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Plastic Rice

William Parcher

Show me the monkey!
William Parcher
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
27,656
There's a news story about manufactured plastic rice being marketed in Nigeria and sold as real rice. This is after there being older stories about plastic rice being made in China and sold as counterfeit rice. I'm skeptical.

Suspected plastic rice has been seized in Nigeria and is being tested. Authorities there say it will take some time for scientific results. It seems to me that anyone could apply a flame to this stuff and quickly know if it is plastic as it would melt or catch fire and smell like burning plastic.

The idea seems to be that plastic rice would be cheaper and easily manufactured. I'm wondering if it would actually be more expensive than real rice.


BBC story here. They have several articles on plastic rice if you search.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38414337


Snopes story here. They say the claim is unproven.

http://www.snopes.com/plastic-rice-from-china


Is this an urban legend?
 
Plastic rice Christians

Really, lots of rumors of plastic rice, but no credible news source has found or examined any.

Plastic rice crispies!
 
As mentioned in Snopes, it appears all paths lead to a small article in Weekly Hong Kong in January 2001 that cited its source simply as a report in Singapore media. Neither that report nor the media source has been identified.

It may be derived from a mid-2010 scandal in China where officials charged a company with selling fake Wuchang rice (an expensive gourmet rice with a distinctive fragrance) by adding a fragrance to regular rice. Officials were unsure what was used to add the fragrance and whether or not it would be harmful to consumers. Concerns about the illegal additive may have led to a story about adding plastic to rice or potatoes to create the "plastic rice".
 
It may start out real, but after I'm done cooking it it tastes just like plastic.
 
Am I missing something? Rice costs next to nothing. How can plastic rice be cheaper to produce?
 
NPR's The World had an article on this yesterday, stating that Nigerian authorities had seized several tons of the stuff.
They mentioned only "Asian" sources for the material, and that it had a distinctive odor.....
 
Not only can't I imagine that plastic rice is cheaper than grown rice (no matter how fancy the type of rice) but I can't imagine anyone being fooled by plastic rice- the texture, flavor, aroma, changes in these properties when cooked, etc. There is no way that a plastic-based material could duplicate a food with which so many people are so familiar. We are not talking about whether one species of cooked fish can be mistaken for another by some people- we are talking rice versus plastic.

It is very sad that such an obviously made up story can get such traction. Unfortunately this type of spreading of untrue rumors has lead to far more serious consequences: e.g. that health workers vaccinating children against polio are really infecting the children with polio (leading to the health workers being murdered), etc. More and more it appears that people will accept something that appeals to their emotions (including their suspicions and love of conspiracy theories) rather than think logically about it and/or discover the actual facts.
 
The story is that the fake rice is made from potatoes, sweet potatoes, and plastic that are mixed together and then formed into rice-shaped pellets.

I’m not sure if it is even possible to combine potatoes and plastic to get something that is anything like rice.

On another forum or blog (I forget which) someone dug up the prices of rice and low-grade plastic in China and found that plastic is almost twice the price of rice per pound. Potatoes appear to be starting to become a big thing in China, but their potato technology is far behind. Potato fields are worked almost entirely by hand and have yields per acre that are about 1/3 of those in the U.S. So I doubt that potatoes are cheaper than rice, pound for pound. Plus the added cost of forming the potato-plastic into rice pellets.

Since the Weekly Hong Kong article in 2011, there have been numerous claims of fake plastic rice and all that have been tested have been found to be false.
 
If you've ever had undercooked wild rice you'd know exactly what plastic rice tastes and feels like. Little broken plastic toothpicks.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
The story is that the fake rice is made from potatoes, sweet potatoes, and plastic that are mixed together and then formed into rice-shaped pellets.

I’m not sure if it is even possible to combine potatoes and plastic to get something that is anything like rice.

On another forum or blog (I forget which) someone dug up the prices of rice and low-grade plastic in China and found that plastic is almost twice the price of rice per pound. Potatoes appear to be starting to become a big thing in China, but their potato technology is far behind. Potato fields are worked almost entirely by hand and have yields per acre that are about 1/3 of those in the U.S. So I doubt that potatoes are cheaper than rice, pound for pound. Plus the added cost of forming the potato-plastic into rice pellets.

Since the Weekly Hong Kong article in 2011, there have been numerous claims of fake plastic rice and all that have been tested have been found to be false.
Click to expand...
What if the 'plastic' is the same material that's used to make the biodegradable foam packing peanuts?
 
SteveL said:
What if the 'plastic' is the same material that's used to make the biodegradable foam packing peanuts?
Click to expand...


That material is starch, from various sources such as wheat or corn. Since starch is also what rice consists mostly of, imitation rice made of those materials would probably just be called "imitation rice."

(I would prefer real rice if there were any choice, but I have eaten a number of the starch-based packing peanuts without ill effect.)
 
Myriad said:
That material is starch, from various sources such as wheat or corn. Since starch is also what rice consists mostly of, imitation rice made of those materials would probably just be called "imitation rice."

(I would prefer real rice if there were any choice, but I have eaten a number of the starch-based packing peanuts without ill effect.)
Click to expand...
Yes, I know that. Did you notice the scare quotes I used around the word "plastic"? However, facts don't compete well with a scare based story. Remember pink slime?
 
SteveL said:
What if the 'plastic' is the same material that's used to make the biodegradable foam packing peanuts?
Click to expand...

Wait, now they are selling plastic peanuts? What's next, plastic chicken? Where does this end!!?!!?! :D

The reports on the fake Wuchang rice say that the rice was also polished with wax to make it bright and shiny. I wonder if the “wax” was mistranslated, misinterpreted, or otherwise misreported as “plastic” which then turned into the rice actually being made of plastic.

I don’t know about the claim about potatoes and sweet potatoes. Does Wuchang rice smell like sweet potatoes? Maybe there was speculation or even a report that the fragrance being added was derived from sweet potatoes. I couldn’t find anything, but I don’t know Chinese so I can’t search original sources.

Original sources related to the original Wuchang rice scandal were thoroughly searched by Jing Li of Iowa State University who wrote a Master’s paper examining the media coverage of the scandal. Jing Li does not address the plastic rice claim.

If there were actual reports of rice actually being made of plastic, I would expect as much various Chinese media attention and public uproar as there was with the Wuchang scandal. We don’t find that. Instead we find all reports connected back to the single Weekly Hong Kong article, which only references “Singapore media” as its source. I could not find any other independent reports of the incident or anything mentioning actions taken by Chinese officials.

Early reports of the plastic rice indicated it occurred in Shaanxi province, which was also the epicenter of the Wuchang rice scandal, although in a different district or city.

So I would conclude that:

1. The initial reports of rice made with plastic were false.
2. The original source of the claim was Weekly Hong Kong.
3. The false claim was based, to some degree or other, on the actual Wuchang rice scandal.
4. The Weekly Hong Kong report may have been result of misinterpretation, misunderstanding, wild speculation by one or more consumers who were getting little information from officials, a case of “telephone” where facts morphed into myths, a "joke" that was assumed to be real, or was basically just made up by the author.
5. Subsequent claims of “plastic” rice from China have been unsupported or proven to be false, and are based on the original myth started in Weekly Hong Kong.
 
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DevilsAdvocate said:
So I would conclude that:

1. The initial reports of rice made with plastic were false.
2. The original source of the claim was Weekly Hong Kong.
3. The false claim was based, to some degree or other, on the actual Wuchang rice scandal.
4. The Weekly Hong Kong report may have been result of misinterpretation, misunderstanding, wild speculation by one or more consumers who were getting little information from officials, a case of “telephone” where facts morphed into myths, a "joke" that was assumed to be real, or was basically just made up by the author.
5. Subsequent claims of “plastic” rice from China have been unsupported or proven to be false, and are based on the original myth started in Weekly Hong Kong.
Click to expand...

I blame Google Translate.
 
Isn't plastic rice of some kind (probably rather expensive) needed to make plastic sushi? Which is pretty common, for eatery window displays and novelty items.
 
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