Rice
Rice is a kind of grain, or grass, like wheat, millet, or barley, which provides carbohydrates to people who eat its seeds. It grows wild in south-east Asia. People probably first began to farm rice in Thailand, about 4000 BC. From there, people learned how to grow rice in southern China (north of Thailand) and in India (west of Thailand). Certainly people were growing rice in India in the Harappan period (about 2500 BC) and in China in the late Stone Age (about 3000 BC). Rice may have been brought to West Asia and Greece about 300 BC by the armies of Alexander the Great. By the time of the Roman Empire, people were growing some rice around the Mediterranean Sea, in southern Europe and North Africa including Egypt (but not as much as in China or India). By 800 AD, thanks to trade with India and Indonesia, people in East Africa were also growing rice.
It was probably Chinese farmers who first invented the rice paddy. This is a system of growing rice in artificial (man-made) ponds, which saves water and also helps to kill weeds.
After the Civil War, in the late 1800's, people also began to grow rice across the rest of the South, especially in Louisiana and Mississippi, and parts of Texas and California. But most people in Europe and North and South America continued to eat more bread and noodles than rice, and it was people in southern Asia and southern Africa who ate most of the rice.
People usually cook rice by boiling or steaming it to make it soft. You can eat it plain, or with a sauce of vegetables or meat or fish, or sweetened and baked into rice pudding. Or you can crush rice into a powder and use it to make rice noodles. Rice is a good source of carbohydrates (energy).
For more information about rice, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Rice, by Roz Denny (1998). For kids. Beautifully illustrated.
Rice: Origin, History, Technology, and Production, edited by C. Wayne Smith and Robert H. Dilday (2002). For specialists, by specialists.
Wheat
Millet
Barley
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