"The thesis behind FieldTrip, which the chef and restaurateur JJ Johnson opened in Harlem last year, resounds. The phrase “Rice is culture” is plastered everywhere in the small counter-service shop: on the wall, on employees’ T-shirts and face masks, on snapback caps for sale. The 2017 cookbook “Between Harlem and Heaven,” a collection of “Afro-Asian-American” recipes by Johnson and his former boss Alexander Smalls, includes an essay that argues, “If we traveled the world from Africa to Asia and all the points of the diaspora, we could eat only rice and we would not starve. On the contrary, we would feast.” Rice, they note, accounts for more than twenty per cent of the diet of at least 3.5 billion people, and, outside of Asia, West Africans consume more rice than any other population in the world. The West African dish known as jollof rice is so central to the region’s culture that there are memes devoted to the debate over whether Ghanaians or Nigerians make it better." - Hannah Goldfield
