My name is Low from YOLOW Zines. That's Y-O-L-O-W zines. I will be reading the introduction and a piece, "Washing Rice," from "Did You Eat?" a 32-page zine by 22 artists of color about appreciating our food culture, in the face of colonization and appropriation. I am reading over the track, "Cosmic Relevance," by Unheard Music Concepts.

"Did you eat?" is something you say if you have been away from someone for an hour or a decade. Something you understand in your mother tongue, even if you don't speak the language. Something that means, "I love you. I care about you. Can I share what I have with you?"
This zine is dedicated to any Black, Indigenous, Person of Color who has created home with the phrase, "Did you eat?" This zine is dedicated to our families and ancestors of the diasporas of space, place, and time. To our relationships made by blood and by sharing recipes, meals, and stories.

"Washing Rice" by L. Kling.

Cooked rice, congee, mochi, rice noodles, risotto, paella, sake, paper, rice milk… there are so many ways that we consume rice. We throw it at weddings, we offer it to our ancestors, we eat it as babies and as elders.
I eat rice with practically every meal. Rice can seem like a monolithic food, considering it provides more than ⅕ of calories consumed by humans and half of the world depends on it as a staple food. (Wikipedia) However, as an ancient grain grown on every continent except Antarctica, there are more than 40,000 types of rice! And every person and culture has their favorite type and way to prepare it. Short grain, long grain, glutinous, aromatic, sweet, nutty, brown, white, black, red...

My favorite rice is Japanese short grain white rice. This is how I wash it. Exactly the same as my mom, and her mom, and probably her mother before her.

After measuring your rice, add cold water and stir the rice with your hands. Gently pour off the water, one, two, three times. Work gently so grains of rice do not get washed away. The water does not need to be clear! Let drain in a sieve for 5-30 minutes.

When you are ready to cook your rice, either on the stove or in a rice cooker, place the uncooked rice in the pot, and, with your finger pointing down and the tip of your finger touching the top of the rice, add cold water to the top of the nail bed of your pointer finger. Or you can use a 1:1.2 rice to water ratio.

I’ve been preparing rice in this way for so long that I forget that not everyone knows how to do it, and not everyone does it the same way. Out of curiosity, I recently asked my social media network if they washed their rice, and I got so many responses! Keep in mind this is just a sample of some of my friends, and is not meant to definitively categorize anything, but spark some conversations about cultural food practices.

Some people don’t wash their rice because they grew up with instant/boil-in-a-bag rice, or possibly because eating rice is something that they’ve adopted in recent generations and their rice is really processed and homogenous. Some BIPOC folks don’t wash or soak their rice because they combine it with oil as the first stage of cooking and don’t like the rice to absorb water at that stage. Rice washing seems less common in parts of Central America according to my friends from Mexican, Bolivian, Ecuadorian cultures. Most white people just said that they didn’t know they were “supposed to.”

BIPOC folks I heard from who are dedicated rice washers belonged to cultures including being Black, Southern, Singaporean, Peruvian, Desi, Korean, Japanese, Puerto Rican. Most of us learned from our mothers. We come from places that have been eating rice for thousands of years, before it was heavily processed and homogenized and (in the US) enriched, often acquiring rice in bulk.

White people who wash their rice were taught by BIPOC folks, or the internet told them to do it to reduce the sticky starchiness of rice, or grew up in countries where rice might have stones or chaff or weevils so washing was necessary.

For many of us, rice is so much more than a staple food ingredient. The Mandarin Chinese (飯 fàn), Japanese (米 gohan), and Korean (밥 bap) words for “rice” are the same as for “food”/“meal.” Rice nourishes our bodies, food culture, and traditions. Rice is a whole meal.