I and fish in the sea for the catching, and bamboo and palms for building houses and boats and nets, so the rice crop is not of such tragic importance as it is in parts of japan, China and India. In the Philippines the growing of rice is not made so much of a task. Few families grow more than is needed for their own use. Every family has a humpy, horny, pig-skinned water buffalo, to drag the plow and pull the cart. Lazy brown children sprawl on the flowery banks around the fields and watch the clumsy cow struggle in the mud. Each cow has a friendly crow or crane on her back to catch the flies that annoy her, so she doesn’t trouble to switch her tail. Brown women in big straw hats, red calico skirts and white cotton jackets put in the plants, weed them and cut the grain with sickles. The buffaloes tread out the grain. And it is a daily "chore" for the children to pound hulls from rice in wooden troughs, and toss the grains in baskets to let the chaff blow away.
In the southern part of the United States rice is grown, too. From Carolina to Texas along warm gulf shores are many stretches of rice fields. But how differently they are worked. The fields are large, and they are owned by white men. They are cultivated by negro laborers who are paid good wages; and oxen, mules and fine machinery are used. The seeds are sown in deep, water-filled trenches a foot and a half apart. The entire field is flooded after planting. Everything is done with machinery and animals—plowing, reaping, threshing, hauling, milling and shipping to the nearest seaport.
It is this Carolina rice that you eat—the long, pearly white grains that make such good puddings, or that is served for a breakfast cereal with sugar and milk, or in the place of potatoes with stewed chicken. Really, as a food, rice is more like potatoes than wheat. It is three-fourths starch. In the brown skin, that is polished away for us, is a small amount of gluten, not one-third as much as there is in wheat. Fortunately, the poor people who live on rice cannot throw away this good brown skin. They have no milk or meat gravy to add to it. In the warmer islands sugar cane is grown, and brown sugar is cheap. But in China and japan the poorest people feel very lucky if I they have a little weak tea to drink, and some dry salt fish to cook with their rice.
We have several names for wheat—wheat when it is in the field and in the threshed grain, flour when it is ground, and bread when it is baked, Many rice-eating people have five names for their chief food—one in the field, one when cut, one when threshed, one when
