Beans and Rice Feeds the World

**Chuck** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. When you put the three of us together, add a little miso, you got Stuff You Should Know, which rhymes with miso.

**Chuck** (0:24)
Oh, boy, he rescued that one. I was on the edge of my seat. I was like, where's this one going?

**Josh** (0:30)
Yeah, well, you can always bring it back to rhyming. Yeah. Unless it doesn't rhyme, and then you got nothing.

**Chuck** (0:36)
Well, something that doesn't rhyme is rice and beans, or beans and rice.

**Josh** (0:41)
Which way do you prefer to say it?

**Chuck** (0:43)
I've always said beans and rice.

**Josh** (0:46)
Really? I say the exact opposite.

**Chuck** (0:48)
Hey.

**Josh** (0:48)
I say and rice beans.

**Chuck** (0:54)
You doofus.
So I think I was trying to figure out why I thought of this one, because this was my idea. We did an episode on rice last year, and just its importance as a crop all around the world. And I think maybe when I was in Belize, I had a beans and rice dish, and it just got me thinking. I was like, man, I feel like almost every country I've been to in the West, and certainly every island, there's like some version of beans and rice. And like, I was kind of wondering what the deal was and why the combination specifically of those two things was a thing, and I guess out of this the idea was born.

**Josh** (1:32)
Well, that's a great idea. I'm glad you did. And I definitely ate rice and beans for lunch today just from studying all this. Oh, did you? Oh, yeah. I put together what we had on hand, so I had pinto beans mixed with wild rice, which was actually really good.

**Chuck** (1:48)
Interesting combo.

**Josh** (1:50)
It was. I took a cue from Jerry, and I actually added a little miso to it, stirred it all together. That helped really pull the room together. And then I put some tuna on there on top.

**Chuck** (2:02)
Oh, tuna on top. That's the Joshuae.

**Josh** (2:06)
I was like, what would I call this? And I came up with the frijoles importantes.

**Chuck** (2:13)
Did you really? Oh, no.

**Josh** (2:16)
That wasn't off the cuff, so yeah, I guess I did really.

**Chuck** (2:20)
My favorite bean, if I'm gonna eat beans and rice, is actually pinto beans. Although I'm not gonna turn my nose up at black beans or refried or refried black or any of that stuff. I love all that stuff, but I love pinto beans.

**Josh** (2:31)
What about red beans?

**Chuck** (2:33)
I like red beans okay, but I much, much prefer pinto beans. Like red beans and rice isn't my favorite out of the beans and rice dishes.
And my favorite rice far and away is, and I don't know what the word for it is or if there is one, but the very, very traditional Mexican rice that my friend PJ makes and he's gonna teach me that's made with like chicken stock and tomatoes. It's just, it sort of turns out a light brown, orangey color.

**Josh** (3:00)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (3:01)
And it's not clumpy or sticky. It's all like the rice is very loose within each other. That's my favorite kind of rice is that specific kind of Mexican rice.

**Josh** (3:11)
It's almost like an orzo.

**Chuck** (3:12)
Yeah. But like other places, like the place down the street has like a cilantro rice, which is really good.
But I like just that really traditional Mexican rice.

**Josh** (3:21)
I know. I agree with you. One of the ironic things, Dave helped us with this and he pointed something out that I hadn't really considered. You said that like everywhere you've been to in the west or any island, especially, has their own beans and rice dish, right?
Mexico is what I always associate with, or it's certainly initially associated with rice and beans. And they actually don't have a rice and beans dish. They just give you rice and beans. And that's actually the authentic way that Mexico does it. They don't have like a national rice and beans dish. Yeah.

**Chuck** (3:54)
That's like combined. Although, let's be honest, it gets on that plate. What are you doing? You're eating that stuff together on one forkful at a time.

**Josh** (4:02)
But they stopped one step short. All they had to do is come up with the name for mixing together the rice and beans, and they would be like every other Caribbean, Central, and South American nation.