The rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats | Hacker News Reader

The rice of the sea: how a tiny grain could change the way humanity eats

theguardian.com

137 pointspseudolus49 comments

I'm skeptical about this "miracle" grain's commerical viability - at least for human consumption, the barrier to entry is not simply edibility, but palatibility. It was only after trying millet - a grain with a long history of consumption and intriguing agronomic properties - that I realized just how agreeable rice, wheat, quinoa and nixtamalized maize really are. They might seem bland, but the moment you "go against the grain" you realize that palatability is not the rule among grains, but the exception.

Interesting..To me, quinoa tastes like cardboard pebbles, whereas something like foxtail millet tastes delicious in comparison. To each his own I guess. Point being, there may be significant number of people who find this new grain awesome.

I think that's probably why the chef mentioned here almost immediately tried fashioning it into flour and pasta, which I thought was quite clever.

Between boiled oats and rice, I would pick rice 10/10 times but if you fashion oats into a flour and make a bread from it, I find it much more agreeable.

Eh. White rice must be the blandest food in human history.

Try basmati rice. It has a light bit of nutty flavour. You will never eat Uncle Ben again.

Or try Arborio rice and cook a risotto

— and jasmin rice.

i perfer black rice or mix or brown and wild rice

Spend more time eating rice until you understand the taste of it.

Confucius, he say: "Chew your rice slowly."

Rice contains starch, and saliva contains amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starch into glucose. Slow chewing gradually confers a sweetness on a mouthful of rice; so Confucius was right.

The way I see it, it's there to soak up flavours from food that the rice accompanies. I think the texture is quite pleasant as well.

Now if only it were better for your health.

There are so many rice varieties I honestly don't know how you can say this. It's like saying root vegetables are the blandest food or grains are the blandest food in human history.

That's why I said "white rice", and not just "rice".

Bruh white rice is not a type of rice, it has to do with the way it's prepared.

What you're saying is equivalent to saying all peeled fruits are bland. Peeling the fruit has less of a correlation with the taste than the variety of the fruit you're eating.

Try jasmine/basmati rice, they have a lot more flavor (both with and without the bran, aka white or brown).

Article: "its tremendous potential: gluten-free, high in omega-6 and -9 fatty acids, and contains 50% more protein than rice per grain"

https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2019/11/omega-6-overl... "The abundance of omega-6 fatty acids in modern diets, combined with an insufficient amount of omega-3 fats, plays a major role in age-related disorders including cardiovascular disease, obesity, dementia, and metabolic syndrome."

Site is down for maintenance, so:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115182707/https://www.lifee...

Nutritional facts are misrepresented by the Guardian in this article and in the primary source of the research: https://www.cerealmarino.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/APON...

50% more protein “per grain” is a comparison I’ve heard here first. The intro of the paper claims “13% protein” but its comparison table states “10.1% protein”. In comparison, regular wheat has around 12.6% protein, while Einkorn wheat contains 19.3% protein. [1]

“In addition to essential fatty acids, Omegas 6 and 9, and amino acids not found in other common grains and minerals, it also has significant levels of glucose, making it a superfood with exceptional qualities for a healthy diet.”

* First, we need much more omega-3 and drastically less omega-6, while we get plenty of omega-9, which is not essential as our bodies can synthesize omega-9. [2] [3]

* Glucose and other sugars are one of the handful things that there’s a consensus it’s bad for our health.

* All plant foods contain all 20 amino-acids, essential and non-essential. [4] Naturally, rice does not lack an amino-acid in their comparison table.

[1] research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32246458

[1] summary: https://youtu.be/6fciEfyYyK4

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid

[3] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/omega-3-6-9-overview

[4] https://dci.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Food-and... (page 25)

***

OTOH, this could be an environmental friendly grain if cultivated in open seas on floating platforms instead of disrupting highly vulnerable shallow waters.

> * Glucose and other sugars are one of the handful things that there’s a consensus it’s bad for our health.

Is that really the case? There is a difference between something being inherently unhealthy vs excessive in our current diet. We like sugars because our bodies need readily accessible energy. The issue is that today it is to easy and cheap to produce and consume and we don't control ourselves.

The body makes its own sugar from protein needed. The hypothalamus is very sensitive to insulin. The when looking for it, you'll prolly find other examples

Running in gluconeogenesis permenantly isn’t biochemically ideal (at least for early growth)

> All plant foods contain all 20 amino-acids, essential and non-essential

Isn’t this well known? It’s the quantities that are vastly different. On the next couple slides it shows that you need 10 cups of broccoli to get 40g of protein, or 2 cups of edamame beans

> 50% more protein “per grain”

That's "50% more protein than rice per grain," though. Presumably they're talking about white rice, which is one of the lower protein grains. 50% more than that would put it just below oat bran, but still well below e.g. spelt, quinoa, sorghum, amaranth, and others.

> The intro of the paper claims “13% protein”

One study found 13% dry weight protein on average in eelgrass seeds, so this is substantiated: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Sugar is bad, but the true unhealthy sugar is fructose or polysaccharide that degrade into fructose in your stomach, basically. Glucose is only bad in high quantity.

> All plant foods contain all 20 amino-acids, essential and non-essential

Yes but there's a catch, and you can see it in p 24 of the reference you linked.

Legumes are low on Methionine. Grains are low on Lysine. Ideally a consumption of both is needed to balance things out. (Hence why these "protein $thing" stuff on the supermarket is 100% marketing gimmick since they use the cheapest sources available - soy usually)

(Also of course this is the overall proportion, it says nothing about protein/gram. Yes, broccoli is high protein, but how much broccoli do you need to eat to match the content a steak? - answered on p.27 actually)

Edit: "oh look Gorillas and Cows are vegetarian" Cows actually have their intestinal flora make the proteins for them ;)

My immediate question when I hear about how plants can capture carbon is: yes, but how will you ensure that it doesn't get released as part of the natural carbon cycle when the plant dies. You need to bury it all before it decomposes or it'll end up right back where it started.

Sidenote: I wonder what this tastes like.

This is only a half-serious answer, but some kind of fungal aggregate that outputs calcium carbonate as a byproduct would be awesome.

The article answers both of your questions.

The byproducts of the eelgrass can be used in ways (e.g. building materials) where it won't return to the ecosystem.

I thought most people already have too much Omega 6 in their diet? This article makes it seem like that is a benefit.

You could balance it out with the rest of ingredients guess, it’s not like they suggest to eat only sea grain

Inspiring entrepreneurship and curiosity: taking risks on an unknown to expand his business and craft, following through to prove its usefulness, and improving lives.

This is a craftsman.

I'd say this is someone who was curious and followed that curiousity.

How long would it take our usual white rice, to be slowly introduced to increased levels of salt, to slowly selectively mutate it until it can grow in open salt water seas? It doesn’t sound impossible, as I know this has been done to algae

Halophytes is the key word you are looking for if you want to do more research into this. Generally sea water is a very high bar, however there are some interesting looking developments for places with high ground water salt levels, which is typically a big problem with respect to desertification.

Awesome, thanks for that!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokkali_Rice

There are some rice varieties which can tolerate salinity , but not upto sea water levels.

I'm always a bit conflicted about the idea of carbon capture. The whole idea seems predicated on the notion that the carbon is going to be sequestered forever and ignores organic matter getting broken down into methane which is much worse than the captured carbon dioxide. It really feels like the approach is creating climate debt for the future rather than coming up with a long term solution. I have to wonder if human kind will need to find some way to convert CO2 to pure carbon for storage as a climate control measure.

I assume that carbon capture implies actually capturing carbon. The sea grass actually gets covered by sand and mud in an anaerobic environment, which does sequester carbon for a long time. Unlike forests, which are exposed to the air and do sequester some carbon but also release a bunch back to the environment.

>I have to wonder if human kind will need to find some way to convert CO2 to pure carbon for storage as a climate control measure.

We have! They're called plants. Any other method uses far too much energy to be able to do at the scale we need.

Plants do capture carbon. As long as they don't burn subsequently, this isn't released again as CO2.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I was under the impression that any form of decomposition causes most of the carbon in the plant to re-enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Thus using plants to sequester carbon isn't just a matter of planting more trees; you actually have to pay attention to what happens when the tree dies.

Now, if we could somehow remove ligogen from wood, we would have pure carbon, ignifuge building material. This would do a lot for the planet.

Some of it does, but a lot becomes part of the soil. (Source:https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-remo... ) Coal and Oil were once plants and organisms, examples of such carbon sequestration.

I was under the understanding that the plants and trees that became coal and oil didn't decompose because at the the time, nothing had evolved yet that could consume it. So it just collected on the ground with new stuff growing on top of it, forming this compressed mass of underground carbon fuel that we were able to exploit millions of years later. It could never happen today because all of that plant matter would rot before that could happen, because of the presence of bacteria that can break down plant matter.

relevant: https://phys.org/news/2021-04-current-climate-simulations-ov...

What's the sodium content?

978 mg per 100 g, according to https://medcraveonline.com/MOJFPT/macro-and-micro-nutrients-...

If we move any agriculture to the ocean which is 70% of the earth and mostly unused or used in a fungible way then we would continue rehabilitation of much more of the earth's forests.

Which the environmental movement will fight tooth and nail. They are about daily penitence not solutions.

Obviously 'waste' in the ocean sinks and stores carbon forever in deep water, and if done properly it also could strengthen fish stocks... so it'll be fought hard against.

Lots of good edible seaweed books out there.

How do you move any agriculture to the ocean at the scale we consume it currently? Do you mean just switching crops like corn for crops that grow in the ocean like sea weed?

Yes. Why not?

Or cattle food. Which will move to lab grown meat and other product nutrients.

You basically turn the ocean into solar panels while collecting nutrients rather than using more valuable biodiverse land.

Start with a somewhat novelty product like this and keep moving.

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