Rice

RICE, a well-known cereal, botanical name Oryza sativa. Ac cording to Roxburgh, the Indian botanist, the cultivated rice with all its numerous varieties has originated from a wild plant, called in India Newaree or Nivara, which is indigenous on the borders of lakes in the Circars and elswhere in India, and is also native in tropical Australia. The rice plant is an annual grass with long linear glabrous leaves, each provided with a long sharply pointed ligule. The spikelets are borne on a compound or branched spike, erect at first but afterwards bent downwards. Each spikelet con tains a solitary flower with two outer small barren glumes, above which is a large, tough, compressed, often awned, flowering glume, which partly encloses the somewhat similar pale. Within these are six stamens, a hairy ovary surmounted by two feathery styles which ripens into the fruit (grain), and which is invested by the husk formed by the persistent glume and pale. The cultivated varieties are extremely numerous, some kinds being adapted for marshy land, others for growth on the hillsides. Carleton gives the following provisional arrangement of wild and cultivated rices:—(I) Oryza granulata (wild rice), (2) Oryza officimlis (wild rice), (3) Oryza sativa (cultivated rice), (a) utilissima, (i.) com munes (large kernelled rice), (ii.) minuta (small kernelled rice), (b) glutinosa (glutinous rice).

See G. Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1908) ; C. B. Carleton, The Small Grains (1916) ; W. W. Robbins, The Botany of Crop Plants (1924). (V. H. B.) World Trade in Rice.—The rice plant is grown in many lands, but most successfully in hot countries with plenty of water obtainable. By far the greater part of the enormous crop is grown in the plains, with the roots standing in water; there is, however, so-called hill rice, which is sown broadcast on ordinary arable land Figures from the International Institute of Agriculture.

The exports of rice in 1936, including flour, meal, and broken rice, were 7 ,519,000,000lbs. Of this 3,023,000,0oolbs. were supplied by British India ; 3,735,000,000lbs. by Indo-China; 313,000,00o lbs. by Italy; 3o3,000,000lbs. by Egypt; I I8,000,000lbs. by Bra zil and 22,000,000lbs. by the United States. China in 1936 im

ported 580,000,000lbs. ; British Malaya, 1,919,000,000lbs.; Ceylon, I , I 9o,000,000lbs. ; France, 1,825,000,000lbs., the Netherlands, 324 ,000,000lbs. ; Germany, 381,000,000lbs.; the United Kingdom, 249,000.000lbs.; Manchuria, 236,000,000lbs.

Preparation of Rice.

All parts of the rice plant are useful; even the husk is valuable as fuel for the mills. Rice is good food, but it cannot be said to be very popular with Western people and there is no record of any civilized community discarding other cereals and making rice its main food. A diet limited to polished rice renders Eastern people very liable to a disease known as beri-beri. But this disease can be avoided by mixing some pulse with the ration and, strange to say, parboiled rice is innoxious. The rice is parboiled before the skin is removed, then it is dried in the sun. It appears that the process fixes the vitamin of the cuticle in the rice berry.

Rice milling is almost a lost industry in Great Britain, only three mills now being at work. Continental and Eastern millers have captured the trade, by reason of their lower working costs. Special machines are used for husking, for milling or whitening (removing the cuticle by attrition), grading, polishing and facing. Such terms as husking, whitening and grading are almost self-explanatory, but it may be useful to mention that grading is necessary to remove the rough broken rice, which is then further graded as to size and finally put on the market as "broken rice," of which there are several classes. Facing and glazing give the rice an attractive appearance and have no other value, except that the facing may protect the surface and save the rice from deterioration. Oiled rice is obtained by running the white rice through a special mixing machine with the bran containing the oily germ. The rice bran, which contains small broken grains, is used as cattle food and is in much request for the manufacture of special feeding cakes. The broken rice is used for brewing and distilling, for the manu facture of starch and to a small extent for the manufacture of rice flour. (G. J. S. B., X.) RICE BIRD: see BOBOLINK.