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My dad is being especially paranoid of this. He claims to have read a paper years ago that said that the standard in rice processing was bleaching the rice to produce "whiter" rice.

I've been searching everywhere, and for only weird fringe sites, most of the main sites (Wikipedia, some other cooking websites) make no mention of bleach.

Is my father being paranoid about this? Or are his claims substantiated?

yuritsuki
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  • I'm not answering because I don't know, but my gut strongly says no. Rice is cultivated and processed all over the world, and in many cultures, it is revered. I could believe it for generic white rice in the US, but I've never noticed that "our" white rice is any whiter than anyone else's. That combined with the fact that bleaching would add expense to the processing makes me very dubious. – Jolenealaska Aug 03 '14 at 02:32
  • No. White rice is often parboiled, but it is the cereal grain stripped of its hull through a milling/mechanical process not a chemical one. – Little White Lithe Aug 03 '14 at 02:34
  • http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138007/ – Little White Lithe Aug 03 '14 at 02:37

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No. It is not general practice to add bleach to rice. The brown rice bran is removed through mechanical processes. As to whether he should continue to indulge this worry...I'd be more concerned about [insert common American male problem here] before ammonia in rice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138007/ This review has many free references in it. Should you want further peer-review reading, I can provide it.

Little White Lithe
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  • There are so very many other dietary choices/problems to be worried about above the chances that one is consuming second-hand bleach from rice. – Little White Lithe Aug 03 '14 at 09:27
  • I didn't intend to sidetrack your inquiry with the [Common American male problem] thing. It was a...thinly veiled attempt at tounge-in-cheek humor. My tone missed the mark it seems, and now the whole internet knows I can't tell a good Dad joke. **facepalm** – Little White Lithe Aug 03 '14 at 22:36
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White rice is bleached. You can find videos on you tube that show you the process.

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mimi
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  • I found one video in a youtube search, and it was in Vietnamese. Can you translate it and summarize here? – Erica Feb 06 '15 at 15:40
  • @Erica: can you post the link? I couldn't find the video o_O – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 15:58
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    @ChingChong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N71zA2GlkA The title is "RICE BLEACHED WITH WHITENING CHEMICALS," but it would be useful to know whether the news coverage says "every company does this" or "bleaching is absurd and illegal and the company is in trouble" – Erica Feb 06 '15 at 16:00
  • @Erica I can't understand every word since the newsspeaker talks a little bit too fast for me and I'm not used to the dialect. And since I still can't write Vietnamse safely I can't look up the missing words. Please forgive me for the crude translation. Translating Vietnamese to German and then to English doesn't go well ^^; – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 16:24
  • @ChingChong You should be able to make it play slower - click the settings gear and there's a speed dropdown. – Cascabel Feb 06 '15 at 16:30
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    @Erica: Phew: The newsspeaker says: A problem emerges in Vietnam: the practice of bleacing rice gets out of hands. Bleaching rice with whatever-peroxide is forbidden in many countries. However, in Vietnam it is permitted to bleach and to sell the bleached rice. Bleached rice looks clean and white and doesn't mold and won't be infested by bugs. Rice is (usually?) treated by other chemicals (so that they retain their aroma as long as possible? [note: I unterstood something with "rice", "aroma" and "sold in Saigon" (HCM-City)]). – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 16:35
  • Moldy, old rice is bleached and polished to have shiny new grains. At eateries/ beer taverns a chemical is added to the rice so that the rice soaks ten times more water than normal. [note: here comes a sentence that I don't understand, something with "today" "eatery" "use"] At one eatery two bags with a white powder was found to raise the soaking capacity of the rice. vietnam.net says that this substance is harmful. – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 16:36
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    TL;DR: Bleaching is forbidden in many countries. However, in Vietnam bleaching is allowed and some people do this. The report does not say that everyone does that. – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 16:39
  • @Jefromi I have a settings gear but I just can set the quality, enable subtitles and set font, fontsize, ... – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 16:41
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    @ChingChong Oh, it may only be in the HTML5 player. https://www.youtube.com/html5 – Cascabel Feb 06 '15 at 16:51
  • @Jefromi You're right. After I switched to the html5 player it works. – Ching Chong Feb 06 '15 at 17:08
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    This has been flagged a bit. I'm not deleting: it's wrong (or at least misleading) but it is an answer. – Cascabel Feb 07 '15 at 00:33