Exactly a month ago, I ended up writing a post called The Madness of Rice.
Not what I’d usually write about, I mentioned that I’d been told about a piece of internet folklore that alleged that you could take two jars of cooked rice and treat them differently for a month – giving one nothing but compliments and the other only abuse.
It sounds like nonsense. It’s miles from being a scientific experiment in any way. And what’s more it sounds crazy. But I realised that my default with such things is to immediately go off and research the truthfulness of any such stories on the internet. Whereas, in this case, I could simply test the frankly unbelievable idea out for myself.
So after committing to do so, and to report back, here’s the photo:-
You’ll just have to take my word for it. But the rice that got abuse for a month? Ended up in a pretty bad shape. Whilst the other was almost the same as the day it went into the container.
It’s a long way from proving anything much. Maybe all it shows is that one container will grow mould faster than another and you’ve therefore got a 50/50 chance of the ‘experiment’ ending up with the results that are promised.
But it did prove one thing, perhaps more important. That’s the fact that it’s worth investigating things yourself. No matter how flawed. We rely on simply headlines and online simplifications for so much of modern life. From now on, the next time I fall myself falling into the track of blindly accepting something, I’ll be thinking of two words instead: Stupid Rice.