China Plans to Feed 80M with ‘Seawater Rice’ | Hacker News Reader

China Plans to Feed 80M with ‘Seawater Rice’

bloombergquint.com

24 pointstrasz11 comments

The nation has one-fifth of the world’s population, and that many mouths to feed, with less than 10% of the Earth’s arable land.

If China can be more self-sufficient in staple foods, it would be a contribution to the world's food security too,” said Zhang. “The less China imports, the more other countries will have.

“Chinese food security is world food security” is a thing, absolutely rampaging across markets over the past few years.

Along with diversifying fertilizer production outside geopolitically active areas (including China), an increasingly food secure China would be a simply absurd boon to world food security as we enter an era of less than stable supply chains.

I wonder how different the rice tastes from traditionally grown rice. Do I still need to use as much salt in the boiling process?

What do you use your rice for? In my experience, you almost never need to salt rice while boiling.

When I was a university student, I taught a lot of my friends how to cook simple things. I made pasta for my roommates and taught them how to make it themselves. One roommate was getting the hang of things, and would assist me. He went to start rice, and made the rather fair assumption that it'd be just like making pasta, so he salted the water a similar amount. When the water had cooked off, it was some very salty rice we had.

I do not salt my rice either. I like the difference in salt/spice/sweet between the curry or sauce and the starchiness of the rice. When I salt the rice it tastes so uniform it may as well be blended together.

I rarely put salt in my rice, but sometimes when i make it in the pressure cooker (instant pot) Ill add butter, garlic and salt in small amounts to the rice.

Sometimes ill cook the rice in broth rather than water as well.

When I do add salt though, i use really coarse Himalayan rock salt (also note, this salt does not have iodine, FYI.

Salting can help season the rice internally

Sure, salt as seasoning. My question was more around the usecase for "seasoned" rice.

There's always a risk when creating cereal varieties to fit a specific purpose, as we haven't been adapted to them.

It reminds me of the wheat hibridization that greatly improved wheat. It is suspected that it has a role to play in the increasing incidence of celiac disease in recent times, as certain more of certain gliadins. It'll be years until we know for sure if that's the case.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24524657/

Probably 80M people are willing to risk it to eat, though... Striking to see cases like this where an autocratic system can back initiatives that would be bogged down in protests from the left about GM and/or the right about conspiracy theories in a more democratic state.

I'm working on this problem since the past year, and certainly it can scale to a wide more people and have very interesting byproduct (like carbon capture).

Contact with me if you are interested in learn more.

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