling about wherever it desires. In such a case we need to learn self-discipline. If it is hard for us to grapple our thoughts because our thoughts are running a rampage then we need to discipline ourselves to sit in the presence of the Spirit and have a mind that is at peace. Therefore it is good to meditate on the presence of the Lord and relax before you memorize that you may be ready for the memorizing marathon. Usually if you’re tired or very stressed out that is a time to take a break and rest in the Lord. Make sure you’re both getting plenty of sleep and resting in the presence of the Lord. By continuing in His spirit it will be easier to meditate on Him and His word when the time comes. As we stated before a marathon runner is mindful of their diet. Likewise certain foods can give us a cloudy head, whereas others can give us clarity. When we eat right it helps our mental state. By eating processed foods, refined sugars, highly salty foods, and highly fatty foods it can affect the mind so that it’s hard to think. There have been studies which have proven that after eating fast food many people become depressed, tired, and drowsy. But to keep yourself alert and healthy, it is better to eat whole grain foods, fewer salty foods, less foods high in fat, higher protein foods, and whole foods. Whole foods are foods with no processing. Such as eggs, unprocessed meats (chicken breasts, etc.), whole grains (oatmeal, rice, whole wheat flour etc).

Daughter, "Daddy, do rice and beans really make you grow big and strong?" Dad, "Yes." Daughter,"Are you sure?" Dad,"Yes." Daughter, "Then why are you so short?

Spreading straw might be considered rather unimportant, but it is fundamental to my method of growing rice and winter grain. It is connected with everything, with fertility, with germination, with weeds, with keeping away sparrows, with water management. In actual practice and in theory, the use of straw in farming is a crucial issue. This is something that I cannot seem to get people to understand.

By spreading straw, growing clover, and returning to the soil all organic residues, the earth comes to possess all the nutrients needed to grow rice and winter grain in the same field year after year. By natural farming, fields that have already been damaged by cultivation or the use of agricultural chemicals can be effectively rehabilitated.

The 49-year-old Bryant, who resembles a cereal box character himself with his wide eyes, toothy smile, and elongated chin, blames Kellogg's financial woes on the changing tastes of fickle breakfast eaters. The company flourished in the Baby Boom era, when fathers went off to work and mothers stayed behind to tend to three or four children. For these women, cereal must have been heaven-sent. They could pour everybody a bowl of Corn Flakes, leave a milk carton out, and be done with breakfast, except for the dishes. Now Americans have fewer children. Both parents often work and no longer have time to linger over a serving of Apple Jacks and the local newspaper. Many people grab something on the way to work and devour it in their cars or at their desks while checking e-mail. “For a while, breakfast cereal was convenience food,” says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. “But convenience is relative. It's more convenient to grab a breakfast bar, yogurt, a piece of fruit, or a breakfast sandwich at some fast-food place than to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal.” People who still eat breakfast at home favor more laborintensive breakfasts, according to a recent Nielsen survey. They spend more time at the stove, preparing oatmeal (sales were up 3.5 percent in the first half of 2014) and eggs (up 7 percent last year). They're putting their toasters to work, heating up frozen waffles, French toast, and pancakes (sales of these foods were up 4.5 percent in the last five years). This last inclination should be helping Kellogg: It owns Eggo frozen waffles. But Eggo sales weren't enough to offset its slumping U.S. cereal numbers. “There has just been a massive fragmentation of the breakfast occasion,” says Julian Mellentin, director of food analysis at research firm New Nutrition Business. And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more healthconscious, they're shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg's four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packagedfood analyst at Consumer Edge. If such discerning shoppers still eat cereal, they prefer the gluten-free kind, sales of which are up 22 percent, according to Nielsen. There's also growing suspicion of packagedfood companies that fill their products with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For these breakfast eaters, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam may seem less like friendly childhood avatars and more like malevolent sugar traffickers.

Preface Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be writing a cookbook. I never liked helping in the kitchen when I was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks. She would first beat the egg whites in a shallow bowl with a fork until it was so foamy. I was always amazed but at the same time I felt it was too much effort wasted, after all we were only making an omelet. Then came the time when I had to learn how to, at least, make the sauteed vegetables Josh and I enjoyed. When I asked mother about this, I remember her saying, "Gisahin mo ang sibuyas at kamatis..." (Saute the onions and tomatoes...) but I quickly stopped her to tell her that I did not know what gisahin meant. Visibly annoyed with me and with a hint of sarcasm in her voice, she very slowly said, "Get the fry pan, put some oil in it, heat it..." and again I quickly glanced up from the notes I was taking to tell her that she was going too fast and what size fry pan was I to use and how much oil do I put in it. Realizing how neglected my education in the kitchen had been, she immediately started my cooking lessons. I carefully wrote things down, but words like sankutcha, ligisin, and my ceaseless interruptions were just too much for both of us. Out of desperation, I sent my maid over to my mother's house to learn how to cook all of the dishes that Josh and I enjoyed. I congratulated myself thinking it was one of my most brilliant decisions, but good things always come to an end. In 1978, Josh, our two sons Alan and Adam, and I left our country. We left our life of Riley. With no more maids or help of any kind, I had to learn how to cook if

Preface Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be writing a cookbook. I never liked helping in the kitchen when I was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks.

was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks.

dreams did I think I would be writing a cookbook. I never liked helping in the kitchen when I was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks.

my wildest dreams did I think I would be writing a cookbook. I never liked helping in the kitchen when I was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks.

would be writing a cookbook. I never liked helping in the kitchen when I was growing up. We were often assigned chores and I always opted for washing the dishes. I hardly ever cut vegetables, never cooked rice and I detested beating eggs. I remember Tia Bestra, who would patiently show me that the whites should be separated from the yolks.

4/20, CANNABIS DAY, APRIL 20 420 FARMERS’ MARKET RISOTTO Recipe from Chef Herb Celebrate the bounty of a new growing season with a dish that’s perfectly in season on April 20. Better known as 4/20, the once unremarkable date has slowly evolved into a new high holiday, set aside by stoners of all stripes to celebrate the herb among like-minded friends. The celebration’s origins are humble in nature: It was simply the time of day when four friends (dubbed “The Waldos”) met to share a joint each day in San Rafael, California. Little did they know that they were beginning a new ceremony that would unite potheads worldwide! Every day at 4:20 p.m., you can light up a joint in solidarity with other pot-lovers in your time zone. It’s a tradition that has caught on, and today, there are huge 4/20 parties and festivals in many cities, including famous gatherings of students in Boulder and Santa Cruz. An Italian rice stew, risotto is dense, rich, and intensely satisfying—perfect cannabis comfort cuisine. This risotto uses the freshest spring ingredients for a variation in texture and bright colors that stimulate the senses. Visit your local farmers’ market around April 20, when the bounty of tender new vegetables is beginning to be harvested after the long, dreary winter. As for tracking down the secret ingredient, you’ll have to find another kind of farmer entirely. STONES 4 4 tablespoons THC olive oil (see recipe) 1 medium leek, white part only, cleaned and finely chopped ½ cup sliced mushrooms 1 small carrot, grated ½ cup sugar snap peas, ends trimmed ½ cup asparagus spears, woody ends removed, cut into 1-inch-long pieces Freshly ground pepper 3½ cups low-sodium chicken broth ¼ cup California dry white wine Olive oil cooking spray 1 cup arborio rice 1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley ¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese Salt 1. In a nonstick skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the THC olive oil over medium-low heat. Add leek and sauté until wilted, about 5 minutes. Stir in mushrooms and continue to cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add carrot, sugar snap peas, and asparagus. Continue to cook, stirring, for another minute. Remove from heat, season with pepper, and set aside. 2. In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring broth and wine to a boil. Reduce heat and keep broth mixture at a slow simmer. 3. In a large pot that has been lightly coated with cooking spray, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons THC olive oil over medium heat. Add rice and stir well until all the grains of rice are coated. Pour in ½ cup of the hot broth and stir, using a wooden spoon, until all liquid is absorbed. Continue adding the broth ½ cup at a time, making sure the rice has absorbed the broth before adding more, reserving ¼ cup of broth for the vegetables. 4. Combine ¼ cup of the broth with the reserved vegetables. Once all broth has been added to the risotto and absorbed, add the vegetable mixture and continue to cook over low heat for 2 minutes. Rice should have a very creamy consistency. Remove from heat and stir in parsley, Parmesan, and salt to taste. Stir well to combine.

In Japan: The shortage of wives for farmers became a rural crisis. In one village in the late 1980s, of unmarried persons between ages 25 and 39, 120 were men and only 31 were women, a ratio of 4:1. Some Japanese villages organized to find wives for their bachelors. One mountain village placed newspaper ads, promising free winter skiing vacations to all young women who visited and agreed to meet its men. Over a fiveyear period, 300 women responded, but none became wives of a village man. In another mountain village of 7,000, there were three bachelors for every unmarried woman, so the local government became a marriage agent. It brought in 22 women from the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries to marry its men, many in their 40s and 50s. Some marriages endured, but others ended in divorce because of the labor demands of farm life, the burden wives bore in caring for their husband’s elderly parents, and cultural differences. Small businesses developed that offered counseling services for bicultural couples and served as marriage brokers to match Japanese men with foreign women. Even today, many Japanese farm men remain bachelors. Farming in Japan is now primarily a part-time occupation—farmers find off-season jobs in construction or other tasks, unable to make an acceptable living even with government subsidies. And farming is now largely performed by older persons. For example, in one important rice-growing area, between 1980 and 2003, the number of people making most of their money from farming fell by 56 percent, and the number of people between ages 15 and 59 fell by 83 percent. There was one increase, though: there were 600 more farmers older than 70 in 2003 than in 1980.

EVERYONE THOUGHT QUINN was watching Meet the Press with Grandma, even Grandma. Lying on the sofa, covered with an afghan, Quinn had simply rolled off and stuffed pillows under the covers while Grandma stared at the screen. Then she had sidled upstairs, out her bedroom window, and down the oak tree growing right by the house.

But first, rice diversified and spread around the world. It is a water-loving grass that reaches up to sixteen feet in flooded fields. However, it does not have to grow in standing water. Its peculiar method of cultivation in rice paddies probably came about when people noticed healthy rice plants growing in flooded fields during the monsoon season. The

I don't want to hurt the child. Tell me what I must do to protect it," he demanded. That simple request opened Lily's heart to him more surely than anything else he could have said. She spread her fingers across the rough squareness of his jaw and met the intensity of his gaze with tenderness. "The child grows well above where even you can reach. Just be gentle with the child's mother." His

Before they slept, Lily felt Cade's hand slide to her side and test her growing roundness. Sleepily, she murmured, "He is larger than Roy at this stage, I think. I am getting fat already." "You'll never be fat. You are beautiful. I want to hold both of you." Cade adjusted her so she lay contentedly against his side. He had called her beautiful. No one had ever called her that before. Smiling, Lily finally drifted off to sleep. Cade

Don't, Lily. I will not be able to stop myself. I forced the burden of bearing a child on you once before. I will never do so again. There must be time for you to grow strong. We do not need to have more children. I would not see you suffer through that pain again." Lily glared at him. "I am strong, Cade. I am strong and I am not afraid of bearing your children. And I need you in the same way that you need me and you will drive us both mad if you deny it." She

Before she realized what he meant to do, Cade was on his horse, towing the mule while riding at right angles away from the road and the army on the move. The rain had let up and the air was warm, and Cade wore only the white full-sleeved shirt and tight trousers he had worn every day since they had left. The shirt was open halfway down his copper chest and accented by a bright-red sash at his waist that held his knife. Lily thought he looked a pirate or worse, but the soldiers striking out after him weren't reaching for their weapons. "He looks like a damned Spaniard," Travis whispered at Lily's side. "How does he do that?" With years of practice and an Indian talent for deception—but Lily didn't say that out loud. She was gradually learning that Cade was like a chameleon, able to blend in with his surroundings for safety. She didn't like to think of the child he must have been to grow up that way, but it certainly helped to survive in this chaos that was Texas. Lily

Lily kept Serena's chubby body curled tightly against her own and prayed as she had prayed every night since Cade's departure. She had been furious with him at first. Then she had felt rejected, as if she were of no account in his life. Cade had never said anything to contradict her fears. But then she had begun to remember little things—the kitten in his lap, the flute on her pillow, his pain in setting Roy's leg, the fierce passion of his lovemaking—and she had to wonder if these weren't Cade's way of showing how he felt. A sliver of hope had entered Lily's heart then, and she had nourished it in the days since, hoping to block out the growing fear when there was no sign of Cade even after the battle was won. Lily

A wide-eyed and terrified Roy staggered into Travis's path, and Travis bent and scooped him up as if he were as small as Serena. Lily didn't watch the reunion. Her attention was focused wholly on the unconscious man in the bed. Hugging Roy, Travis glanced back at Lily with sadness in his heart and let the last piece of his dream go. She had been a bright part of his adolescence, of his growing up. He was grown now, and as a child surrenders the comforters of his past, Travis surrendered any notions he might still have harbored about the mother of his child. He didn't want to let his son go, but the woman was already lost to him. Reassuring

Travis grinned and gave her an admiring look. "I wish I'd been there to see you grow that big with Roy. A woman never looks better than when she's carrying a man's child." That

What are we going to do?" she asked quietly. Cade shrugged. "We'll wait. There's nothing else that can be done." Trying to ease the mood, he stroked the place where his child grew. "We'll watch our child grow and wait for the corn to rise." That was what she wanted to hear, but Lily had a feeling that wasn't what Cade wanted to say. She could almost feel him erupting inside, feel the frustration and the fury tearing at him. She knew that despite his size, Cade wasn't a violent man, but there was a limit to how much any man could take. Lily very much suspected Cade had been pushed to his limit, but still he lay here calmly telling her he was content to wait for events to happen. "I

Oliver looked up into Ralph’s earnest green eyes. He felt bad for feeling so overwhelmed that he couldn’t share in Ralph’s evident excitement. “Why don’t you tell me a bit more about our powers?” he suggested. Ralph brightened again immediately, clearly eager to oblige. “So, we each have a specialism that allows us to manipulate the physical world in order to change the future. I have a biological specialism. I can rearrange matter; make vines grow to tie someone up, or part the trees of a forest to open a pathway through. That’s how I was able to change the leaf before. It’s not a lot but once I’ve trained properly I’ll be strong. Right now I can just about make a petal fall off a buttercup.” “What about the others?” Oliver asked. “What kind of rearranging can they do?” “Well, my friend Simon has a molecular specialism,” Ralph explained. “Liquids to gas, lead to gold, that kind of thing. Hazel has a chemical specialism. She can change someone’s mood from happy to sad, for example. She once helped me digest a rather large burrito. So, I suppose if you want to see your role as some kind of predetermined burden you can. Or you can choose to see it as AWESOME like I do.” “All right, all right,” Oliver said, relenting. “That bit does seem pretty awesome. Messing with molecules

Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.

published by Márquez et al. (2007) in Science in 2007 described “a virus in a fungus in a plant.” The plant—a tropical grass—grows naturally in high soil temperatures. But without a fungal associate that grows in its leaves, the grass can’t survive at high temperatures. When grown alone, without the plant, the fungus fares little better and is unable to survive. However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures. The microbiome of the fungus, in other words, determines the role that the fungus plays in the microbiome of the plant. The outcome is clear: life or death. One of the most dramatic examples of microbes that live within microbes comes from the notorious rice blast fungus: Rhizopus microsporus. The key toxins used by Rhizopus are actually produced by a bacterium living within its hyphae. In a dramatic indication of how entwined the fates of fungi and their bacterial associates can be, Rhizopus requires the bacteria not only to cause the disease but also to reproduce. Experimentally “curing” Rhizopus of its bacterial residents impedes the fungus’s ability to produce spores. The bacterium is responsible for the most important features of Rhizopus’s lifestyle, from its diet to its sexual habits. See Araldi-Brondolo et al. (2017), Mondo et al. (2017), and Deveau

EASY FIRST FINGER FOODS FOR BABIES • steamed (or lightly boiled) whole vegetables, such as green beans, baby corn, and sugar-snap peas • steamed (or lightly boiled) florets of cauliflower and broccoli • steamed, roasted or stir-fried vegetable sticks, such as carrot, potato, egg plant, sweet potato, parsnip, pumpkin, and zucchini • raw sticks of cucumber (tip: keep some of these ready prepared in the fridge for babies who are teething—the coolness is soothing for their gums) • thick slices of avocado (not too ripe or it will be very squishy) • chicken (as a strip of meat or on a leg bone)—warm (i.e., freshly cooked) or cold • thin strips of beef, lamb or pork—warm (i.e., freshly cooked) or cold • fruit, such as pear, apple, banana, peach, nectarine, mango—either whole or as sticks • sticks of firm cheese, such as cheddar or Gloucester •breadsticks • rice cakes or toast “fingers”—on their own or with a homemade spread, such as hummus and tomato, or cottage cheese And, if you want to be a bit more adventurous, try making your own versions of: • meatballs or mini-burgers • lamb or chicken nuggets • fishcakes or fish fingers • falafels • lentil patties • rice balls (made with sushi rice, or basmati rice with dhal) Remember, you don’t need to use recipes specifically designed for babies, provided you’re careful to keep salt and sugar to a minimum.

For Sam, growing up as worried about food and rent as his mother was, angry that everyone else had more than him, childhood hadn’t been easy. His school pictures were hard to look at—he could see the worry and pain in his face, the tension in his posture. It took a hard-luck kid to know

Mustard seeds mean faith,” she had said. “All you need is the tiniest bit for it to sprout and grow. And you can do anything with faith. . . .

Growing up, there had always been candles burning, not for the light they gave, but for remembrance. Her grandmother used to say the flame honored a person’s spirit, reminded the living that the dead were never really gone.