But does this put the rice industry in a double bind with its own rice milk product?
Carb Fatigue
Low-carb diets, including the "paleo" subgenus, have spawned some strange species of recipe. Parsnip fries, squash hash browns, cloud bread (made from eggs and cream cheese) and zucchini noodles instead of pasta (blasphemy!) all have had their 15 minutes of fame.
But the replacement of an entire staple food with a low-carb alternative is a category shift that's bound to raise eyebrows and maybe even rile a temper or two.
If you're a regular reader, you're familiar with the epic milk controversy that's raged for more than 20 years now. As a story, it possesses a certain Dickensian sweep, so please, spare us carpal tunnel and read about it here.
For the purposes of this article, we'll simply note that the folks who produce milk don't take kindly to the wide variety of vegetable-, seed- and nut-derived dairy substitutes that have crashed the market. But until now, despite some recent rumblings, federal authorities have been unable or unwilling to weigh in.
Verbing Weirds Language
But just when you were getting tired of the endless slosh of the milk wars, a new conflict is opening over another basic kitchen staple: rice.
Adherents of popular low-carb diets can't consume rice, which is packed with carbohydrates; to compensate, they've exercised their considerable culinary inventiveness to create a number of alternatives, cauliflower rice being the most well-known.
And while there's plenty of information out there on how to create veggie-derived rice from scratch, vegetable companies have introduced prepackaged "riced" veggies to capitalize on the trend. (No matter how much it galls us, "rice" seems to be becoming a legitimate verb.)
Care to guess how the rice industry feels about this development? Let's just say it is not keen on the trend, and Big Rice – that's now a thing – has found allies in at least one corner of the country. Arkansas State Rep. David Hillman and Arkansas State Sen. Bruce Maloch recently introduced a bill to cut through rice-related nomenclature debates.
House Bill 1407 would prohibit representing agricultural products "as rice when the agricultural product is not rice" and "affixing a label that uses a variation of rice in the name of the agricultural product when the agricultural product is not rice or derived from rice."
There are similar prohibitions in the bill regarding meat generally and pork and beef in particular. (As if you needed another link – check out our article on Indiana's effort to corral synthetic meat labeling. We're on top of this, folks.)
The Takeaway
All of this effort might be for naught – a recent milk case in the Ninth Circuit found that federal labeling requirements superseded state regulation. We'll see whether federal guidance on cauliflower rice or any of the other variants is released.
But, Big Rice, beware – rice milk is a product that's taken its place beside oat milk, almond milk and the other combatants in dairy's own Twenty Years' War. Can Big Rice quash the aspirations of cauliflower rice products while championing its own milk substitute?
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