Holiday on rice

I ought to send you a sack of rice," said Sylvia Ventura, my now-retired Shakes-peare professor, when we met on campus last week. She’d read my columns about my recent travels around Europe, mostly in search of Chinese food – and rice.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t survive for too long – three days, four days? – without rice in my belly, which now looks like half a sack of the white stuff got stuck there somewhere, held in reserve against absolute famine and riceless deserts like… well, come to think of it, I can’t imagine any place on earth without rice, thanks largely to the fact that I can’t imagine any place on earth without Chinese, Indians, or Filipinos.

I get dizzy and cranky without rice. Rice ballasts not just the belly but the brain; I’m convinced that it’s my cargo of carbohydrates that keeps me in good cheer, thinking of pleasant prospects like peace and goodwill to men instead of the exquisite skewering that some of them deserve.

I suppose this fixation comes from the time when all we had, literally, was rice; one of my favorite poor-boy stories, which Demi has coming out of her ears, has to do with the time when we kids had to make do with rice and brown sugar, and no one complained. As long as there was rice on the table, then the world was a tolerable place.

According to Agriculture Secretary Cito Lorenzo, we Pinoys consume about 11 million metric tons of rice a year (but produce only 9.5 million MT of it – thus the need to import rice from places like Thailand). Someone help me do the math here, but according to my English-major calculations, that comes out, divided by 80 million rice-ravenous Pinoys, to almost 140 kilos per person per year, or about 375 grams of raw rice per person per day. That sounds about just right for me, but like all averages, it’s bound to be way wrong for somebody else, if not in fact for most Filipinos, allowing for industrial uses (all that kakanin) and, more prosaically, the grinding mass poverty that keeps rice off many a Pinoy table. I think there’s nothing crueler than lack of access to one’s staple food.

What is it about rice that we like so much, anyhow? It has to be the way rice fills your maw and tummy without, well, tasting much like anything except whatever it’s going down with. Of course rice has its own flavors and textures, and rice connoisseurs can wax ecstatic over the relative sweetness, fluffiness, or nuttiness of any of the 40,000 varieties of rice around the world (yes, Virginia, there is a www.ricegourmet.com, and that’s where I got that factoid). Beyond the mouth is the even longer tongue of memory and its romances, the associations we make with red rice or champurado or lugaw, steaming hot on a cold rainy morning with tuyo or tocino and a cup of brewed Batangas coffee on the side – somebody pinch me awake!

Rice is one of those things by which our preferences supposedly define us; but then I like all kinds of rice, the plainer the better, from basmati to jasmine to wild or mountain rice to Japanese short-grain kokuho. I prefer my rice pearly, fluffy, and a little sticky – not my parents’ dry and stony buhaghag, if I can avoid it, but I’ll take even that on my fifth riceless day.

I fancy myself as being sensitive enough to these differences that I can enjoy rice and nothing but, except maybe a chunk of tuna, but it’s the obrero, not the gourmet, in me that likes loads of rice with just a dash of viand. (You know how peons eat: A sliver of fish or meat to go with a bucket of rice.) One of my favorite lunch places in UP, when I’m not lounging at Chocolate Kiss or Chateau Verde with my food-fussier friends, is a hole-in-the-wall in the Dilimall called Papercup, where the daily specials include "Sizzling Liempo w/ Rice, P45, Second Cup of Rice Free!"

It’s the ultimate extender, short of plain air. There’s an old Dolphy movie where the family gathers around the dinner table with clumps of rice on their plates and one dried fish hanging on a string in the middle of everything; Dolphy takes a deep sniff of the fish – their only ulam – then shoves a handful of rice down his gullet. (This reminds me of another hoary joke, the one that asks "Why are the nostrils of – here supply any famously parsimonious ethnic group – very large?" Find the answer at the end of this column.)

I’ll confess to being one of those bumpkins who go to a party and who head straight for the lechon table, knowing how fast the crackling skin on that porker is going to vanish. Ah, yes, finger-lickin’-good lechon – and rice. Sugpo, morcon, alimango – and rice. Pancit – and rice. Spaghetti – and rice. Ramen – and rice. Campbell’s chicken noodle soup – and rice. I know that some of you draw the line at pancit, but you’ve got to realize that pancit for us was always ulam (defined, logically, as anything other than rice). There’s something about two kinds of carbohydrates competing for your palate’s attention, almost like having two… never mind.

The folks at home are convinced that all this carbo-loading will be the literal death of me – I haven’t even told you yet about my passion for corn, which will take a whole other column to do justice to – but I think they’re exaggerating. (And just in case you were wondering, I don’t think I’m going to die of hypertension, either; I’m one of those people with a sickeningly normal BP; so it’s got to be something worse, far worse, which I’m not about to guess at.) I tell them that I’ve never met anyone yet who died from eating too much rice, or French fries, or chippies (there’s something wrong with that statement: No, I don’t particularly wish to meet anyone dead, for whatever reason).

I suppose I could live as a Buddhist monk with a rice bowl in hand – but naaah, Buddhist monks aren’t supposed to eat anything after lunch, and I can just hear my stomach reciting its own mantra, as soon and as sure as the sun sets: "Rice… rice!"

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The household was thrown into a panic last Christmas Day when I realized, at about three in the afternoon just as everyone was peaceably digesting his or her Christmas lunch while watching someone chew on species of dubious digestibility in Fear Factor, that Chippy was gone. I hadn’t heard him mewing all day, and when I looked for him in the usual corners to give him a Christmas Day neck rub, he was nowhere to be seen.

It was enough for me to blow the whistle, sound the general alarm, and command an army of nephews and nieces to set Christmas aside and devote themselves to the singular task of locating a 12-pound, orange ball of fur. I also interrogated the tykes and determined that no one had seen Chippy since before lunch; he had been gone for hours, feasting for all I knew on scraps from the garbage heap – or worse, being feasted on by the homeboys to go with their Christmas gin (and rice?).

All efforts proved unavailing – he was nowhere in the bathrooms, where he likes to take a sip of water straight from the pail, nor under my cousin Lando’s bed, where he likes to hide to avoid the holiday crowd. Distraught, I took the car and began circling the neighborhood, keeping an eye peeled for a marmalade blur. It then occurred to me that the one place we hadn’t looked was my daughter Demi’s room, which she had locked before leaving for Christmas-Day duty at her hotel job. I whipped out my cell phone and called Demi at work; she promised to drive home right away.

Finding no Chippy on the street, I went home, ran up to Demi’s room, and got on all fours to stick my ear to the locked door, listening for signs of life. Nada. On an inspiration, I got a handful of dry Friskies biscuits (the only thing he eats – aside from corn on the cob, but that’s for another column) and nudged a few under the door to entice him out. No dice. I was beginning to despair, writing feline elegies and obits in my head, when Demi arrived with the key. A montage of dire possibilities rushed through my mind: Finding Chippy on the floor with four paws in the air, having been electrocuted or strangled by the web of wires in this geek’s haven; or finding no cat whatsoever, which would have sent me printing a hundred copies of his hairy mug on a "Wanted" poster and plastering the neighborhood with them, offering extravagant rewards.

The door lock clicked open and we rushed in. Silence. I was about to gnash my teeth and tear my hair, when something bright and furry slid out from under Demi’s bed and through my legs, making a beeline for the Friskies trough downstairs.

I gave Chippy his Christmas Day neck rub that day – and the day before, and the day after; but that particular afternoon, I must confess, there was an instant or two when, running my fingers through his collar, I didn’t know whether to embrace or to strangle that pussycat.

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(And the answer is: "Because the air is free.")

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.