Brown vs. White

. . . rice, that is. My mother, who is a staunch white-rice person, recently visited us to escape the hotter-than-Angelina-Jolie climate of Fresno summers.

She's a vegetarian, who has primarily eaten South Indian food, lots of vegetables, lentils and rice. In the olden days, my mom ate well. People in her environment needed an abundance of carbohydrates to get through the day. Still, my family in India shovels mounds of rice onto their plates to weather the sizzling Andra climate. Most of them don't have cars and walk everywhere in order to get around. They burn what they eat, and they rarely have health problems.

Then, there's my mom. She lives in the 'burbs and drives her car everywhere, even if all she needs is a carton of milk. The food that she eats is now no longer viable for her environment. Her diet, from our current perspective of carb-consciouness, is too sugar heavy. She is a prototypic white rice addict, and it's hard for her to give up the good feeling that it gives her. I have on many occasions extended an arm and tapped at the vein, indicating the junkie-like hold it has on her.

It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the simple fact that she can't, in her primarily sedentary lifestyle, burn all those carbs off. She is teetering on the edge of adult-onset diabetes. And, she eats the worse type of carb possible: one with a high glycemic index. White rice spikes her blood sugar levels and requires insulin to come to the rescue immmediately. She might as well be eating candy. She's only 50, mind you. That ain't good.

Meanwhile, I've been singing the praises of brown rice for a long time, trying desperately to encourage her to try it. In much the same way that she refuses to believe that seaweed is vegetarian--we're talking about an old dog here--she has firmly stood in the white rice category. Only now, egged on by a recent weight loss and the positive effects it has had on her blood sugar problem, she has opened her mind to other kinds of slower-burning grains.

So, I made a Thai veggie curry and a pot of brown rice. And guess what? She loved it. But she is not the type of person who is so easily converted (no pun intended) to a new type of food. Unlike me, she listens to words of the familiar. She realized that brown rice was something her father used to eat before white rice became popularized in India. She also believed that white rice, or "polished" rice, was something the British initiated in India. My mother claims they processed the rice and then marketed it back to the Indians as a better product. Throughout her childhood, she remembers disdaining the old "brown" rice and singing the praises of white rice, much to her father's dismay.

Anybody familiar with this historical narrative? I'm curious to see what I can learn about this change from brown to white rice. I've looked around a bit on Amazon but haven't been able to find much about this time period in rice's history.