How It's Made: Rice

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[McShaggswell]

He shakes the rice, and scrutinizes. This lowers the rice's self esteem before the next step.

[shiddy.]

it's 5am and suddenly I'm learning rice technology

truly, this is an amazing time to be alive

[daffers]

Rice is one of the cheapest foodstuffs in the grocery store, and I never thought about how much it goes through to get it the way we do in those bags. What an interesting little video! I love _How It's Made_ so much!

[webluke]

Got to love how they gloss over the significant steps of planting, growing, and harvesting the rice.

[nameismetatoo]

Can we all appreciate the fact that modern farming technology is so good that entire truckloads of rice can be reasonably expected to be bug-free? Even with standards that high, it is still sold at a profit...mindblowing

[TChoppyable]

This reminded me of how much hard works my parents, grandparents and generations before me making rice from start to finish manually their whole life. I remember those day my mom had to make a small mud patch in the garden to germinate the rice. My father and the water Buffalo did the ploughing to prepare the field. Once they’re big enough, she brought them to the field and plant them by hands.
Every couple days, she would bring me to those field and we together pulled up the water with this tool ( note sure what it called anymore, it’s like a cone shape bucket with strings on both side, 2 people each hold 2 strings attached to top and bottom of the cone and scope up the water from tiny runnel to water the rice paddy. On dry season, sometimes we had to do it from one runnel to the next to gather enough water for small paddy).
it took months of manual watering, weeding, etc… for the rice to be ready for harvest. If that’s on hot day, my parent would cut the rice overnight to avoid the extreme heat. There’s no fancy tool, just small sickle and lots of sweats, they tied them in bunches, carried them to the wood trailer. I had seen some farmer carried so much rice that the back of their neck and shoulder swollen up like they got a baseball inside.
Once the trailer is fulled, my father would be the one who pull it while other pushed from behind to bring the rice home, then back to the field and repeat until all rice was transported back. At home, they use this tool looked like wooden nunchucks to wrap each bunch of rice and hit it on a slab of stone until most the rice fall off the plant, any left would be manually pull off by us kids. The rice then would be sun dry for couple days. As kids, our job would be this easy part of watching out for rain and turn the rice by dragging our feet though it every once in a while to make sure the rice got completely dry for storage. Everyday just scooping out the rice, sun dry them, and scoop them back in at the end was enough to build 6 packs lol. If we goofed and not paying attention to the sky, we could loose it all with some sudden rain.
Once dried, my mom would use flat big bamboo tray to screen out stuffs like empty husk, straws, dirt. First she used the biggest circle tray, possibly 4-5ft diameter, this one was tightly weaved, no holes to flip the rice back and forth, the bad one or empty husk usually lighter would gather in one end and she would throw them aside to use as burning material for the kitchen later. Then she transferred the good one to smaller ones with some holes on bottoms to screen out the rocks, dirt or other debris.
All that done, we could finally store the rice. If we need to use it, my mom would have to bring out this huge tool that’s like a giant form of mortar and pestle to de-husk the rice. Rice was put inside a huge stone hole, the adult would use their feet to step on one end of a log which connected to a big pestle . When they stepped on the end, the pestle would raise up and they released the pressure, the pestle would hit the rice and remove the husk. This again would go through screening process to separate the eatable rice, husk and bran. Brand would be used for the animal food, husk for burning material.
Some years when the weather was tough, we could loose all the crop right before harvest. Imagine working with promised pay by the end of the year and all went down the without any warning. Im glad, my parents don’t have to work like that anymore.

[apictureoffunction]

It's amazing that ancient people ever even figured out that rice was edible given how many steps are required to turn it into the final, ready to cook product. Not to mention they probably had even more steps involved given they didn't have machines.

[kamuy_]

“If he finds just one moth or beetle, the entire 5500 pound truckload of rice will be rejected”
Bug: I’ll take your entire stock

[josephjackson]

You’d be surprised how a couple of bugs can make a logistics company reject an entire truck. I work at a Kelloggs warehouse and if we find even one bug on a truck, we have to reject the whole truck, because we don’t know if there are hundreds more hiding in the pallets, boxes, etc.
Just imagine pouring a bowl of cereal to find even one beetle. You’d probably throw the whole box away too. It’s just a larger scale with logistics.

[Someguythatlikespizza]

As a Filipino and back when I was a still a kid, my elders used to say to me not to waste a single grain of rice because a farmer gave out so much effort to de-husk every single grain of rice on my plate.

[TehMafiaTV]

I want this man to narrate my funeral. He's been there for me since I was just a lad; explaining rice creation.

[Kyotosomo]

It's absolutely ludicrous how far technology has come, imagine how many tens of thousands of people it used to take to produce this much rice in a day. Now just a few people overseeing some machines do it, thank the stars we all happened to be born in the era we are now.

[SomeScruffian]

"The grates filters out some of the large stalks and debris"
literally everything passes through

[marcuscarana]

It's amazing how the simplest of things like rice or flour is produced by such a complex and many step process. And the fact we can watch the process for free and see all of this. It just makes one think how great of a time it is to be alive. And with that said, have a nice day today.

[sheilaolfieway]

I like how this show shows that many parts of things that are made are kept for other uses or just recycled.

[nicholasmohr]

We need an episode of How it’s Made that shows how an episode of How it’s Made is made.

[Junio]

if 1 bug is found, 5500 pounds of rice will be rejected….. yeah, right.

[Allyourbase]

My fiancé is Filipina, in her village they have these huge rice fields that I’ve always thought were really beautiful. It’s so cool how it’s grown

[tgnm]

Much respect for farmers back then to make rice without machinery
(Edit) yes including people who still do it until today

[yourpants]

Something tells me one lil bug isnt going to make that company throw away 55, 000 ponds of rice