Ultra Rice

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a friend who is looking for a job. She found a job advertisement for a position at an international NGO in Beijing looking for an Ultra Rice project assistant. The position required applicants to be fluent in Chinese and understand rice technology. So she sent it to me. At first, I did not really pay much attention to it because I knew I did not have time to be applying to jobs. But then I looked at it more closely and googled 'Ultra Rice,' the name of the rice that the job would center around.

Turns out Ultra Rice is not rice at all, but a manufactured, vitamin-enhanced "food product designed with the flexibility to address specific nutritional deficiencies in populations where rice is a staple food." It is made from rice flour with extra micronutrients added and then molded into rice-shaped grains. In an email to me, they claim to potentially "make a positive influence on health status of common, especially vulnerable people while not to change their cooking and life styles." The Ultra Rice project is funded primarily through the Gates Foundation.

So the job is looking for someone who is familiar with rice technology who can work on introducing the grains to China. Instead of applying for the job, I emailed them and asked if I could interview them for my dissertation research. I feel this weird tug of being fascinated by the project from an academic view and being shocked by it from an activist point of view.

My shock stems from the collaborationbetween an international group focused on being a catalyst for global health, the Chinese government, and rice technology advocates in deciding that a country with thousands of years of rice cultivation under their belt could use some fake rice to increase their livelihoods. I could go on about the politics of food aid, but I will stop here. All I will say is that after spending the last few months in markets and supermarkets asking consumers about their rice-buying preferences, the basic thing I can say is that Chinese people know their rice. After years of eating low quality hybrid rice, people want high quality rice. They consider high quality rice to be "natural." I know Harbin and Beijing consumers are probably not the intended target audience for this rice, but I would be surprised to hear that anyone that knows what real rice is would want to eat fake rice. But at this point its not my job to step in and tell them what I think. Its is my job, however, to find out where and how they are going to try to market this 'rice.' And that is fascinating.