Bread and Rice (A Ramble)

Now, I’m Asian, and if there is one thing we Asians can’t really live without, it’s rice. Rice to us is like bread to, well, Non-Asians. We eat it three times a day, seven days a week, five-hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes a year.

In a way, I think is rice is superior to bread. Firstly, you don’t need much to make rice. All you need is a bunch of harvested grains and some sweet tender love. Bread – all you need are flour, water, eggs, oil, yeast, sugar, honey, salt, malt syrup, etc. Secondly, it’s easier to cook. All you have to do is soak the grains into water after washing it a few times, boil it in a pot for 15-30 minutes, then serve with some crispy slabs of Spam and eggs. For bread – Step 1: place dry ingredients in a bowl. Step 2: mix ingredients until they become a dough. Step 3: knead dough. Step 4: place dough in a pan. Step 5: bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit or until golden-brown, for about 30-minutes to an hour to God-knows-when. With rice in a cooker, you know when it's done when the bell starts ringing. Thirdly, rice can still be good when it’s stale. You can make the best fried rice this side of the Pacific with that three-day-old batch sitting in your fridge. When bread goes stale, you grind it up and turn it into cat food (according to some Hawaii locals).

No offense to the pro-bread crowd. I love bread, and I'm sure there are plenty of delicious bread dishes with some recipes making good use of stale bread. I just love rice more. And when an Asian goes a day without rice, they feel completely out of it. It’s like a local from Hawaii going a day or two without a Spam Musubi, or Spam.

So, you can imagine what it feels like when I’m visiting my relatives in the Mainland. Ah, the Mainland United States. Land of the Free Haole (native Hawaiian term used to describe White People), Home of the Brave – And from what I’ve seen on the Travel Channel, NO RICE! In every single food show about America that I’ve watched, they almost never include rice as their daily starch! What they have most of the time – BREAD! And POTATOES! God! How are you supposed to eat a good Loco Moco or Musubi with those? And worse, they don’t like Spam in the mainland. So, when I landed in San Diego, it was a culinary D-Day for me.

The morning after we arrived, I was in the kitchen making breakfast. I thought to myself, “What do Mainlanders eat for breakfast, anyway?” I was essentially trying to learn the ways of the haole in order to survive in their land for the next three weeks. They always talks about how a Great American Breakfast includes bacon and eggs with toast and a side of coffee. I was jet-lagged, so I opted for toast and marmalade. My uncle and aunt came in and were aghast.

“Ian! What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m having breakfast?”

“That’s breakfast?”

My aunt and uncle then made a more proper breakfast. Eggs, sausages, and-

RICE!

Rice! Here, on the Mainland!

I was dumbfounded! All this time, I thought people in the Continental US of A ate only bread and potatoes as their staples. Never did I think I would see the staple food of Asians and Hawaii locals in California.

I turned to my aunt in astonishment.

“Auntie, you eat rice here? In California?”

“Were you living under a rock in the middle of the Pacific? Of course, we eat rice here!”

“But everyone in Hawaii said even Asians here eat only bread and potatoes for starch.”

“That’s funny,” my Aunt retorted.

“What do you mean?”

“When you guys came here from Hawaii, we were expecting you to be wearing grass skirts and coconut shells!”

As I’ve grown up, I had begun to accept the fact that, yes, Americans do eat rice. I've also learned how to tolerate not eating rice for a day or two. But like I said, an Asian without his bowl of rice is like a Hawaii local without his slice of Spam. You can’t imagine life without the two, and your brain turns to mashed potatoes thinking about it.

Spam and Eggs - The Hawaiian Breakfast of Champions.