One of the many beautiful things about visiting people is eating food you do not normally eat. While at @Brisby's, I watched her make these little rice cakes for her daughter's lunch. I learned how to make them late at night while giggling in Brisby's kitchen and keeping the rest of the house from sleeping.

After getting home, I tried to order some special rice. Walmart told me it would be at my house in two weeks. I thought that was a stupid amount of time to wait for rice, but shrugs I never make fancy rice, so what do I know?

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What I do know about rice is as a child, it was covered with disgusting things and put on plates in front of me for dinner. While looking at the glob of white worms (bean sprouts) and mushrooms in a slimy sauce from a can, I would die a little inside, knowing it would be a long night sitting at the table trying to pick out the white rice from the sludge poured over.

The unique Chinese tin can came with two cans taped together. I blocked out why this was needed because neither of those cans had anything good in it. I also know it wasn't Japanese food because of Pearl Harbor. Cuban food was not big in the United States at this time because of the Cold War.

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Thinking back on why I never ate a lot of rice as a kid made me realize how political food was. The grocery stores did not have an Asian or Mexican section, for that matter, either. German food wasn't counted as foreign food because the town was built and settled chiefly by Germans.

However, many people changed their German last names during WWII and quickly lost their German accents.

As a small child, I still remember sitting around my Great-Grandmother's house surrounded by her sisters and sister-in-law and hearing their German accents sneaking out when they spoke. You could always tell when they were the most comfortable and relaxed. I miss those times.

All this thinking about rice made me realize I grew up eating American food, not just any American food. If you had to put it in a category, it would be Midwest American food. Southern food uses ingredients like okra and crayfish. Texas and California had more fruits in their diets because of the year's warmer weather. Beans in any shape or form is an American Southern thing to eat.

Ham hocks with blackeyed peas, which I am not sure are peas because they look like dried beans, is a great dish that will make your mouth water while you wait for them to be done cooking. As far as I know, there is no rice in there either.

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Two world wars and a Cold War, followed by a few non-wars and other wars in deserts, did not bring rice into my diet. There were no ramen noodles. There were pot pies. Pot pies were 5 for 1.00 USD, and then inflation came and brought the price up to 4 for 1.00 USD.

The more I thought about those white worms I hated as a child when they showed up on my dinner plate, the more I realized how war dictated what we ate and had to buy in a grocery store. How even food was political back in the days before the internet.

You didn't talk about Japan because of the war. China, Russia, and Cuba were off limits, too, because they were just going to bomb us in our sleep or while we were at school. Either one was correct at the time. Canada had good fish, but I didn't come from a fishing family, so we grew up eating beer-battered cod on Fridays during Lent.
Everyone knew England and Poland had bland, horrible food, so those never even made it into the conversation.

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This is a 2024 photo of the white worms. They didn't look like this in 1970!

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Yet, knowing what I do now, I could have eaten anything from any of those countries and been happier than a plate of white worms trying to hide in a gravy-like sauce.

I would sit still and try to eat as much plain white dry rice as possible. The rest of my plate had the goop spread as thin as possible, so it looked like I had eaten more than I had.

Next, you waited for the right moment—the perfect moment to ask if you could be excused from the table. You wanted your parents distracted when asking, and you didn't want them to look too closely at your plate—any idiot would know you hadn't eaten enough.

If you didn't pick the perfect time to ask, you had to live through the Children in Africa starving stories because you admitted you could not eat another bite and were full. STUFFED. REALLY! If you were lucky, you got a sigh and were let free after you wondered how, even if kids were starving in Africa, they would not want to eat white worms either! So, really, I was doing them a favor by not sending them my leftovers.

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You're Welcome!

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Today, when I make my new fancy rice, the white worms and mushrooms are still at the grocery store for those who like to eat that kind of thing, and no one in Africa gets harmed.

This was my rice story.

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