Rice Bugs - Organic & Sustainable. Is "Vegan Rice" Just an Idea to Pacify Us?

She was outraged and vented earlier this week on social media. The organic rice at a local Thai vegan restaurant was served to her, complete with local rice bugs. Lets just say her post got a LOT of comment and traction. :) No need for television in Chiang Mai - just enjoy the visitor reactions to real Thai local culture on social media. :)

Myself and several other long-standing Chiang Mai residents basically offered the same practical advice: pick them out, relax, it's natural and not dirty, enjoy the organic rice. Cos organic rice here, 100% of the time, will have some bugs in it, especially if purchased in bulk or from a market or "zero-waste" no-packaging vendor. There is a good reason organic rice is mostly sold in small, vacuum packed plastic packs - it stops the bug eggs hatching in a zero oxygen environment. Even when you buy the really expensive 'quality' rice in 1kg vacuum packs at the western style supermarket, about a week or two after opening, the bugs appear.

I pointed out to the enraged, affronted and aggrieved venting traveler that bug-free rice here is not organic. But that no bugs doesn't mean vegan. Cos the pesticides sprayed to keep the rice "bug free" most assuredly kill frogs, birds, snakes and the myriad of other little rice-field critters. Every. Single. Day.

The Thai solution that we all use and learn pretty quickly here is to wash the rice. You can't rinse the rice the way the western youtube videos suggest with a strainer, cos the bugs get trapped. And so we put the dry rice in a big bowl, fill it with a lot of water and swill it around, at which point the bugs float up and can be rinsed away. You do this several times until no more bugs float up, and then you proceed with your normal cooking process. It's as normal as breathing in every real Thai kitchen.

Somehow this week the question of ethics, organic transparency, western white-washing, sustainability and the vegan dilemma stayed in my brain. I should probably thank Peter Singer, the well known PETA animal rights ethicist and philosopher who I took some classes with at university way-back-when. He helped teach me to THINK.

There are simply only three options.

1. The chemically-sprayed and treated rice. Birds, lizards, snakes, fish, frogs, tadpoles and insects die in their thousands in an average rice field, but we don't SEE it directly, so we can pretend it didn't happen and it can be called "vegan". Only it really isn't.
2. The organic rice is washed, Asian style, to float out the bugs. Let's make no mistake - this is not a catch and release program. The bugs go down the sink and drown. NOT vegan.
3. Or the organic rice ISN'T washed Asian style (as per the incident described), the bugs simply get cooked and we have a tourist meltdown. Either cos she accidentally ate a few or cos they were cooked in the process of preparing her meal. Either way, the rice isn't vegan.

What troubled me most about this week is the distraction of "vegan" away from the far more important agenda of organic & sustainable. We DO have to engage with the natural world in order to live sustainably and to stop destroying Mother Earth and ourselves, and in Asia that means dealing with the rice bug dilemma. But we then also have to be adult enough to accept, own and stop pretending that rice can ever be vegan.

Why does the organic rice in other countries not get rice bugs? Fumigation and irradiation. Neither of them natural or sustainable and neither are vegan either, since they are both just more expensive ways to kill the critters in the rice.

My solution? We buy exceptional quality organic rice - black, red or brown - from the local rice vendor. One KG at a time. We use it within days. We wash the rice and accept the cycle of nature which dictates that some things must die in order for us to have life. And we don't discriminate between killing a carrot or killing the rice bugs.

Looking forward to a world where there is definitely LESS vegan hysteria on social media (as amusing as it was) and more solid debate, calm reason, philosophical understanding and consciousness about the way we farm, eat and tell the farmer's story.

Loving my Thai rice. Respectfully give thanks each and every time I wash the rice.