A lot of it is from Texas.
Yes. A lot of rice, no MOST Texas' rice, is grown down around Beaumont/Orange area on the coast. A lot of rice is also grown farther on into Louiasana across the state line from there. We could see rice fields along I-10 driving from Galveston to New Orleans. A side note, I read an article around 10 years ago on a rice research study about arsenic levels in soil. They tested samples, if I remember correctly, as far up as Ohio & New York in the study. Seems like very few producers were under FDA's maximum allowed level, and some were 5 times the allowed level. Arsenic occurs in the soil likely as a result of fertilizer usage runoff throughout the length of the Mississippi. The data indicated it is at the greatest levels in the delta around southern TX (Beaumont area) and southern LA. I studied the data for quite awhile because I didn't know rice 'absorbed' arsenic from the soil. Never heard that before. The conclusion of the study was that it was in the soil from fertilizer and rain/river water action getting it into the surround paddies. Made me stop eating rice totally, which still saddens me, because I LOVE rice and wild rice. Chinese food and Indian food are diminished without rice.
If I may go off-topic a moment: I stopped eating all wheat product in 2009 when I went low-carb, long before reading the research study on arsenic levels found in U.S. rice. All wheat is GMO nowadays. It all contains gliadin. Got to have that better tomato and the higher yields, non? Gliadin is one of the reasons so many people are getting fat nowadays! Gliaden makes you want to eat MORE because it disrupts grelin (
I'm hungry! gut hormone) and leptin (
I'm full gut hormone) signaling from your stomach to your brain.
Instead, in very small amounts, I cook with Einkorn non-GMO wheat (from Jovial Foods) mixed with nut flours. Einkorn wheat has a totally different chromosomal profile from ordinary wheat (different number of chromosomes) therefore the two types of wheat literally CANNOT cross-pollinate, not even if the neighboring field is Monsanto GMO wheat! Not many people have heard of it, so I thought I'd just ention Einkors.
At our house, we only eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and occasionally things baked with Einkorn flour as a starch source. I prefer to avoid arsenic even if some of that rice-born arsenic is already in me from a lifetime of not knowing this before. The one exception in my last 12 years of low-carbing is our SHTF food prepping. Have lots of rice stored in buckets. We'll all be glad to have ANY food when it comes down to starvation, no matter what kind of wheat we must consume. Getting fat will be the least of my worries at our BOL. Interestingly, imported Indian basmati and Thai jasmine rice had some of the lowest levels of arsenic of all tested samples.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/arsenic/index.cfmhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892142/