> Where was brown rice the traditional way of eating rice (for non-elites)? During what centuries roughly?
My understanding is that it was the usual way of doing so until mechanization made it affordable.
> What is your evidence?
I remembered reading it on acoup, and that's indeed the case:
> Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
I have evidence that seems to contradict acoup’s assertion that “prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor” at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40258263
My understanding is that it was the usual way of doing so until mechanization made it affordable.
> What is your evidence?
I remembered reading it on acoup, and that's indeed the case:
> Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...
Edit: now that I looked up on Wikipedia, Thiamine is actually vitamin B1, not Vitamin A, so THIS IS NOT THE SAME DEFICIENCY and I stand corrected.
Too bad I can't update my comment above anymore, because it's conveying false information based on an incorrect understanding of mine…