Where did they come from and where did they go?
For many American children of the ’80s and ’90s, rice cakes — stacked in a column and kept in long plastic bags — were an omnipresent feature of home kitchens, preschools, and afterschool programs. I can’t remember the first time I held one, but I also can’t remember a time before I did. Palm-sized disks, they’re the same weight as styrofoam with a scant sprinkle of flavor crystals, salt or maybe cinnamon, dusting the top and coating the crevices between each grain of puffy rice.
There was, however, that pleasant, satisfying crunch, like taking a chunk out of a perfectly crisp apple, and that miniscule bit of toasted, sometimes sweet, sometimes salty, flavor mixed in with a slurry of desiccated rice matter. It was interesting enough to take down the whole cake, and maybe even dip into the tube bag for another, and another. After all, I was a hungry kid, and one of those suckers wasn’t going to satisfy my bottomless pit of an adolescent stomach.
It’s that feeling of being just on the border of satisfaction that made rice cakes such a staple in American households like mine during the late ’80s and ’90s. During that period of time, many kids like me became well acquainted with diet fads and foods, to the extent that we sometimes didn’t even realize we were snacking on them. All the adults around me seemed to be perpetually trying to lose a few pounds by going on the Atkins Diet or re-enrolling in Weight Watchers.
Plenty of cultures have their own version of rice cakes, but we can partially thank a botanist named Alexander Pierce Anderson for laying the groundwork for the American rice cake as we know it. Anderson was working at the New York Botanical Garden in 1901 studying the water content of nuclei in starch crystals when, as the story goes, he “discovered” steam-puffed rice.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
India parliament session may be cut short as COVID-19 cases among lawmakers rise, sources sayIndia's parliament session that began this week is likely to be cut short after 30 lawmakers were found infected with the coronavirus, two senior parliament officials said, as the number of cases in the country rose to 5.3 million.
Read more »
Costs Of Climate Change Continue To Rise As Storms Become More Destructive : Consider This from NPRThere have been so many tropical storms this year that the National Hurricane Center has already made it through the alphabet to name the storms. The last storm name started with 'W' (there are no X, Y or Z names). Now, storms will be named using the Greek alphabet. In the last five years, the United States has lost $500 billion because of climate driven weather disasters, including storms and fires. That estimate by the federal government doesn't even include the storms that have hit the Southern coasts in 2020.Hurricanes and wildfires are getting more destructive. And with a world that's getting hotter, NPR's Rebecca Hersher and Nathan Rott report that the costs of these disasters will continue to go up. The change to energy sources with smaller carbon footprints comes with its own risks, too. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf went to Japan to visit the Fukushima region — the site of a nuclear disaster in 2011. Now, people there are working to make the region completely powered by renewables by 2040.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at considerthisnpr.orgYou can see more of Kat Lonsdorf's reporting from Fukushima here.
Read more »
Sault’s ‘Untitled (Rise)’ Seduces Listeners With Sumptuous R&B, Then Startles With Powerful Messaging: Album ReviewSomehow, the mysterious British R&B/electronic-ish combo Sault has managed to drop four richly diverse, socially confrontational albums, all of them good and two of them absolutely great, in ju…
Read more »
North Dakota sets COVID case, hospitalization records as infections continue to riseNew COVID-19 infections have been on the rise in North Dakota since mid-July, according to the state health department.
Read more »