The Philippines consists of 7,641 islands, although about 500 of them disappear at high tide. While the nation has growing industrial and service industries, about 30% of the labor force remains in agriculture, with rice as its biggest commodity.
I’ve always had a special affinity for rice. One of my first assignments as an environmental consultant was to tour the southern US to locate collaborators for a study for a new rice pesticide. I roamed the fields of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. Years later I found myself in southeast Asia noting the prevalence of rice (and noodles) in the diet.
During my recent trip to the Philippines I had several occasions to get a better understanding how important rice is the to the local diet and way of life. Here’s just one example. I visited the Motag Living Museum on the northwestern tip of Panay Island, a short speedboat ride from the tourist island of Boracay. The museum consists of a series of traditional huts and workspaces. Women show how traditional crafts – baskets, toys, clothes, tools – are made, while both men and women highlight the methods of ploughing, harrowing, planting, threshing, pounding, and then cooking, rice.
Rice is a basic source of starch, much like pasta and potatoes in Europe and the United States, but I was surprised to learn that they also make the equivalent of popcorn (pop-rice?) and hard grain rice snacks. Rice fibers can also be used as toilet paper. I passed on the invitation to roll up my pants and plant new rice fronds in the muddy rice field, but jumped at the chance to ride a water buffalo (called a carabao in the Philippines) around the same mud plot. I also used a bamboo pole as a bucket to lift water from a well, fill another bamboo pole as a carrier, and tote the water to an area for washing and showering.
My science education also didn’t stop with rice. Motag also showed us how to hack coconuts out of their outer husk using a sharp stick, then use another sharp stick to break up the coconut meat into flakes. We also got to taste coconut water and coconut milk. Coconut also played a role (no pun intended) as “paper” at the local toilet hole. Mixing coconut flakes with water makes a handy shampoo, while a coconut and leaves blend works great as a natural soap. These seemed to work better than the leaves sometimes used at the hole and sometimes to sandpaper the bark off trees (for which it worked way too well). Later I would enjoy the traditional coconut pie and 80-proof coconut wine/liquor.
I finished up my visit with a cup of hot lemongrass and ginger tea, followed by leaf-wrapped sticky rice.
The short local minibus ride back to the boat squeezed passed the row of moto-tricycles waiting for their charges as the local high school emptied out its students. Along the way back to the pier we saw acres and acres of rice fields squeezed between the shoreline and mountains. Much of the Philippines was severely damaged by Super Typhoon Haiyan (called Yolanda in the Philippines) in 2013. A 7.1 level earthquake hit the area a month prior to the typhoon. Luckily, the Philippines gets all its energy from geothermal, wind, solar, and hydroelectric, so they were able to recover fairly well.
Suddenly I feel an urge to eat some pop-rice. Perhaps this is an unexplored market in the west.
David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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On February 27, 1860, a tall, lanky lawyer from Illinois gave a speech at a place called Cooper Union in New York City. The speech would make Abraham Lincoln president. Sounds a bit hyperbolic to say such a thing, and there were many other factors that contributed to Lincoln’s success that election season, but the speech did more to make his name in eastern society than any other event.
William Wallace Lincoln, “Willie,” died of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862. President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Lincoln were devastated. Willie’s younger brother Tad was also afflicted, but would live. This personal tragedy on top of the ongoing Civil War was almost too much to bear for both of them; Mary would never completely recover. But Willie’s death, and those of 700,000 soldiers during the Civil War, also ushered in advances in the embalming sciences.
During a recent visit to Costa Rica I learned how to make coffee. From scratch, like from the beans. I toured the 
If you aren’t already a member, please consider joining the Lincoln Group of DC. We have members all over the country. For those who are local to the District of Columbia, we have monthly dinner meetings featuring well-known authors and Lincoln scholars, run at least one Civil War battlefield tour a year, have an engaging monthly book study group, and a host of other events and meetings. The Lincolnian newsletter comes out quarterly and includes news about the group as well as scholarly articles about Abraham Lincoln.
Although he was the last of seven children, Thomas Alva Edison was born into a largely empty household. February 11, 1847, was a cold, snowy night in the tiny village of Milan, Ohio, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. Edison’s mother, Nancy, who seemed always to be wrapped in black mourning garb, was eager to have more children to replace those who had not survived. One son, Carlile, died in 1842, when he was only 6 years old. A second son, 3-year-old Samuel Ogden, perished a year later while Nancy was pregnant with daughter Eliza. Eliza also lived only three years, passing away in late 1847, when Thomas was still an infant.
Most people of heard of Doris Kearns Goodwin from her bestselling book, Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln picking many of his political rivals to key cabinet positions. Initially well sold, it got a huge boost after then-candidate Barack Obama was seen carrying it on the campaign trail prior to his 2008 election, then again when Obama picked his rival Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, much like Lincoln put William Seward in that position. Another boost came from Steven Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln, which was based on a tiny part of Goodwin’s book.
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