Rice Harvest Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Rice Harvest. Here they are! All 53 of them:

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.
Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution)
Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years. And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. Couple that with the second reason - for the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel - and you've got America the individualistic. Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family's rice. The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it withe slavery.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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.
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Years of Rice and Salt)
We all know that if the seasons were the same, there would be no growth. We know that without winter there would be no spring. We know that without frosts there would be no bulbs and without the monsoon there would be no rice harvest. In the same way, we also know that without sorrow there would be no joy. Without pain there would be no healing. I think that's precisely where the beauty comes in. It comes in through the fruit of the seasons. He has indeed made everything beautiful in its time.
Naomi Reed (My Seventh Monsoon)
Nothing is quite as beautiful as farmers harvesting their rice.
Muhammad Yunus (Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)
A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Like any great and good country, Japan has a culture of gathering- weddings, holidays, seasonal celebrations- with food at the core. In the fall, harvest celebrations mark the changing of the guard with roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and skewers of grilled gingko nuts. As the cherry blossoms bloom, festive picnics called hanami usher in the spring with elaborate spreads of miso salmon, mountain vegetables, colorful bento, and fresh mochi turned pink with sakura petals.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice of rice can consume half a village. You will loafer learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain.
Meena Kandasamy (The Gypsy Goddess)
I took her in my arms and kissed her. And thus in the midst of a city of wild conflict, filled with the alarms of war; with death and destruction reaping their terrible harvest around her, did Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, true daughter of Mars, the God of War, promise herself in marriage to John Carter, Gentleman of Virginia.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Years of Rice and Salt)
Almost everything people did throughout history was fuelled by solar energy that was captured by plants and converted into muscle power. Human history was consequently dominated by two main cycles: the growth cycles of plants and the changing cycles of solar energy (day and night, summer and winter). When sunlight was scarce and when wheat fields were still green, humans had little energy. Granaries were empty, tax collectors were idle, soldiers found it difficult to move and fight, and kings tended to keep the peace. When the sun shone brightly and the wheat ripened, peasants harvested the crops and filled the granaries. Tax collectors hurried to take their share. Soldiers flexed their muscles and sharpened their swords. Kings convened councils and planned their next campaigns. Everyone was fuelled by solar energy – captured and packaged in wheat, rice and potatoes.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
If a boy with Albert Einstein's brain had been born in Germany in the dark ages, there would have been no scientific revolution emanating from him. If a girl with Marie Curie's mind had been born in a remote Indian village twenty years ago, today she'd probably be harvesting rice and struggling to raise her children.
Chris J. Anderson (TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking)
The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.
肉包不吃肉 (二哈和他的白猫师尊)
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it’s all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just backbreaking planting and harvesting, which are done in rotation because the entire village is needed to harvest each family’s rice.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Once he traveled to a village to purchase a large rice harvest, but when he arrived the rice had already been sold to another tradesman. Nevertheless, Siddhartha remained in this village for several days; he arranged a feast for the peasants, distributed copper coins among their children, helped celebrate a marriage, and returned from his trip in the best of spirits. Kamaswami reproached him for not having returned home at once, saying he had wasted money and time. Siddhartha answered, "Do not scold me, dear friend! Never has anything been achieved by scolding. If there are losses, let me bear them. I am very pleased with this journey I made the acquaintance of many different people, a Brahmin befriended me, children rode on my knees, peasants showed me their fields, and no one took me for a tradesman." "How very lovely!" Kamaswami cried out indignantly. "But in fact a tradesman is just what you are! Or did you undertake this journey solely for your own pleasure?" "Certainly." Siddhartha laughed. "Certainly I undertook the journey for my pleasure. Why else? I got to know new people and regions, enjoyed kindness and trust, found friendship. You see, dear friend, had I been Kamaswami, I'd have hurried home in bad spirits the moment I saw my purchase foiled, and indeed money and time would have been lost. But by staying on as I did, I had some agreeable days, learned things, and enjoyed pleasures, harming neither myself nor others with haste and bad spirits. And if ever I should return to this place, perhaps to buy some future harvest or for whatever other purpose, I shall be greeted happily and in friendship by friendly people and I shall praise myself for not having displayed haste and displeasure on my first visit. So be content, friend, and do not harm yourself by scolding! When the day arrives when you see that this Siddhartha is bringing you harm, just say the word and Siddhartha will be on his way. But until that day, let us be satisfied with each other.
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
It seemed indeed, as if he did not care about the business. At one time, he travelled to a village to buy a large harvest of rice there. But when he got there, the rice had already been sold to another merchant. Nevertheless, Siddhartha stayed for several days in that village, treated the farmers for a drink, gave copper-coins to their children, joined in the celebration of a wedding, and returned extremely satisfied from his trip. Kamaswami held against him that he had not turned back right away, that he had wasted time and money. Siddhartha answered:
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Chikako and Ben's lives are inexorably linked linked to an ever-expanding list of seasonal tasks. In summer, they work through the garden bounty, drying and pickling the fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness. Fall brings chestnuts to pick, chili paste to make, mushrooms to hunt. Come winter, Noto's seas are flush with the finest sea creatures, which means pickling fish for hinezushi and salting squid guts for ishiri. In the spring, after picking mountain vegetables and harvesting seaweed, they plant the garden and begin the cycle that will feed them, their family, and their guests in the year ahead.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
A friend of hers had finished processing his wild rice, or manoomin, and the bag was for us. The rice was nicely cleaned, a rich green-brown. I plunged my unbandaged hand into the bag. The feeling of the rice, the cool laky scent, was calming. We took some out and admired the length of the grains. Native people around here have a specific ferocity about wild rice. I’ve seen faces harden when tame paddy rice, the uniformly brown commercially grown rice, is mentioned, called wild rice, or served under false pretenses. People get into fights over it. Real wild rice is grown wild, harvested by Native people, and tastes of the lake it comes from. This was the good stuff.
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence)
More food is good, but agricultural diets can provoke mismatch diseases. One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.26 In contrast, farmers sacrifice quality and diversity for quantity by focusing their efforts on just a few staple crops with high yields. It is likely that more than 50 percent of the calories you consume today derived from rice, corn, wheat, or potatoes. Other crops that have sometimes served as staples for farmers include grains like millet, barley, and rye and starchy roots such as taro and cassava. Staple crops can be grown easily in massive quantities, they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for long periods of time after harvest. One of their chief drawbacks, however, is that they tend to be much less rich in vitamins and minerals than most of the wild plants consumed by hunter-gatherers and other primates.27 Farmers who rely too much on staple crops without supplemental foods such as meat, fruits, and other vegetables (especially legumes) risk nutritional deficiencies. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers are susceptible to diseases such as scurvy (from insufficient vitamin C), pellagra (from insufficient vitamin B3), beriberi (from insufficient vitamin B1), goiter (from insufficient iodine), and anemia (from insufficient iron).28 Relying heavily on a few crops—sometimes just one crop—has other serious disadvantages, the biggest being the potential for periodic food shortages and famine. Humans,
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
There is a story that illustrates this view. A long time ago in China there lived a very greedy monk. Whenever there was some temple donation, or a distribution of money from a rich layman, this monk was always the first in line. He officiated at many ceremonies, accumulating enough money to buy even the nicest house in town! He was so greedy for money, it seemed he took pleasure only in the joy of collecting it, and never spent any of it. He never even bothered to spend it on himself. His clothes were still quite shabby despite the fact that everyone knew he had a lot of money. “There’s the greedy monk in his ragged clothes,” the laypeople would say. “He’s so cheap he won’t even buy something for himself.” Then one day, it started to rain, and the rain did not stop for several weeks. The little town below the temple was washed out. Houses were destroyed, farms were submerged weeks before the big harvest, and cattle perished. The whole town faced a terrible winter without food or housing. The villagers were very sad and frightened. Then one day, the villagers woke up to find a great number of carts filling the village square. The carts were loaded with many bags of rice and beans, blankets, clothing, and medicine. There were several new ploughs, and four sturdy oxen to pull them! Standing in the middle was the “greedy monk,” in his shabby, patched clothes. He used half his money to buy these supplies, and he gave the rest to the mayor of the town. “I am a meditation monk,” he told the mayor. “Many years ago I perceived that in the future this town would experience a terrible disaster. So ever since then I have been getting money for this day.” When the villagers saw this, they were ashamed of their checking minds. “Waaah, what a great bodhisattva he is!” This is the story of the greedy monk.
Seung Sahn (The Compass of Zen (Shambhala Dragon Editions))
We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.
Donia Bijan (The Last Days of Café Leila)
warm places with ample supply of water. In the Philippines, rice planting is a celebration. The soil is first prepared by the farmer and his carabao (KAH-RAH-BOW), then the land is flooded and the planters come in to do their jobs. Each seedling could develop two or more offshoots, each producing about 200 flowers, which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big wooden mortar and pestle, usually by the synchronized pounding of two men. The process of winnowing, usually done by the females using a bilao (a woven, flat, round, bamboo tray),
N.T. Alcuaz (Banana Leaves: Filipino Cooking and Much More)
ample supply of water. In the Philippines, rice planting is a celebration. The soil is first prepared by the farmer and his carabao (KAH-RAH-BOW), then the land is flooded and the planters come in to do their jobs. Each seedling could develop two or more offshoots, each producing about 200 flowers, which turn into grains. After harvest time, these grains are removed from the stalks by threshing them. They are then hulled in a big
N.T. Alcuaz (Banana Leaves: Filipino Cooking and Much More)
exponential growth. In ancient China a man came to the emperor and demonstrated to him his invention of the game of chess. The emperor was so impressed by the brilliance of the man’s invention that he told the man to name his reward. The man asked for his reward in an amount of rice — that one grain be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on — doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square. Not being a very good mathematician, the emperor at first thought the reward to be too modest and directed his servants to fulfill the man’s request. By the time the rice grains filled the first half of the chessboard, the man had more than four billion rice grains — or about the harvest of one rice field. At that point the man was rich. By the time the servants got to the sixty-fourth square, the man had more than eighteen quintillion rice grains (18 x 1018), or more than all the wealth in the land. But his wealth and ability to outsmart the emperor came with a price — he ended up being decapitated.
Anonymous
Peasants are people without sense or forethought. Therefore, they must not give rice to their wives and children at harvest time, but must save food for the future. They should eat millet, vegetables, and other coarse food instead of rice. Even the fallen leaves of plants should be saved as food against famine.
Keian no Ofuregaki
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.
Elise McDonough (The Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook: More Than 50 Irresistible Recipes That Will Get You High)
The Morioka region of northern Japan is famous for its horses and this festival was originally conceived by horse breeders who wished to pray for long and happy lives for their animals. It now features a parade of colourfully dressed horses ridden by local children with round 80–100 horses usually taking part dressed in konida costumes (worn by the horses of daimyo – feudal lords – in the Edo Period). The name of the festival comes from the noise made by the bells (chagu chagu) on the horses’ harnesses (umakko) and the event is designated as a national intangible folklore cultural asset. At the end of the parade, prayers are offered for a bountiful rice harvest and thanks are given to the horses.
Melusine Draco (Western Animism: Zen & The Art Of Positive Paganism (Pagan Portals))
A soft wind rippled the rice, making green waves on a green ocean. Beyond our paddy were endless paddies, endless green oceans whose harvest would one day fill a million bowls. In the distance a heron stalked a frog, piercing it with its sharp beak, throwing it up in the air, and swallowing it with one gulp. With all the plenty there was cruelty. There had been Han Na's love as wide as a hai and now she was gone, snatched from me forever. I hunched down and, covering my face with my hands, cried until there were no tears left.
Gloria Whelan (Chu Ju's House)
The sowing of seed disciplines the body and the sprouting of the seed uplifts the spirit, but there is nothing to equal the rich satisfaction of a gathered harvest, when the grain is set before you in shining mounds and your hands are whitened with the dust of the good rice; or the very act of measuring -- of filling the measure, and topping it with a peak, careless of its height because you can afford to be, and also because you know in your prudence that the grains will see to it that you are not too generous, and slip and tumble down the sides of the measure if that peak be too tall. So many handfuls to one measure, so many measures to one sack; one after the other the sacks are filled and put away, with rejoicing and thankfulness.
Kamala Markandaya (Nectar in a Sieve)
What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other. Our giant opportunity for tomorrow is to rise. To rise above our long history of using specialist knowledge to do repetitive tasks. Whether it’s the backbreaking work of harvesting rice year after year or the mind-numbing work of assembling a product on a manufacturing line, most humans, for most of history, have made a living doing the same thing over and over again. Our future won’t be like that. Anything that can be automated or calculated ultimately will be. Now, we can be fearful of that, or we can embrace it and take the chance to discover a richer path to life fulfillment.
Chris J. Anderson (TED Talks: The official TED guide to public speaking: Tips and tricks for giving unforgettable speeches and presentations)
The harvest is good. Families are awash with rice. Deposits at the rice storehouses climb, enabling more loans. Land values are rising, both because credit is more readily available and because villagers believe future harvests will continue to be bountiful.
Charles Wheelan (Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System)
The nature of entities Does not exist in conditions and such." Thus, the nature of a rice sprout does not exist in any of its conditions. It does not exist in its causal conditions (water and manure), nor in its object condition (the harvest), nor in its immediate condition (the last moment of the rice seed), nor in its dominant condition (the person who planted the seed).
Karl Brunnhölzl (The Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madhyamaka in the Kagyu Tradition (Nitartha Institute Series))
Mr. Grote shows me how he grows wild rice in the stream and collects the seeds. The rice is nutty and brown. He plants the seeds after harvest in late summer for the crop the following year. It’s an annual plant, he explains, which means that it dies in the autumn.
Christina Baker Kline (Orphan Train)
People were drunk, but on the cusp of drunken brilliance, which only ever lasted a few minutes and had to be harnessed and harvested while it could be.
Eva Rice (Love Notes for Freddie)
Once the boat reaches its destination, Young-sook and the other women take a few moments to make offerings of rice and rice wine to the Dragon Sea God and pray for an abundant harvest, a safe return, and peace of mind.
Lisa See (The Island of Sea Women)
I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!” “I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out. “Fair?” The man laughed bitterly. “Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!” “If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.” Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny. “Aren’t these your countrymen?
Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
This worship of the sacred fire did not belong exclusively to the populations of Greece and Italy. We find it in the East. The Laws of Manu as they have come to us show us the religion of Brahma completely established, and even verging towards its decline; but they have preserved vestiges and remains of a religion still more ancient—that of the sacred fire—which the worship of Brahma had reduced to a secondary rank, but could not destroy. The Brahmin has his fire to keep night and day; every morning and every evening he feeds it with wood; but, as with the Greeks, this must be the wood of certain trees. As the Greeks and Italians offer it wine, the Hindu pours upon it a fermented liquor which he calls soma. Meals, too, are religious acts, and the rites are scrupulously described in the Laws of Manu. They address prayers to the fire, as in Greece; they offer it the first fruits of rice, butter, and honey. We read that “the Brahmin should not eat the rice of the new harvest without having offered the first fruits of it to the hearth-fire; for the sacred fire is greedy of grain, and when it is not honored it will devour the existence of the negligent Brahmin.” The Hindus, like the Greeks and the Romans, pictured the gods to themselves as greedy not only of honors and respect, but of food and drink. Man believed himself compelled to satisfy their hunger and thirst if he wished to avoid their wrath.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (The Ancient City - Imperium Press: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Traditionalist Histories))
Like nearly all beneficial inventions, however, this admirable solution has its drawbacks. To begin with, more than half of the applied nitrogen does not end up in crops but escapes through different routes (volatilization, leaching, erosion, bacterial conversion to nitrous oxide) into the environment. The global average for the share of nitrogen applications eventually ending up in harvested crops is now below 50 percent, and in China’s intensive rice farming the share is only about a third.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
Ugh, so what're we supposed to help with?" "Harvesting stuff from our veggie garden out back." "Wow! You guys grow your own ingredients too?" "Yeah. A lot of the people living at Polaris are into making their own. Ibusaki makes the wood chips he uses for smoking meats and cheeses. Ryoko specializes in cooking foods that use shio koji as an ingredient... *Shio koji is rice malt fermented in salt and water.* ... so she has her own warehouse close to the dorm where she ferments her own. Me, I want to make my own breed of Polaris chicken, like the French bresse. I have my own flock I'm keeping free-range right here. So... over here is the place Isshiki senpai runs. A kitchen garden with over a dozen different kinds of vegetables!
Yūto Tsukuda (Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, Vol. 2)
A famous agricultural analogy to this system of karmic classifica¬ tion equates karma with rice. This makes Sanchita Karma the already grown rice that has been harvested and stored in the granary. Prarabdha Karma is the small portion of that stored rice that has been removed from storage, husked, and readied for cooking and eating. Kriyamana Karma is the rice that is now being planted in the field to produce a future crop.
Robert E. Svoboda (Aghora III: The Law of Karma)
The most important point, in his view, was that the new methods and new crops had done what they were supposed to: increase yields. Economists have estimated that the global average productivity gains from Green Revolution crops are about 1 percent per year for wheat, 0.8 percent per year for rice, and 0.7 percent per year for maize. The numbers sound small, but over time the impacts grow large, compound-interest style. Between 1960 and 2000, wheat harvests in developing countries tripled. Rice harvests doubled. Maize harvests more than doubled. The extra food, Borlaug said, was why the population could increase while the proportion of hungry people went down.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
Through a break in the willows, if the fog isn't too heavy, you can see the edge of what everyone around here calls the Waters, where a sort of island rises up, accessible by a bridge three planks wide, strung between oil barrels floating on the watery muck. There, under the branches of sycamores, oaks, and hackberries, the green-stained Rose Cottage sinks on the two nearest corners so that it appears to be squatting above the bridge, preparing to pitch itself into the muck. Beyond the cottage, the trees give way to a mosquito-infested no-man's-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams, and springs a half mile wide between solid ground and the Old Woman River. This is where Herself harvested wild rice, cattails, staghorn sumac, and a thousand other plants.
Bonnie Jo Campbell (The Waters)
But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of the harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke, a new apron, a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear.
Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic)
Let’s take the example of Raju, who owns two acres of land near Madurai. In theory, he grows rice in the winter when the northeast monsoon brings rain, and once again in late summer, when the Mullaiperiyar dam opens and brings water from Kerala. Raju has two children; his daughter, having finished her tenth-standard examinations, is working in a nearby textile mill. His son, his pride and joy, is studying in school. Raju hopes he will be a mechanic, or even an engineer. When asked why he doesn’t want his children to take up farming, he laughs. The rains did not come in the summer, so the water was not sufficient to plant the summer crop. The winter temperatures were hotter than usual, and one big downpour close to harvest time, a month later than usual, destroyed half his crop. Only those with no other choice should pursue farming, he says. Indeed, one of the most tragic effects of climate change is the triple whammy on agriculture: rising temperatures cause falling yields, water shortages make the yields worse in rain-fed areas, and when the rain does fall, it packs a real punch and damages crops.
Mridula Ramesh (The Climate Solution: India's Climate-Change Crisis and What We Can Do about It)
As Tomiko and I sank to our knees on floor pillows, her mother filled our sake cups with an amber-green liquid. Called toso, it was a traditional New Year's elixir made from sweet rice wine seasoned with a Chinese herbal-medicine mixture called tososan. Meant to ward off the evil spirits, the drink was honeyed, warm, and laced with cinnamon and peppery sansho. To display the contents of the lacquer boxes, Tomiko's mother had arranged the various layers in the center of the table. The top layer always contains the traditional sweet dishes and hors d'oeuvres, while the second layer holds steamed, boiled, and vinegared offerings. The third box consists of foods that have been grilled or fried. Since not everything fit into the lacquer boxes, Tomiko's mother had placed a long rectangular dish at everyone's place holding three different nibbles. The first one was a small bowl of herring eggs to represent fertility. Waxy yellow in color, they had a plastic pop and mild saline flavor. Next came a miniature stack of sugar- and soy-braised burdock root cut like penne pasta and tossed with a rich nutty cream made from pounded sesame seeds. Called tataki gobo (pounded burdock root), the dish is so named because the gobo (root) symbolizes the hope for a stable, deeply rooted life, while the homonym for tataki (pounded) also means "joy aplenty." The third item consisted of a tiny clump of intensely flavored soy-caramelized sardines that tasted like ocean candy. Called tazukuri, meaning "paddy-tilling," the sticky fish symbolized hopes for a good harvest, since in ancient times, farmers used chopped sardines along with ash for fertilizer.
Victoria Abbott Riccardi (Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto)
this.  There has never been a political organization as powerful or as fearsome as the Democrat National Committee.  Yes, there have been tyrants and despots.  There have been Huns and kings and Caesars, but there has never before been a religion-party that could command armies and navies, buy up priests and popes, and reign with blood and horror on the earth for so long.  The oath and covenant to be robed with the priesthood in this organization requires a commitment of the soul.  You cannot leave.  You cannot even die to avoid your obligation.  In return, you will be provided a charm of favor.  The laws of men will not be able to hold you.  The bounty of all nations will be yours for the taking.  The innocent and hard-working people of the world are your sheep to be shorn or slaughtered by your command.  In place of joy you will be provided seemingly endless pleasure.  In place of serenity, you will be driven by the dogs of greed who never tire and never stop.  In place of love, you will receive virgins and children for sex.  In place of salvation, you will receive a long life of power and more wealth than a hundred men could spend in a hundred lifetimes. For some, the cost of this religion-party is too great.  For others, the lure is too great, and life is too short to be wasted trying to earn one’s way to wealth.  Besides, that type of wealth can be stripped away with a single lawsuit by someone who wants it more than the person who earned it.  The promise of eternal life is a shiny and sweet smelling counterfeit of exaltation.  Who wants to eat cold rice, when one can have a tender and juicy steak with the finest wines?  Who wants to heal the sick or feed five thousand when one can have his or her name put on the wing of a hospital or command the harvest of a nation?
Brooks A. Agnew (Charm of Favor: A true story of the rise of the Clinton Crime Syndicate)
The key to great bamboo, Yamashita tells me, is space. Bamboo trees can reproduce for six years, but their roots need room to spread, and the sun needs room to bake the forest floor. More than a farmer, Yamashita is a constant gardener, pruning branches, keeping the trees to a height of six meters, using rice husk to sow nutrients into the soil. The best bamboo is found deep underground, safely away from sunlight, turning the harvest into something resembling a truffle hunt. We walk carefully and quietly through the forest, looking for little cracks in the earth that indicate a baby bamboo trying to make its way to the surface. When we spot cracks, Yamashita comes by with a small pick and gently works the soil until he reaches the bulb. Most bamboo you see is ruddy brown or purple, but Yamashita's takenoko comes out lily white, tender, and sweet enough to eat like an apple. "You have to cook it right away, otherwise you begin to lose the flavor," says Shunichi.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
Recently Professor Tsuno of Ehime University wrote a lengthy book on the relationship of plant metabolism to rice harvests. This professor often comes to my field, digs down a few feet to check the soil, brings students along to measure the angle of sunlight and shade and whatnot, and takes plant specimens back to the lab for analysis. I often ask him, "When you go back, are you going to try non-cultivation direct seeding?" He laughingly answers, "No, I'll leave the applications to you. I'm going to stick to research." So that is how it is. You study the function of the plant's metabolism and its ability to absorb nutrients from the soil, write a book, and get a doctorate in agricultural science. But do not ask if your theory of assimilation is going to be relevant to the yield.
Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution)
Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of java beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.
Donia Bijan (The Last Days of Café Leila)
Plants have a circadian clock, which many species use to turn on their chemical defenses in anticipation of morning attacks from insects; the plants are more resistant to attack when their clocks are functioning normally. Janet Braam, a cell biologist at Rice University, and her colleagues found that the circadian clocks of cabbages, blueberries, and other fruits and vegetables continue to tick even after the plants have been harvested. But under the constant light of a grocery store—or the constant dark of a refrigerator—the circadian rhythms start to dissipate, as does the cyclical production of key compounds, making the plant more susceptible to bugs and perhaps diminishing its taste and even its nutritional value.
Alan Burdick (Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation)
People forget that saffron is the backbone of a flower," he said, still sniffing. "They get so preoccupied with saffron's cost that they forget what saffron really is." "My boyfriend used to study crocuses in college," I said, unsure where the conversation was going, but determined to set it on stable ground. 'He harvested the strands for a pilot dining hall program, but gave me the best ones to cook with." "A match made in heaven." "Yeah," I said. "He's great..." But we weren't here to discuss my love life. What were we here to discuss? "And what did you make with the saffron?" Michael Saltz asked. "My specialty is a rice stew with ginger and flounder." He had brought the conversation back to food and I felt more at ease. "Like a paella?" "No, not like a paella. I don't use shellfish, because..." "Oh, right, allergic! Yes, how could I forget?" He had an excellent memory. Or maybe just for me. "It has an Asian flair," I continued. "The saffron adds a taste of the sun. You have the pillowy sea element of the flounder and the earthiness of the rice, and I think the farminess of the saffron- that rustic, rough flavor- brings the dish together.
Jessica Tom (Food Whore)