Peace Corps Blog Panama: Of rice and men

How many of you PANAMANIACS! out there like rice? Huh? Huh? 'Cause if you like rice, you can consider today's post an early Christmas present! Because it's about rice!

The gents around these parts are finishing up this year's rice harvest...which got panablog wondering, "Just how does rice get from the field to your plate?" Well, hop on the panablog Rice Express and let's find out!

All aboard! Toot, toot!

During harvest season, the fellows head out to the fields with these nifty little cutters, that, as best as I can tell, are made from: a four inch chunk of machete blade, a piece of bicycle tire rubber, and a stick. Resourceful. They grab each stalk about 10 inches below the rice grains and pull it against the machete blade, like so:

They keep doing this until they've got more strands than they can hold in their non-cutting hand. At which point they take a quick break to bundle the rice up, like so:

After five hours or so of cutting, they pack up and head back home. Since the rice fields are usually a couple of miles away, this means a trek over hill and dale with lots of heavy rice on your back:

Okay! So, to recap, we've got the rice from the fields back home. Time to eat, right? Wrong.

At this point, the rice grains are still attached to the stalk, so the people go through and strip each stalk by hand, which leaves you with a big pile of rice grains.

"Mmmmmm...rice time!"

Okay, seriously, take a pill. Alright? I will let you when we're at Rice Station, okay? Here's the thing: each grain still has a hard, inedible shell on it, which we've got to get off. But how?

Well, you've got two options:

1.) Take a giant piece of heavy wood and beat the grains over and over, thereby cracking the shell and freeing the delicious white rice, like so:

But, since the pieces of that shell you've removed are all mixed in with the rice, you've got to sort the edible grains out. Which you do by putting the rice and shell mixture into a shallow wooden tray, and sifting out the shell pieces, like so:

This method has several drawbacks, namely that it is extremely time consuming, and that in the process of cracking the shell, much of the edible rice grains are pulverized.

So... it's generally better to go with:

2.) Which entails dumping the grains into a machine which strips the shell off without destroying the grain:

A lot easier. The problem here is that, a.) a good proportion of the people live far from the stripping machine, so it's easier to do it by hand than make a three-hour hike over rough terrain with 100 pounds of rice on your back, and b.) it costs $.60 a bucket to use the machine... and if you don't have $.60 sitting around, Option 1 is what you're stuck with.

So. That part's kind of rough.

But, luckily I've got some good news: Chuggachuggachuggachugga, Toot toot! We've arrived at delicious Rice Station! Eat up, panafriends!: