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Rice is a staple food for more than half the world’s population. Although it is usually white, there are many other colors and types of rice out there. Caryl Levine and Ken Lee have pioneered the introduction of heirloom red and black rice to the United States. Joining Corinna Bellizzi, they share how they are reshaping the way Americans see, think about, and consume rice, all while empowering smallholder farmers and promoting regenerative agriculture. Caryl and Ken also discuss how their efforts impact global food systems, cut methane emissions, and empower women in the field of agriculture.

About Caryl Levine and Ken Lee:

Caryl Levine and Ken Lee are jointly co-founders of Lotus Foods, Inc., the successful organic and specialty rice company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Husband and wife, Ken and Caryl started Lotus Foods in 1993, pioneering the introduction of heirloom red and black rice to US markets, starting with Bhutanese Red Rice and a black rice they trademarked Forbidden Rice®. Together they have reshaped how Americans think about and eat rice.

Both are passionate about empowering women farmers, creating a more equitable food system and ensuring consumers have healthier rice options. Their work has received abundant recognition. The Specialty Foods Association honored Ken and Caryl each with a Leadership Award, for Citizenship and Vision, respectively. In 2017 Conscious Company Media selected Ken and Caryl to receive their first ever “Leadership for Global Impact Award,” recognizing leaders “using the power of business as a force for positive change.” In 2021 Caryl was among “Real Leaders 100 Women in Impact” which recognized 100 women who are” leading the way towards a brighter future.”

Guest LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/caryl-levine-a507897/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-lee-871882b/

Guest Website: https://www.lotusfoods.com

Guest Social:

https://www.TikTok.com/@LotusFoods

https://www.Instagram.com/LotusFoods/

https://www.Facebook.com/LotusFoods

https://www.Pinterest.com/LotusFoods/

Additional Resources Mentioned:

Rice Is Life by Caryl Levine & Ken Lee

Show Notes:

• 00:02:37 – Caryl Levine And Ken Lee Of Lotus Foods
• 00:10:06 – Understanding Regenerative Organic Certification
• 00:21:55 – Raising Rice The Right Way
• 00:26:40 – The Feminization Of Agriculture
• 00:30:20 – Rice Varieties And Their Health Benefits
• 00:34:34 – Tips For Cooking Black, Red, And Brown Rice Easier
• 00:39:39 – Caryl And Ken’s Favorite Recipes
• 00:45:41 – Potential Policy Shifts For Regenerative Agriculture
• 00:49:20 – Balancing Premium Sourcing And Pricing
• 00:54:46 – Reconnecting To Food Culture
• 00:58:48 – Shop, Cook, And Eat In Line With Regeneration
• 01:01:47 – What’s Next For Lotus Foods
• 01:06:59 – Caryl And Ken’s Closing Words
• 01:09:09 – Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

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Revolutionizing Rice With Caryl Levine & Ken Lee

Welcome to Care More Be Better, a show for people like you, who care about our planet, our communities, and the choices that we make every single day. As of today, our community has planted 15,761 trees through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org. We’re well on our way to our 2025 goal of planting 20,000 trees. Remember, we plant a tree for every new subscriber and follower on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and via our newsletter at CareMoreBeBetter.com. That means you can help us plant up to four trees yourself. If you haven’t already, click that follow button and help us grow a greener future.

I’m honored to welcome back two pioneers of regenerative food systems, Caryl Levine and Ken Lee, co-founders of Lotus Foods, and authors of the incredible historical cookbook, Rice Is Life. They revolutionized how we think about rice, a staple food for more than half the world’s population. We get to know through the pages of this book and their experience the cultural meaning of this incredible food. Their work empowers smallholder farmers, cuts methane emissions, and proves that regeneration can be profitable, ethical, and delicious. Let’s welcome them back to the show. Caryl and Ken, it’s nice to see you again.

Nice to see you again.

Hello.

Caryl Levine And Ken Lee Of Lotus Foods

I have about fifteen questions. Hopefully, we’ll have time to get through them all, but I know that this will be a lively discussion. For those who may be new to your story, I hope you could take a moment to explain how rice became your platform for global change.

That was over 30 years ago when Ken and I took a market research trip through China. We came home with 90 ideas. We were looking for a business, and the one idea that became the dominant one was that throughout the whole trip, we discovered a black rice that Ken named, when we were in the Forbidden City, Forbidden Rice, the emperor’s exclusive grain. Throughout China, wherever we saw it, people told us the same folktale that this was used to be called longevity rice or tribute rice. It was an opportunity to reserve a nutrient-dense grain exclusively for the emperor to ensure their long and healthy life.

We were tourists, but we were also looking for a business. While touring the Forbidden City, I recalled that conversation we had with so many vendors. I said, “Caryl, I got it. We’ll call that black rice the Forbidden Rice, the exclusive grain of the emperors, because of its folklore. It’s interesting because when we launched this business, I told my father, who had a Chinese restaurant for many years, that we were in the rice business. He’s thinking, “Why did I put all my five kids through college?” All he could think of was the guy who’s lugging 100-pound bags of rice into the restaurant and dumping them on these big piles. He didn’t quite understand, but eventually did, that this was more than just a commodity rice.

When we decided to go into the rice business and the natural foods business, we evolved in that we found out about the plight of the smallholder farmer and the lack of rice biodiversity. There are hundreds of thousands of different varieties of rice that are being lost. The tenet of Lotus Foods was not only to partner with smallholder farmers who were growing rice more sustainably, but to give them access to a global market at a fair trade price, to keep the biodiversity of rice alive.

The sad reality of it then, as it is largely now, is that a lot of these heirloom or traditional varieties of rice were existing only in seed banks and coming out of the fields and being stored, which is a tremendous loss of biodiversity as people try to start scaling up and working on cash crops. Part of the background is that we thought there were so many delicious and nutritious varieties of rice that people weren’t aware of because of the forces of agribusiness.

This is a page that showcases in your book, with the different colors that rice can be. I have to tell you, Ken, when I first heard the Forbidden Rice, I thought that’s what it was called. By the time I saw it on your packaging, I didn’t realize that you brought that to this land.

We became the pioneers of pigmented rice. Not only the black rice, but also the Bhutanese red rice, which is another fantastic story that we can save for another time. We had to police the trademark all these years because it is a trademark of Lotus Foods. It’s not what the rice was called. When it becomes generic and people are calling it Forbidden Rice, that’s not a good thing for us. We’ve had to police it as much as possible, and correct that it is a trademark name.

I’ve used several of the recipes in this book now. One of the things I loved about this book is that it hit me at a time when I was going mostly plant-based after I discovered that I have a food sensitivity to quinoa. I had used quinoa in so many dishes. The reality is that you helped me discover, through recipes in the book, ways in which I could replace this earlier love of quinoa with things like black rice or that red rice.

I now have four different varieties of rice in my cabinet. Before, I just had brown rice and white rice. It’s amazing the flavor profiles that are unique to each of them as well. A work like this and the work that you’re doing through Lotus Foods also helps people discover food, discover different ways to integrate great nutrition into their lives.

It’s a great point you’re making. I remember when we first started the business, we didn’t have the money to put fancy packaging around in the selling stores, so we started with chefs. What you touched on, in terms of the flavor profile, I remember several chefs telling me when I showed them the black rice and the red rice, “Ken, this will be outstanding on a big white plate as opposed to just white rice, but if this doesn’t taste good, then you made one sale and that’s all.” These heirloom varieties, I always use the example of heirloom tomatoes. They taste better than the regular conventionally sold tomatoes. I think the same is true of rice.

Rice has always been looked at as a commodity. That’s how it’s traded and that’s how it’s been viewed. What we try to do is make rice into a specialized product, like fine chocolate or fine tea, something to savor and to see as unique and flavorful, and also not only delicious but nutritious as well.

I just want to go back to the thing about how we had to police our trademark. It’s not like we’re trying to hoard black rice to ourselves. This is an important point because seed sovereignty, food sovereignty, is a huge issue. There are forces out there who want to criminalize people who save seeds and continue to toe the line of multinational businesses who sell seeds and the chemicals that go along with them. I wanted to make sure no one misunderstood what we were trying to protect. It’s the name Forbidden Rice, the trademark.

I understand completely, having been in the consumer packaged goods world for a long time. It takes up quite a bit of effort to, first of all, spend all of that time in education of the marketplace to popularize something. Essentially, that’s what you’ve done with black rice through this Forbidden Rice piece.

Understanding Regenerative Organic Certification

Your work is so closely connected to sustainable practices. I wanted you to talk for a moment about your work, specifically, as it relates to the Regenerative Organic Certification, and being advocates for smallholder farmers. We know that often, it’s the big guys who get to make the decisions about what these words mean and who can be involved. I was hoping that you could share this story with my audience.

It’s a big story and it’s a long story because Lotus Foods is over 30 years old. What we’ve always done is we’ve always evolved. When we first started, and we were talking about rice biodiversity, most of our farmers were growing conventionally. They weren’t certified organic. They weren’t using herbicides or pesticides because they couldn’t afford it, but it wasn’t organic-certified. We help them get organic certification because we realized that was an important tenet of Lotus Foods as well.

The next projection that happened was that this system of rice intensification came to us from Cornell University, in particular, Olivia Vent. This was a macro ecological methodology for growing rice that used less water and fewer seeds, with no agrochemicals. By adopting six easy principles, farmers could potentially get double and triple their yields, and also mitigate methane emissions.

That was huge for us because just by the way we change how we grow rice, we could have economic, social, and environmental impacts. We became totally committed to that, then when Rodeo and Dr. Bronner’s started the pilot project for the Regenerative Organic Certification, we were asked to be part of the pilot program. At the time, we were on the fence. Do we need another bug on our label? Consumers are already super confused by the Non-GMO verification project, Kosher, Rainforest Alliance, and organic.

We also felt this might be a little bit elitist and a very high bar, but there was something really significant and good about it. If you look at the word sustainability, sustain means to keep level. Whereas the word regenerative is something that goes beyond sustainability. It goes beyond organic. Again, we were trying to be evolved, keep changing, and keep getting better. We then realized that out of the 20 pilot projects, 3 or 4 of us were from smallholder farmers globally, outside of the US. We knew that 1) We needed to be the voice of the smallholder farmer, 2) We wanted to show the consumers that SRI was inherently regenerative, and 3) We had an opportunity to help write the standards.

Sustainability means to keep level. Regenerative means go beyond sustainability.

I just want to stop here for one second and remind people that SRI is a system of rice intensification. You’ve also referred to it as “More crop per drop,” which I think is super catchy.

SRI is a three-letter acronym. Sometimes it doesn’t convey what we’re trying to do, so we coined the phrase “More crop per drop,” referring to what Caryl said about using less water.

Let me just finish, though. Those were the reasons why we decided to do the ROC certification. That became the first ROC-certified rice in the world, and the very first to get a gold standard in certification as well. We’re pretty proud of that.

It’s a huge accomplishment. To your point earlier about what I referred to as this over-badgefication of marketed products, when you get into packaged goods, rice is a packaged good. You have to have it in a box or a bag to buy it and take it home. If you shop the aisles, you might see several brands that you may not have heard of before, and a couple of industry leaders. Sometimes you see non-GMO, organic. Sometimes you see fair trade, and sometimes you don’t. There can be a crowded space on the front of the package. Each of those certifications comes with a cost. I understand that the Regenerative Organic Certification wants to be the one certification that encompasses all of these things. How have you found that to come through in your marketing strategies, and does it work?

One thing I’ll point out is that when you talked about costs, that’s a real thing, especially for smallholder farmers. One of the nice things that the Regenerative Organic Association or the Regenerative Organic Alliance did was instead of having their own certifiers go out into the field and do their work, they could rely on what’s already being done. Regenerative Organic Certification is fair trade, as well as organic certified, so they can piggyback on the efforts of the auditors already in the field, and just add a few questions about animal welfare, which doesn’t apply for our farmers because they’re not selling animal-type products. I think that was a good move in terms of being able to take existing resources and use them towards the certification for ROC.

The reason why we’re so high on ROC and committed to ROC is that the baseline for this certification is organic and fair trade. To me, those are two very important baselines.

When you think about regenerative and trying to impact the whole living system, you have to involve the farmers, thus the fair trade portion. You have to involve the soil. You look at the IPCC report that came out, which talked about we have a finite amount of harvest left in the soil because of the extractive practices that we’ve deployed, which is a horrifying notion if you say the soil will lose its capacity to grow food. These are big issues, and why ROC is so important.

As an organic company for the last 28-plus years, it’s very difficult for us to say the word regenerative without being synonymous with organic. There are regenerative terms out there that do not include organic, but they are still using herbicides and pesticides. That’s where we disagree. There’s a way that you can get to that point. To me, if you’re truly regenerative, it’s got to be grown without herbicides or pesticides.

I think we need a broad movement for those regenerative paradigms that don’t require organic. Let’s move in that direction, and hopefully, they can adopt as they go. Through continuous improvement, you’ll get there. It’s an important factor that we steward the resources we have on the planet.

We are stewards of the planet’s resources.

I understand Regenified does allow some pesticides even at their final stages, but they’re working to try and get their farmers through multiple stages to dramatically reduce or use of those chemical inputs through a variety of methods. I think that’s also because they’re trying to appeal to cattle ranchers and things like that. The costs of grains and things along those lines are quite expensive. I’ve had horses in my life, but I’ve seen the price of a bale of alfalfa go from $20 to $45 in the last few years. It’s a real cost when you’re even doing grass-fed cattle and things along those lines because you often have to augment their feed for at least part of the season.

When you talk about whatever certification or non-certification in terms of regenerative, I think of regenerative in terms of the smallholder farmers that we are working with. As we mentioned, we’re big advocates of SRI, or more crop per drop. In some places, they can’t control the water. The reason that SRI can mitigate methane emissions is that the fields are not continuously flooded. When you have continuously flooded fields, the microbial conditions warrant that it produces methane.

Some people can’t do SRI or won’t do SRI for one reason or another. There are other practices that are out there, like the use of Azolla in a flooded field. It’s this stuff that goes on top of the flooded field and absorbs the methane and becomes a nitrogen fixer. There are other bio methods that I have heard about that prevent methane emissions as well. We’re for any inputs that are natural, like Biochar. There are so many examples of people who are producing their own inputs is my point, because when you have to buy the inputs, that’s another cost for farmers who are already under tremendous threat of economic risk in terms of going into debt. That’s a big thing in terms of farming nowadays, as it has always been.

Azolla is what people might also know as duckweed. It’s an aquatic plant that grows very fast. I have introduced it to my fish tank before, and they were overwhelmed by it. It is bright green, right on the surface of the water, and does fix nitrogen. It was written about in Paul Hawken’s work, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, as well. He features that in one section.

I remember Bokashi is another thing that farmers can fix for themselves to use for the soil. Farmers are very resilient and innovative. We support all those things as opposed to having to resort to synthetic fertilizers or chemicals.

Raising Rice The Right Way

You’ve said to this point that rice isn’t an aquatic plant. That idea flips a common assumption by people. How hard has it been for farmers who have shifted away from flooded fields to make these changes?

It’s difficult on many levels. There’s an inertia for people to change. We think about our own New Year’s resolutions and how quickly they disappear sometimes. It’s hard to change. When you talk about rice production has been going on for centuries, it’s hard for people to change that as well. There are those real circumstances where farmers don’t have irrigation or control of the water. We’re asking them not to have continuously flooded fields, yet they rely on rainfall. With the change in weather patterns, they don’t know when the rain is going to fall. By letting the water go, so that the soils can become more aerobic and build more soil biota, they could endanger their crop themselves if they let the water release at the wrong time.

Water management is probably the biggest challenge in the adoption of SRI, but that’s only one of potentially six things that you can do. Even if you do, four of the six, outside of the water management, you’re still going to get some benefits, like if you do 10 to 15-day-old seeds versus the normal 30 to 40-day-old seeds. These are younger seedlings that are given more spacing instead of putting them or bunching them together.

Imagine you have a vegetable garden and you have a row of beets or carrots. If everything is bunched together, your crop is going to be very tiny because you’re not giving it enough room to grow. If you take one seedling of rice and you put it in a grid pattern and you leave more spacing, you’re going to get more photosynthesis, therefore more profuse tillering, and you get a larger root ball, which is important in rice too. At the end of the season, if you have a big hurricane or monsoon winds, the plant will fall over. It’s called lodging, and then it becomes very difficult to harvest. There are so many other benefits of these six tenets of SRI beyond the wetting that the farmers can do.

Caryl mentioned planting in a grid pattern. The reason for that is when you let the water go, you also allow the circumstances where weeds can now compete with the rice.

That’s the real reason for flooding a field. It was to mitigate the weeds, not because rice grows profusely in water. It learned to survive in water. It doesn’t thrive in water.

I don’t know the history of it, but I imagine a farmer saw that there was a big flood, and the rice was still growing, and there were no weeds. Who knows when growing under flooded fields started, but it is a problem in terms of methane. As I was mentioning with SRI, if you let the water go away, there will be weeds. That’s another problem in terms of mechanization. If they had a conical weeder, the farmer could go through the rows, weed the weeds, and form more biomass to feed the plant.

More importantly, when they’re weeding, not very deep, but maybe a couple of inches, it creates air flow which builds the soil. Weeds are a big problem. That’s why people like Monsanto have a business. This is a different way to address it, but that’s a challenge as well when you talk about the aging population of smallholder farmers and the labor component of SRI. It may sometimes be an obstacle as well.

Farming in itself is not easy. It’s difficult. It’s challenging on so many levels when you have 5,000 years of rice cultivation and you don’t have any new tools to speak of. In Asia, when you see somebody harvesting rice, they’re using that sickle that they’ve used for 5,000 years. There hasn’t been much innovation in rice farming.

The Feminization Of Agriculture

I wonder if you could speak for a moment about how gender and equity play into regenerative rice farming, and perhaps what you have learned from working with women farmers.

For me, as a woman, one of the most rewarding aspects of our business is that we get to empower women through our work. There’s something called the feminization of agriculture. What that means is that because rice is so unsustainable income-wise, men often had to leave the farm and go to the city for income-generating jobs. Along with the rearing of the children, the cooking, the cleaning, and the household chores, they left the farming to the women as well.

What the women have told us time and time again, throughout all the areas that we work, is that with SRI, they can get out in the field early in the morning and do their chores before the sun gets incredibly hot. They still have plenty of time during the day to do all the other things that women do. That has been a real labor saver. When Ken talked about that conical weeder, the women were standing straight up in the fields using this push machine versus bending down and picking out weeds. That has saved their backs. Truly, rice has been grown on the backs of women’s labor for centuries. This gives them an opportunity to stay upright.

Sometimes we’ll visit a farming community and we’ll see women walking around hunched over because they’ve been doing that type of work for so long that they can no longer stand up straight. That’s a sad commentary on the farming practices and the lack of innovation in terms of tools to remove the drudgery of the act. The only thing that comes to mind for me that’s more positive is when women have taken a lead role. They become leaders within the community and have embraced more entrepreneurial activities, whether it’s mushroom farming on logs or various things.

The beauty of SRI is maybe that butterfly effect. You teach them about a new innovative way to grow rice, then all of a sudden, they’re thinking about innovative ways to do other things, and become more entrepreneurial, which further raises the livelihood of the community. We’re seeing this whole feminization of agriculture where the men have come back to the communities. Maybe it’s that weeder Caryl mentioned. Anytime you get a mechanized device, men want to jump in there and do that. Who knows? I think that the overall impact is bringing communities back together.

The women’s role in leadership is not only for entrepreneurship, but they also become leaders in the community, because SRI is a grassroots in today. It’s been passed down from farmer to farmer, and the women are doing a lot of that leadership.

Rice Varieties And Their Health Benefits

I wanted to circle back to a conversation we had a little bit earlier about the different colored rice that you have, specifically to dive into this topic of nutrition, equity, and consumer impact. Rice is a powerful source of nutrition, especially for those like me who have developed some food sensitivities. I can’t eat broccoli. I also can’t eat quinoa. What should more people understand about rice varieties and their health benefits?

Whole grains are truly important. A lot of people don’t understand that when the rice comes out of the harvest, there’s a hard hull on it that protects the rice. When you extract that hull, you either have brown, black, or red rice underneath that hull. If you take a mill and you scrape off that brown, black, or red, that’s the bran layer, you’re going to get white rice. That’s what three-quarters of the world’s population eats. Therefore, all the nutrition is in that bran layer.

If we can just teach more people to eat brown, black, or red rice, a good way to do this is to start mixing it first. Do half and half. Once you get used to the texture and the color, you can do all brown, all black, all red, or whatever. That’s where all the nutrition comes in. If you go back to the soil, when you’ve got healthy soil, you’re going to get healthy rice or healthy food, especially with rice. Because rice is grown with so much water, all the phytonutrients and all the micronutrients that are in the soil get taken up by the roots that go into the plant itself.

The uptake is those roots diving down deeper. If you have a flooded field, do the route systems need to go deeper into the ground to get the water? Not really. When you have alternate wetting, where a field is not continuously flooded, the roots dive deeper. As Caryl earlier mentioned, the root ball is bigger. Think of a bigger, better foundation for the plant. That’s why monsoon winds can’t knock over those plants.

You could talk about nutrition. You’re getting more nutrition out of the soil with the deeper, larger roots as well.

We’re getting back into soil health, and that’s super important. I remember there was a report, I think by the FDA. They said that there’s no difference in nutritional value between organic food and conventionally grown food. I think they were just looking at macronutrients or NPK.

Micronutrients and phytonutrients are more important than anything else.

Beyond fiber and starch, what micronutrients?

Magnesium, potassium. What else? There’s a lot, but it doesn’t come right up to me.

Protein, too, because rice is a great source of protein.

Protein from the brown rice. There’s more protein in whole grain rice than in white rice. There are so many more nutrients in whole grain rice than in white rice. There’s a book by David Montgomery, What Your Food Ate, that talks about the uptick in phyto and micronutrients in food grown in healthy soils.

Tips For Cooking Black, Red, And Brown Rice Easier

Thinking about all the varieties of rice available, from wild rice to black rice to this beautiful red rice that you also have, the only real drawback of white rice or the complete rice compared to these other grains is that it takes a little longer to cook. Do you have any secrets for how to make cooking black rice, red rice, or brown rice a little easier for people to integrate?

That question has always perplexed me. I grew up in a Chinese home. If you start the rice first and then set out to cook whatever you’re going to eat with the rice, the rice is pretty much done by the time you’ve chopped up all your vegetables and prepared all the rest of your ingredients and cooked them. For example, our black rice takes about 30 minutes to cook. I think a lot of whole grains, especially the ones that are grown here in the US, may take 45 minutes for brown rice. That can be a little bit of time for folks, especially for people with busy schedules.

We also have a product, which is already cooked rice in the bag that’s shelf-stable. That’s just 90 seconds in a microwave. For whole grain rice, I don’t think there are a lot of workarounds in terms of shortening the time. Back to Caryl’s thing about whole grains versus white rice, I found that a lot of the brown rice that comes from Asia is a lot softer in terms of the texture. It’s not so much that crunchy, chewy type of exercise for standard brown rice here. I’m not sure what that evolution is about. You’ll then get a whole grain rice with a softer type of texture. I think the drawback for a lot of Asian folks who eat a lot of white rice is the textural component of it. Caryl has a good point. If you mix the white with the colored rice, that might be a good starting point.

I feel that people have no fear of making pasta, but they have a fear of cooking rice. You can cook rice like pasta, too, just pour off the excess water.

People have no fear of making pasta, but they have a fear of cooking rice.

The process is only ten minutes.

We do have Kalajeera rice that cooks up in ten minutes, but it’s white rice. The brown rice, which we used to offer and which we hope we’ll bring back in the near future, took only fifteen minutes. Another thing you can do is cook a couple of cups at a time, and then put them in the refrigerator. It stays nicely in the refrigerator for at least 3 to 4 days, and then you could heat it up. Heating it up is like freshly cooked rice, and then you have it whenever you want it. You can also make fried rice, which you need to use cold rice for.

Our biggest takeaway in terms of saving time on cooking is that when we cook risotto, we’ll make too much. That means there are leftovers. We’ll take little patties of the leftover risotto rice and crisp them up in a skillet, and then drop a poached egg on top of it, saute some mushrooms, or something like that. You have two meals out of that same batch of rice. I love to make fried rice. Cold rice is what you start with. You can plan successive meals. Maybe that’ll take some of the sting out of how long it takes to cook rice.

My favorite rice is Forbidden Rice. That’s what I tend to cook. I add it to soups and stews, along with lentils, garbanzo beans, and all sorts of things. I looked to get more of my proteins from plant-based sources. I also have found that it works incredibly well with somewhat sweeter and savory dishes, and incorporating things like cranberries, lime juice, some olive oil, or things like this, and then tossing it together, and having it as a component on a cold salad. The texture and the flavor it brings make that a more enjoyable experience. Plus, it looks dynamite on a white plate, too.

We’re going into summer now. Rice salad is a fantastic way to use rice. There are so many great things to do with rice salads.

Caryl And Ken’s Favorite Recipes

This is a beautiful book. You have many lovely pictures that help people dive into the world of rice farming. You also have beautiful pictures of the recipes that you showcase in this book. I wonder if each of you wanted to share a favorite recipe, or something that you like to make on a routine basis. It can either integrate, let’s say, your noodles, which I know are also available at Costco, among other health food store retailers, or just the standard varieties that you offer.

My favorite recipe in the book is the black rice risotto with scallops. It’s with the Furikake butter. First of all, I love Furikake on rice anyway. You cook the black rice in a Dashi broth, and then you cook the scallops in a buttered Furikake sauce. It’s fantastic. It is delicious, and it looks beautiful too. If you want to impress somebody, it’s a great recipe.

It’s an Asian twist on an Italian classic. Some people may look at it sideways like, “Black rice? What?”

It will look like squid ink risotto. It’s so dark. I’m looking for the picture now. Black rice risotto with Dashi scallops, and Furikake butter on pages 183 to 184. I’m going to share this picture with everybody.

The white plate bringing the black rice is quite stunning. The other thing I always learned from chefs is that they have this phrase, “The eyes eat first.” I gave you a hint on the fried rice. It says in the book, Ken’s fried rice, but I have to pay homage to my dad, who I mentioned had a Chinese restaurant with his four brothers. I remember I was graduating from college in Rhode Island, where I grew up. I was moving to Texas, of all places.

I had a moment of horror where I realized that I don’t know how to cook any of the food that I love to eat at my dad’s restaurant. I asked him for several things, and one of them was fried rice. It’s interesting because the fried rice recipe in the cookbook is not a standard recipe. It’s featuring things that we harvest in the springtime, like asparagus, leeks, and stuff that comes out in the springtime after a long winter here in the Adirondacks. Typically, in fried rice, you might see barbecue, pork, eggs, and onions.

Historically, the Chinese are great travelers. Wherever they find themselves, there’s always a pot of leftover rice. What you do is scour what’s left over in the refrigerator or something that you can harvest out of the ground, and make fried rice out of that. What it did for many immigrant Chinese is remind them of home, this concept of taking nothing and making it into something. I loved that philosophy. I think that’s how we should cook.

To me, the fried rice is the ultimate comfort food.

It reminds me of my approach to making a soup. My husband once paid me what I thought was a very high compliment. He said, “There’ll be almost nothing in the fridge, and the vegetables are looking rubbery, and then suddenly we’ve got a delicious soup.” When vegetables start to be less than prime for salads, they’re perfect for a stew. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad. They’re just starting to lose some of their water content.

About three years ago, when we moved here to the North Country, we started taking all of our vegetable scraps. When you peel a carrot, the stem of a mushroom, the skin of an onion, the skin of the garlic, or whatever we usually put in the compost pile, we put them in a big plastic bag and keep them in the fridge. At the end of every week, we make a vegetable broth out of it. That’s a base for anything, soup, stir fry, or whatever you need something liquid as you’re cooking.

That’s a great method. I love that. I’ve also used leavings from juicing. For instance, I love to make a beet, carrot, cucumber, and celery juice every once in a while. I have this thought of all these fiber leftovers. What could I do with this fiber? I made a hearty soup stock out of it. You don’t strain out all that fiber. You leave a lot of it in the soup. I looked at it like taking an approach like I would with butternut squash or something, but to this endeavor, and it ended up being delicious. Go with what spices you like. Experiment a little bit. You might create something that you didn’t love, then try again next one.

Potential Policy Shifts For Regenerative Agriculture

I’d love to talk in this last stage of the interview about the global systems, policy, and hope that we’re working to create through regenerative nutrition solutions. You mentioned in some other work that you’ve done the farm bill and agricultural subsidies, which are threatened now, in many cases. What policy shifts would you most like to see to support regenerative agriculture at scale?

For me, it also has to do with more corporate and private support for the smallholder farmer and for these systems. Outside of government subsidies, I think it’s up to the corporations that are working with the stakeholders, with the smallholder farmers, to find ways to support them. More private philanthropy needs to go to creating a more regenerative and sustainable food system. We’ve depended upon the government too long and too much. They have a role, but I think companies and the private sector, which includes consumers, can play an important role as well.

That is a great question. I’m struggling with it because I’ve been trying to get involved with policy. All along, our main objective was to try to change the system from within. A lot of what we’ve done has resonated with consumers. We’ve seen in down economies where our core consumer was still there, even though you would think they would go to less expensive agribusiness offerings. There is a place for policy. If policy could make some big changes in terms of supporting regenerative agriculture or healthy foods, instead of just supporting corn and soybeans, and supporting the growing of things instead of paying people not to grow things.

There are lots of problems with the policy right now. Policy moves the needle for so many people. For now, I see it as a grassroots type of movement. Politicians will follow if the popularity of consumer habits shows that it’s popular, and they want to get the votes. I see now that when people are telling a regenerative story, big companies will tell suppliers like ourselves, “You need to commit to this.” It involves us spending more money to prove, monitor, and verify the type of metrics that they’re looking for, to say that they’re checking the box and saying, “Look how great we are.” I’m a little bit skeptical, but when the burden falls to the supplier consistently and it also falls to the grower consistently, then this is part of the problem.

Balancing Premium Sourcing And Pricing

I would tend to agree. You spoke about pricing. I know that this is a delicate balance for any brand, particularly when you’re in what is perceived as a commodity arena. Can you speak to how Lotus Foods balances accessibility with premium sourcing and pricing as it might relate to food-insecure communities?

You can find our products in Walmart. To me, being accessible to the mass grocery market is important because that’s where most of the people shop. We’ve been very fortunate to be in Costco with the Millet & Brown Rice Ramen 12-pack. The cost of food is expensive. Americans have always thought that food should be cheap. Unfortunately, the growing of food has never been cheap. It’s just the farmers haven’t gotten their payday, and haven’t gotten what they deserve for their products.

Americans have always thought that food should be cheap. Unfortunately, growing food has never been cheap. Farmers are not getting their payday, and most of them do not get what they deserve for their products.

It’s difficult because some people can’t afford our products. We’re trying to give the farmers as much fair trade price as possible because they’re the ones who are growing the products. It’s a huge balance between the farmer, the consumer, and the manufacturer. It’s got to be a win-win for everybody, and that’s what we try to do.

Your questions are getting harder and harder, Corinna, but these are some of the real issues. When we talk about SRI and the “Less is more” paradigm, using less water, less seed, no agro chemicals, and farmers getting bigger yields, that would implicitly apply that the cost could go down. We’re still a relatively small company. We’re still working with smallholder farmers, and there are lots of obstacles on the ground at the farm level.

It’s difficult with all the tariff madness that’s going on and the uncertainty that entails. What we’re trying to do now is build up the capacity at the farm level. For instance, we bring in a container of rice, and then we have to receive it at the port. We then ship it to a place to be cleaned, ship it to a place to be packaged, and then ship it back to our warehouse. There’s a lot of shipping and there’s a lot of hand-holding of the products that drives up the cost.

If we can work with our farming communities and bring those components to them, where they can adequately clean the product to pass the US customs, as well as our own quality assurance standards, and have them pack it into the retail packaging, and then receive finished goods, then we can get a long way in terms of reducing costs or providing more promotional dollars, so that more people can come on board to enjoy these products.

I liken it to when we first moved to California. We looked at the price of lettuce, and it was $0.10 more for organic than a conventional. Why? Because in the Bay Area, a lot of people were buying those organic products, and they could compete with conventional products, $0.10 is not a huge thing for a head of lettuce. I don’t want to say scale because a lot of times, scaling up means a lot of problems, but somehow, we can become more efficient in terms of controlling our costs, and pass that along so that more people can enjoy healthy foods.

That scenario, which is where we’re moving to now, is also great for the smallholder farmer and the stakeholders in the country because it gets them more employment. They’re the ones who are cleaning and packaging the rice, and that includes more employment for the people around the village in the area. It’s a win-win for everybody, but it takes a lot of capacity building that has taken us a long time to get to.

A great example of that is that we source some jasmine rice in Thailand from our friend Bruno Fischer at FTS. He has grown this business. He has ties to Europe. He has trained farmers to do what he’s been able to do in terms of the growing of the rice, then the harvesting, the drying, and the processing of the rice.

He’s created a cooperative and turned those operations over to the farming community. He stayed on board to be a connector to markets to sell those products into Europe in North America. This is something that would greatly help farmer, farming communities, and farming in general to stand up on their own, as opposed to having to rely on subsidies and things like that.

Reconnecting To Food Culture

It’s fantastic work. I’m glad you have him as a resource. That’s incredible. I wanted to ask you a question with regard to rice, because this isn’t a standard cookbook either. You talk about the cultural significance of rice around the world in a variety of different cultures. In your view, how can reconnecting to food culture support sustainability?

Consumers are interested in global flavors. That has been proven time and time again. Along with global flavors comes the culture of that region and community. It’s education. If we’ve done one thing in 30 years of our existence, it is to educate the consumers. It’s all part of it. You educate not only about the specific rice itself, but also the culture.

I love that the consumer today is interested in how my product is being grown. They’re not just satisfied by picking up a package. They want to know how this is grown, what the methodology is, and how it is affecting all stakeholders. That’s the beauty of regenerative, too, is that it’s more of a holistic living system. It does take a village to do this work. The consumer is understanding that, willing to play a role in that, and teach their kids that a chicken doesn’t just come wrapped in cellophane. There’s a big, long arc of processes and growing methods for that. The more we can do that, the more informed we will be.

There’s something to be said about a sense of place where food comes from and how it’s produced. There’s more interest in that as well. Sometimes you go to visit a farm and they’ll have the cash crop rice growing in one big field, but then in the back close to home, they have this heirloom variety that they love, and they’re going to continue to plant it for their own usage. Those are the gems that we need to preserve. They have unique stories to them.

Ultimately, in terms of supply chain viability, sometimes this knowledge of traditional seeds will help farmers in terms of the changing climate, whether it’s drought type of tolerance. Big ag is working on all these things that’ll withstand heat and be more drought-tolerant. These seeds that farmers are saving have lasted through millennia, and they have the properties that we need. If we lose that Indigenous farmer-peasant knowledge, then we’re not progressing at all. We’re falling behind. Somehow, all this knowledge needed to be preserved. If we can do that, where farmers can preserve this knowledge, that in itself is one of the definitions of sustainability.

In the book, there are two recipes by two different farming groups, one in India and one in Thailand. They share their favorite recipe, how they make it, and how they use the rice. It’s a nice connection to their culture.

Shop, Cook, And Eat In Line With Regeneration

That’s lovely. If someone wants to make a change in how they shop, cook, or eat, specifically to support this whole concept of regeneration, what would you suggest they start with?

Look at brands that either have the ROC certification or some of the other regenerative labels out there. Try to look a little deeper into what the product is and how it’s being grown, and pay attention.

Aside from brands, locally, there’s a lot of stuff going on where people are doing some unique stuff out there in the community. That’s a nice way to connect to your own community and find out some of these innovative ideas that are going on as a starting point. If you’re trying to make a change, the information is out there.

I personally love farmers’ markets. The one down the street from me runs from May to November. They started again, and I look at it as part of my Saturday ritual. Every Saturday, I go and start getting some produce like berries. Everything that is served up to me there is organic. Many of them are also regenerative. It’s interesting to see how far we’ve come in a short time. I am in Santa Cruz County, where there are a lot of natural foods. A lot of food is grown here.

That’s a great way for farmers’ markets to get into your community and understand and appreciate your community. It’s very social too.

They’ll even have local bread makers. Sadly, not all of the local bread makers are using organic wheat, so I don’t buy anything there. I’ve started making my own sourdough. When my mom last visited while I was recovering from knee surgery, she traveled with her own starter. I’ve been creating this new ritual where every week, I make my own sourdough, and it tastes fantastic. It’s made with organic wheat. It’s got a story behind it, and it’s a family sourdough starter. Getting into the kitchen is the thing I tried to advocate for.

What’s Next For Lotus Foods

I feel like your book is a great connection point to remind people that they can do a weekly shopping venture and get some of these vegetables and fruits that they may be a little less familiar with, and try to explore different flavors. If you’re working with rice as a staple, then having a cookbook that helps you explore rice with all these unique flavors is really good. I would tell people that they should also pick up your book. As we prepare to wrap. I would hope to hear from you what your vision for Lotus Foods ten years from now might be. You’ve both been in this for so long, 30 years. I wonder what legacy you hope to leave behind.

It already started. Ken and I have transitioned in the last two years. We’re no longer CEOs, we’re founders. Lotus Foods is now being managed by a wonderful gentleman named Andrew Burke, who has been with us for over six years. He started as our first C Suite president and COO. What’s so wonderful now is that other members of the management team are traveling to the farmers. Jake Ellerbrock, our director of marketing, and the newest member of our team, Claire, who is our first impact manager, spent ten days in Thailand, visiting the farmers and the manufacturer.

It warms our hearts when Jake talks about profuse tillering that he saw in the fields, things that Ken and I always did. It’s wonderful what we’ve been able to do with these new farmers. We started our first supply chain with the Forbidden Rice that we talked about in China. In 2019, after the first Trump tariffs, we had to start looking at alternative sourcing outside of China because the tariffs became unsustainable. We went to Thailand.

What that was enabling us to do was work directly with the new set of farmers, trying to get them into SRI and more regenerative farming methods, and increasing our impact with a whole new group of farmers from the ground floor. That has been rewarding. Now, these farmers are growing the rice varieties that are being used, and the two manufacturers that we have are making our rice ramen and our rice noodles. We’re becoming integrated into the whole process in Thailand itself, from the farm to the end product. That’s really impactful and very exciting for us.

Caryl and I did all the exploration in the past and started with an idea to build a company. Now, there are other folks who we’ve passed that onto, and other people are doing the same work. We’ve had to try to establish alternative suppliers. I don’t know how many countries we’ve scoured to try and find products to replace these high-tariff items. It is very painful because we’ve had tremendous partners in China, but we’ve always had too much concentration.

This allows us to move forward, but other people are doing the work, which is very heartening. We kept this to ourselves, Caryl and I, where we would be the only ones traveling, but more people are doing it. We feel so fortunate that people love the mission and want to continue to do that. We serve on the board now. We think this whole idea of regenerative governance, with how the board thinks and makes decisions, can infiltrate the company itself and perpetuate the mission and values of the company for the next 30 years. We’re very optimistic that amidst all the challenges and the headwinds, there is still a whole lot more to do. We always like to say, we feel like an overnight success that took 30 years, but we’re just starting over again, in a sense.

I feel like we’ve just begun, even though we’ve been doing it for such a long time.

I’m thrilled for you both, and being able to pass the torch to the next generation and to a capable management team to take this forward, to impact more people and more farmers, is incredible. Before we close, I want to remind our audience that you’re a beautiful book, Rice Is Life, is available through LotusFoods.com and wherever books are sold. I also keep it in my Amazon shop. If you follow the link in this episode, I will get a very small commission for that, but it helps to keep the lights on.

Caryl And Ken’s Closing Words

This book is more than a cookbook. It’s a story of transformation, resilience, and global food culture. I love it. It got a little dust on its spine because it sits in my kitchen, and there are some stains on some of the pages, but that’s how every cookbook should be, in my opinion. As we close, I wonder if you had any thoughts that you’d like to leave our audience with or another call to action. The stage is yours.

The seed sovereignty that Ken talked about before is going to be super important and something that, in the coming years, you’ll hear more about. It’s incredibly important for people to start educating themselves about. I also feel that everybody has a role to play. If everybody does a little bit, not only to nourish themselves and their family, but also the Earth, we’ll all be in much better shape.

If everybody does a little bit to nourish themselves, their family, and also the Earth, we will all be in a much better shape.

I keep thinking of the phrase, “What we do to the people, we do to the planet.” Somehow, if we can connect the thread, the ideas will come to people if they think about the interconnectivity of everything.

Thank you. I love that heart-centered closing word, Ken. Caryl and Ken, thank you so much for joining me, for sharing your vision. I know that this conversation has inspired the people tuning in to think differently about what’s on their plate and what kind of future we’re all planting together. I love the concept of rice intensification, building more crops per drop, and building a more regenerative and sustainable future. Thank you for all you’ve done for the past 30 years, and what you continue to do.

Thank you, too. Keep up the great work.

Thanks for the platform to share some of our ideas. Thank you.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

If you’re moved by the messages that we share here, please follow or subscribe on your favorite platform and help us plant more trees. We’ve already reached 15,761 of our 20,000 goal for 2025. As you have a chance, I’d love for you to visit LotusFoods.com to learn more. Try their delicious rice and grab your copy of Rice Is Life. Don’t forget that small changes, like the rice you choose, can ripple outward into big impacts. Look for the Regenerative Organic Certification, or ROC label, on your favorite products, so you can be sure that your purchase is having a positive effect. Until next time, I want to invite you to stay curious, stay compassionate, and remember to care more and be better. Thank you.

Important Links

• Caryl Levine on LinkedIn
• Ken Lee on LinkedIn
• Lotus Foods
• @LotusFoods on TikTok
• @LotusFoods on Instagram
• Lotus Foods on Facebook
• Lotus Foods on Pinterest
• Andrew Burke on LinkedIn
• Jake Ellerbrock on LinkedIn
• Claire Loudis on LinkedIn
• ForestPlanet
• Care More Be Better on YouTube
• Care More Be Better on Apple Podcasts
• Care More Be Better on Spotify

Suggested reading

• Rice Is Life
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
• What Your Food Ate