Writing 1133
Naitong Li
May, 8, 2012
Rice
Chinese
food can be divided into different cuisines; each one has its special dishes.
People lived in different places use different materials and ways to make food.
Besides, changing is obviously over time. But rice is one element of Chinese
food that is very constant; it is the basic of every meal. Rice, the center of the food culture of the
Asia, has a long history, especially in China. Archaeologists have confirmed that
China started planting rice at least 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. At that time,
residents near the lower reaches of Yangtze River had already mastered the
technology of rice cultivation. It was an important part of the early farming
culture in China. But the technologies of rice planting didn’t change a lot
until to the modern time. 
For
a long time, the rice planting mainly depended human. It was a labor intensive
job and it was a very hard work. The hardest step of rice planting was
transplanting rice seeding. People should
stand in the water in the field whole day to do the work. The first period of
rice planting is in March, when the water is still very cold. Meanwhile, people
should stoop to do the job. Usually after a whole day’s work, the farmer can’
hold to stand. Besides, the farmer is constrained hardly by time, so people
must do the work in an exact period time of one year, which generates that
farmer must finished the work in a really short time, nobody can pay more time
of it. I still remembered my father’s words. He told me that, the reason why he
was very hard to studying was that he didn’t want to transplant rice seeding
any more. He said it was very toilsome. Just because of that, he decided to go
to university so that he would not need to leave in the countryside to do this
job.
This
hard situation lasted until the Chinese economic reform. During the past twenty
years, with the quick development of agriculture technology, there are a lot of
changings of rice planting.
First of all, the mechanization of
the rice planting liberates the farmers form heavy farm work. Plowing,
transplanting, weeding, and fertilizing all can be done by machines. The work
efficiency increased hundred times and the equality of the machines’ work raised
rapidly.
At the same time, the design of
super hybrid rice, a genetically modified food, increases the output enormous.
Given China is a country has the biggest population in the world, food problem
is more serious there than other countries. Now, Chinese people use about one
twentieth land to supply one fifth population in the world. If there is no
super hybrid rice, starvation problem must as grave as it in the Africa, which
must causes a lot of issues to the whole world. When referred the hybrid rice,
we must mention a scientist, Longping, Yuan, who is the father of hybrid rice.
He developed one kind of rice can grow three times a year, which increased
about one third of the output, break the idea that rice can at most grow twice
a year. In September, 2011, Yuan declared that in Guizhou, “the yield of the experimental
field has already got to 936 kg per-mu, and there was a hope to get more than
1000kg per-mu.”(Xinhuan news)
Another
changing of the rice planting is about the chemical fertilization using.
“China is currently the
world leader in chemical fertilizer production, consumption, and imports. With food security firmly in mind, the Chinese government has been
promoting the use of chemical fertilizers since the early 1960s,
and China is currently ranked 4th globally in chemical fertilizer use intensity
(Zhang et al. in prep).” (Josephine Williams).
Though these changings increase the
effective of the rice planting in different aspects, they also bring some transition
for Chinese people’s preference of rice.
Initially, people began to suspect that weather the chemical fertilizer is
harmful to human’s healthy. After all, accelerating the ripening is a process that
against the nature. Many people began to worry about that whether the chemical fertilizer
contains hormones, just like what we feed to the animals and make they become
dangerous for us to eat. Then the anxious about the super rice arise, as a genetically
modified food, if they are harmless are still not be detected by the authority.
Besides, the taste of it was not as good as simple rice. So, people now have a
new tendency of rice. More and more people eat organic rice or rice produced by
other countries, like Thailand to instead of the former rice. Others begin to eat coarse cereals. I also can’t escape from the trend. When I go
to supermarket, I always try to pick up organic rice to buy. I think from the
rice planting changes we can see the all kinds food changings in the modern
world. We have a big mount of new technologies now. So our food becomes more industrial
and commercial. No matter for good or bad reasons, they deviate from their
original appearance farther and farther. So people begin to seek for the nature
things. But because of the high population today and the high market demand,
the situation can hardly change in short time. So the label of organic becomes
the life-saving straw for us. We buy them even they are nearly as twice as
expensive than the normal food.
I
believe that this trend will last all alone until we can make sure that our new
technologies can just make our food grow faster and bigger, but not nutrition
less and taste worse.
Works cited
Zhou, Furong, ed. "Yuan Long Ping: The
New Goles of Super Rice Can Achieve in the Future."
22
Sept. 2011. Web. 08 May 012. <http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/20119/22/c_122075201.htm>.
Williams, Josephine.
"Understanding the Overuse of Chemical Fertilizer in China." 1-2.
Web. 8 May
2012.
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