Behind the Ironic Column

I’m not usually a big consumer of rice.  Oh, I certainly eat it at restaurants or when I get a bento box or rice bowl for lunch at one of the food carts around town.  Being at least half Scots-Irish, I grew up eating potatoes as one of the main sources of cheap and filling starch, and I never really switched over to rice. 

But the economic news lately has included a number of stories about rice scarcity — with the prospect of restrictions on sales.  Restrictions have apparently already happened in some stores that supply the small restaurants and food carts.  So the likelhood is that their prices will rise in accordance with the difficulty of getting enough rice.  It’s somewhat curious to me, but these stories have caused me to think about rice.  Not in an abstract, philosophical way, but in the grocery-list making way.  Maybe I should buy some rice, just so I have some.  Never mind that I’ve not made anything with rice for over a year — and haven’t felt deprived because of it.  In fact, I probably could have gone another year without noticing that I wasn’t eating rice.  It’s only because my attention was forced onto it that I noticed I didn’t have any.

Which, of course, has a wider extrapolation to all the things that we wouldn’t know or believe we need if we didn’t hear about them from some external source.  I’m the first to admit that I’m a sucker for new toys — especially technology ones.  But would I really be deprived if I didn’t have a tiny, bright-colored laptop to tuck under my arm?  Odds are that I would not be. 

Knowing it exists plants the idea that I want it — and from there it’s only a step to the thought that I may need it. 

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