The Resilience of Rice: The World’s Most Important Food

Rice is the world’s most important food crop. It is a primary source of calories for more than half of the global population.

Today, small-scale rice farming is threatened by climate change, resource scarcity, and migration. How will this crop and the people who depend on it adapt? How will identities rooted in rice farming shift and evolve?

In a new book, writer, photographer, and Class of 2019 National Fellow Lisa M. Hamilton explores these questions through the lens of one woman’s story.

Below, in this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program’s newsletter featuring exclusive content about and from our Fellows — Hamilton talks about her recently published book that raises questions about identity, migration, and adaptation.

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Your Fellows project, the recently published book, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival, centers on rice, the world’s most important food. How did you become involved in writing about agriculture, and what led you to this topic?

In 2014, I set out to write a book about resilience in farming systems, specifically about plant genetic diversity and the adaptation that it enables. Rice, being arguably our most genetically diverse crop, seemed like the obvious vehicle for that story, and for two years I pursued a book about rice. But then I met an extraordinary woman named Ia Moua, and everything changed. Ia had been born to a rice-farming family in Laos, in 1964. In the aftermath of the American-funded war, violence forced her to flee to Thailand, where she spent 15 years in a refugee camp before relocating to California. Today she grows rice like her parents did, but now in the semi-desert of Fresno. As she told me her story over many days, then months, then years, the book I was writing naturally shifted from being a book about rice, to being a book about this extraordinary woman.

And yet, it remained a book about resilience. In a sense, Ia’s story ran parallel to the story of the rice she was growing: They both drew strength from their ability to survive adversity, adapt to harsh conditions and new locations, and ultimately to evolve into something different from what they were before — something stronger, something more complex. That’s resilience.

You were able to interview Ia and write the book with the help of a Hmong interpreter. Can you describe that subject-translator-journalist relationship? How did it change over the course of this project?

Over the course of my five years reporting in Fresno, Ia and I communicated with the help of a talented interpreter named Lor Xiong. Most days, it looked like this: I would work alongside Ia doing whatever her task was that day at the farm. As we planted or weeded or harvested rice, we talked, and Lor would stand between us, interpreting and recording the conversation. While the three of us began as strangers, over time we developed a deep friendship. Many journalists would steer clear of such closeness, believing that bonding with a “subject” would endanger their ability to write clearly about that person. I see it differently. I believe that genuine relationships are what allow you to see a person and her experience at their fullest. From that intimacy, a new kind of story emerges. That was the kind of story I wanted to write.

You are a writer as well as a photographer. Can you tell us more about your creative process for each pursuit? How does your approach differ when choosing a subject to focus on?

Of course the act of photographing is different from that of writing, but in both mediums I’m the same artist. As a writer, I find immense joy in crafting a sentence well, and so right from the start I choose my words carefully. At times I will spend all day on one or two paragraphs, reworking them until they make sense not just structurally but rhythmically, as if they were a song. Likewise, I’m a slow and deliberate photographer. Because I still shoot film — and medium-format at that — I don’t just tick off twenty clicks at a time and rely on editing later. Instead, I compose each frame like a little painting.

What lessons do you want readers to take away from Ia’s story or on immigration and cultivation? If you could put your book in any policymaker or official’s hands, who would it be?

The Hungry Season is a story about a person, not an argument about an issue, and so what I hope readers take away is akin to what they might gain from reading a novel. In a sense, the book progresses like peeling away the layers of an onion. While readers might begin by seeing Ia as a refugee of war and then perhaps as an immigrant to the United States, I hope that by the end of the book they will come to see her instead for who she is at her core: a woman, who has dreams and flaws, triumphs and struggles — just as they themselves do.

Because of that progression, I would offer The Hungry Season to those immigration hardliners whose arguments rely on (and whose political capital draws on) depicting non-citizens as abstractions and aggregates rather than as individual humans with souls, families, childhoods. People like [Texas governor] Greg Abbott and [former Trump advisor] Stephen Miller. Would it change their policies? Unlikely. But maybe it would move something within their private selves.

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