> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.
If you go into a Chinese supermarket, it will quickly become apparent that the default cooking oil is corn oil.
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
China has a minimum purchase price of corn that's set by the government in order to maintain food stocks. It's also part of a larger jobs program (that I don't know much about).
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
Why does the minimum purchase price of corn in China not make corn oil, a derivative product, more expensive?
Why does the low price of soybean oil in the United States not make soybean oil cheaper in China?
If the reason corn oil is cheap in China is that it's imported separately from the grain and therefore immune to the price floor... wouldn't that imply that corn oil is also cheaper outside China?
Corn??? I don't think corn in bulk is cheaply available in Japan at all. There's a mention in Wikipedia of a Chinese-Mongolian corn meal porridge thing but it looks pretty local.
Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.
You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?
(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.
That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.
> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.
> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.