Golden Rice

[bcholmes]

The guest house served golden rice the other night. I looked at it and asked, "is that golden rice?" It was the right gold colour. P and V were, like, "yeah, sometimes they have this gold-coloured rice."

"But is it, like, golden rice?" It's a fairly recent invention -- a genetically modified rice that produces beta-carotene, which metabolizes to pro-Vitamin A. Beta-carotene (as in "carrot") produces an orange hue, which is what makes the rice gold-coloured. (Beta-carotene is also abundant in sweet potato)

Haiti has clinical levels of Vitimin A deficiency, and earlier in my trip, Sister Mary Alban was telling me about a young boy that had gone blind from Vitimin A deficiency. This is the big down-side of countries where rice is the primary food staple: it lacks Vitamin A, and unless you get meat or sweet potatoes or spinach or something like that, Vitimin A deficiency is a real risk.

Golden rice, unfortunately, is patented, although the scientists who "invented" it (while under grants that required them to transfer the ownership of the results) did a lot of good work negotiating for relatively cheap offerings to be available to the parts of the world that need it the most. Unfortunately, I'm sure that, with food price increases, people probably won't naturally gravitate toward a more expensive rice unless they have a lot of eduction. (But maybe just getting more carrots into people's diets is important).

I still don't know if the rice we had was actual golden rice, but I'm unaware of any other gold-coloured rice.