Rice Is No Longer Rice, Flour No Longer Flour: Are Today’s Staples Still Healthy?
1. Staple Foods and Nutritional Products in the Industrialised Food Production System
In terms of texture, refined flour tastes better; it is also dearer and harder to get — without a grain ration booklet recording your allowance, forget it. Back then, using refined flour for steamed buns would have been a sin against heaven’s bounty. It had to be saved for dumplings. My wish was “steamed buns made from refined flour, all you can eat,” while my mother dreamed of “eating dumplings every day.” In her childhood, you could only have dumplings at New Year.
Thank goodness for progress and economic growth — we have arrived at such a life.
Only later did I learn that this posh, high-end “wheat germ flour” was nothing more than the “bran” sifted out during the milling of flour.
Still later, I spent two years farming in Yilan, Taiwan, and made a crowd of farmer friends. As the village’s resident brewer and practitioner of the European-style wood-fired oven, I was always hosting feasts. Farmers live to eat — whenever a gathering was mentioned, they came running at the scent. Before a good meal, nothing is too important to cancel, except for one iron-clad reason for a rain-check: “toasting rice bran.” Rice germ oxidises and spoils so easily that the best way is to mill and toast it on the spot. Toasting rice bran is a craft — slow-roasting over a gentle flame can take a whole day. The toasted rice bran tasted exactly like the wheat germ flour I had lugged back from Taipei all those miles ago. It is, in truth, the same thing: the germ of rice and the germ of wheat are much of a muchness. When I mentioned my Dihua Street escapade to my farmer friends, they laughed me out of the room — I had been such a gullible fool. The wheat germ flour on Dihua Street was all mainland merchandise, repackaged and sold back. Taiwan does grow wheat, but in quantities too small to mention, with no home-grown wheat germ industry whatsoever. The greatest contribution of “Taiwanese wheat germ flour” is the packaging — and I mean not just the various fancy wrappers, but successfully packaging the concept itself and delivering it to the heads of unsuspecting consumers.
During my farming years in Taiwan I also taught food courses and crammed quite a few relevant books. What I discovered is that the biggest fool was not the one who flew to Taiwan to buy repackaged mainland goods, but rather the modern person’s wellness routine of “refined-flour steamed buns plus wheat germ flour.”
2. Today’s “Rice, Flour and Oil” Are No Longer What They Once Were
A small stone mill cannot produce refined flour. Refined flour is a product of the industrial age — big machines, industrialised processing — better machines grinding the flour even finer while stripping away the “not-so-pleasant” bits invisible to the naked eye. Thanks to the progress of our times and economic growth, refined-flour steamed buns are now something you can eat freely at all three meals.
Our species has undergone a long evolution measured in units of “a hundred thousand years,” and since the gathering era we have eaten whole grains. Evolution wrote the need for every one of those components into our genes. In the agricultural age, Europe drove its mills with wind and water, while we relied on human muscle and donkeys to turn the grinding stones. East or West, rice and flour have been passed down for millennia with little change.
The Industrial Revolution is merely the last minute in the twenty-four-hour span of human evolution; from the appearance of refined flour to its total dominance is just a few seconds within that final minute. Ever more refined processing has produced a delicacy of texture never before achieved, but bodies shaped by tens of millions of years of evolution cannot adapt, and ever more modern ailments emerge. And so “wheat germ flour” rides the winds of the information age to fill the gap. A grain of wheat falls into the modernised processing system and undergoes two rounds of processing to add value: first the bran is stripped away to yield refined flour; then the bran is roasted for aroma and convenience, ground fine to adjust the texture, and packaged with grand and lofty pretensions.
Take wheat as an example: just do a casual online search. “Wheat germ flour is the essence extracted from the wheat kernel — a high-protein, high-vitamin-E, low-calorie, low-fat, low-cholesterol nutritional product containing B vitamins, vitamin D, unsaturated fatty acids, nucleic acids, folic acid, octacosanol, and more than ten minerals including calcium, iron, zinc (23.4 mg/100 g), and selenium…”
Then look up the claimed benefits: “The finest natural, nutritionally rich food for balanced nutrition and strengthening the body. Wheat germ offers therapeutic efficacy against cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, resistance to radiation, anti-ageing, cancer prevention, intestinal cleansing and detoxification, relief from constipation, and reductions in blood sugar and blood lipids; the dietary fibre it contains helps lower serum cholesterol and prevent diabetes. Furthermore, wheat germ promotes the development of beneficial bacteria in the gut…” Every package of wheat germ flour, in all its varieties, stresses “essential nutrients for the human body” — when milling originally discarded the very essence, stripping it away. Why, then, all this trouble?
3. Rice and Flour as Ultra-Processed Food
Modern people, growing ever more vigilant about food safety, have started to watch out for “ultra-processed food” in their daily diet. Some time ago, Foodthink published an article introducing the classification system proposed by Brazilian nutritionist Carlos Monteiro, which places rice and flour in the “unprocessed or minimally processed” category. It is true that rice and flour in their literal sense — the staples of humanity in the agricultural age — were once minimally processed food. But the rice and flour we buy in supermarkets today are already ultra-processed food.
Michael Pollan traced the industrialised food chain and in 2006 published The Omnivore’s Dilemma, warning people to be wary of “ultra-processed food”: “If your grandmother would not recognise it as food, or if it contains more than five ingredients and names you cannot pronounce, it is most likely ultra-processed food.”
Search online for “legitimate additives in flour processing” and you get: chemical substances used to improve flour properties, enhance processing performance and food quality, mainly including dough conditioners, flour bleaching agents, preservatives and other types, with their use strictly governed by national standards (such as GB 2760-2024). Search for “legitimate additives in rice processing” and you get: rice additives refer to specific compounds permitted during rice processing, including sodium starch phosphate (a thickener), sodium diacetate (a preservative) and deacetylated chitosan (a thickener and coating agent).
In the agricultural age, stored grain was rice in its husk or whole wheat kernels. An intact seed coat is more than just a grain’s outer garment — it is a suit of armour that keeps out harm and prevents oxidation and spoilage. Once processing strips away that innate protection, the grain is prone to moisture, oxidation, and deterioration. In the age of industrialised production and globalised sales, adding things has become standard procedure. And so, in the process of becoming rice and flour, paddy and wheat have been subjected to excessive extraction and excessive addition. The words are still the same words of a thousand years past, but rice is no longer rice and flour is no longer flour.
In fact, even if you consult the definition of “ultra-processed food” in Carlos Monteiro’s classification system — “a complex formulation of foods subjected to extensive industrial processing, often containing industrial ingredients such as emulsifiers, flavour enhancers, and artificial flavourings, with long shelf life and convenience of consumption, but far removed from the original food” — the rice and flour in the modern processing and sales system meet every criterion of ultra-processed food except the last: they still resemble the appearance of the original ingredient.
Under China’s national standard for wheat flour, GB/T 1355-2021, which took effect in 2023, wheat flour is explicitly prohibited from containing food additives or food ingredients; products that do contain them are classified as specialty flour. This is absolutely good news, but the standard is not mandatory. And so I still do not buy shop-bought steamed buns or noodles, do not eat shop-bought bread or pastries. I cannot be certain whether they are made with specialty flour, nor whether substances like borax have been added during cooked-food processing. More importantly, I can make these things myself, and the look and taste of mine are far removed from anything bought outside. Whether to treat rice and flour as ultra-processed food is each person’s own choice. I have made mine; you may do as you please. If anyone chooses to believe — to believe in flour and flour products — well then, God bless those who have faith.
I must state clearly: I do not loathe modernity and pine for the past. In 1800, the average global life expectancy was thirty-seven; by 2000, it was sixty-three-point-nine. The progress of our times is a blessing for all humanity. I can say that being alive past sixty is itself a product of that progress.
And one more statement: if I were a large-scale grain processor, needing to transport goods long distances and store them for extended periods, I too would add things.
IV. Wanting It All
But there will always be someone greedy of mouth and greedy of heart like me, who insists on wanting convenience and health and flavour all at once. Is that possible?
Clever modern humans will always find a way: to want convenience and health and flavour and — oh, and happiness on top of it all.
To be alive to this day is thanks to the times. To be alive in good health is thanks to myself. At forty I suffered every manner of sub-health complaint; by sixty, they had eased. The physical ailments I once had were practically the city-dweller’s default setting. I owe the change to those two years farming in Taiwan in my fifties, and there is no mystery to it: eat the right things, do the right things.
In Hsinchu, Taiwan, there is a niche restaurant called Meirixin, specialising in homemade sourdough bread made from organic wheat milled on site, with sourdough cold fermentation — essentially a modern version of the bread ovens that once stood beside the windmill or watermill of a medieval European farm. The founder had studied in Europe; one of them and I were teacher and pupil in both directions — he taught me bread, I taught him brewing.
Meirixin’s chief mission was never selling meals or bread, but promoting the idea of baking your own. With a fridge, an oven, and a home flour mill, you can do it. If kneading feels like too much bother, buy a stand mixer. The ingredients need be nothing but organic wheat.
One kilogram of flour makes one wholemeal loaf. A home flour mill costs a hundred or so yuan on Taobao or Pinduoduo. The flour is not milled fine, and the bran makes the texture rough, so you need a long, slow cold fermentation — twenty-four or forty-eight hours in the fridge. The resulting bread has a slightly coarse crumb, but it is chewy, and the longer you chew, the more flavour unfolds.
I have already forgotten the names of Meirixin’s founders, but I remember clearly what they said: perhaps one day Meirixin will be gone, but the act of baking your own bread will certainly carry on.
Meirixin opened its bread-making technique to anyone who wanted to learn. By 2019, several hundred people were making bread their way. Only a few core members went on to open their own shops; the vast majority were office workers concerned about their own health. Hsinchu is home to Taiwan’s high-tech science park — our big-tech darlings, whom they call the “new elites of Hsinchu Science Park” — and most bake once a weekend and eat through the week. Baking one loaf or several takes much the same amount of time, and so various “bread mutual-aid groups” have sprung up, sharing bread and building human connection along the way.
If “Meirixin” still sounds too much like effort, you can make it easier still: refuse food whose ingredients you cannot name, and refuse to “buy with your eyes shut.”
For modern city dwellers who must rely on what they can buy, those with the option can use a trusted platform like Beiyouji, or head to a supermarket, a market, or shop online. Choose as far as possible the products with simple ingredient lists and names you can actually recognise. Given the choice between a steamed bun and a custard-filled bao or a cake, pick the steamed bun. China has some regional staples that come closer to the whole grain — Northeastern corn grits, Northwest millet rice, or my hometown’s Shandong jianbing, to name a few. I recommend them.
I have always believed that “additive-free” matters more than “organic.” Pollan reminds us to prioritise whole foods whose names you can recognise — peanuts, edamame, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, potatoes themselves. I strongly recommend buying a generous mix of assorted grains and beans, cooking them with brown rice into a big pot of congee, portioning it into the freezer, and thawing as needed. I once wrote an article for Foodthink — “If You Cannot Cook a Proper Bowl of Bean Porridge, How Can You Speak of Ennoblement?” — and this way of eating is precisely the “bean rice” that fitness influencers now push en masse. Swapping refined-flour steamed buns, noodles, and white rice for this dish has all manner of benefits; please look them up yourselves. An unexpected bonus of that article: a friend’s wife, in the worst of her early-pregnancy nausea, could not keep anything down. Bean porridge carried her through the hardest days.
*Editor’s note: Grandma Kouzi’s next piece will be about oil.
