While at the Eco-Farm Conference, I attended a session about The Ark of Taste, a program sponsored by Slow Food with a mission of preserving and celebrating endangered tastes.
One of the speakers at the session was Sarah Alexander, from the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota. The wild rice that is harvested by this organization is being promoted through Slow Food's Ark of Taste.
Unlike 95% of the "wild rice" sold in this country, true wild rice is a grass that grows wild in the lakes of places like Northern Minnesota and only a handful of other place in the country. It is considered a sacred food to the indigenous Ojibwe people. During the rice harvest, ricers harvest the rice on the lake two to a canoe. One person sits in the front of the boat navigating over the lake, and the other hits rice stalks with a pole and gently knocks the rice grains free from the stalk and into the canoe. A good day of ricing will yield over 500 pounds of rice per pair. Once back on land, the native Ojibwe people follow further tradition and ritual for the preparation of the rice for market.
Native Harvest wild rice suffers from a name identity issue. Most Americans are used to a cultivated wild rice that is grown from seed in diked rice paddies and harvested using a combine. "That is different than two Indians in a canoe. They're trying to call it wild rice, but that's not wild rice - we call it tame rice. And it doesn't taste the same. Our rice tastes like a lake," says Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. The product is so different from cultivated wild rice, and yet it shares a name -- kind of like the difference between Kraft Parmesan cheese in a green can and Parmigiano Reggiano sourced from the Parma region of Italy.