Rice-A-Roni

Marooned on the Giant Yellow Spaceship now for 33 consecutive days, I am left at the mercy of the cooks in the dining hall to develop creative and innovative menus. Doesn't happen. This past week, 13 of the 14 lunches and dinners featured chicken--I never thought to serve boiled chicken before dining in our cafeteria and now I know I would never serve boiled fowl to anyone under any circumstance. The variety of starches isn't much better: plain white rice, plain buckwheat, plain mashed potatoes, plain pasta, and plain roasted potatoes, rotated over and over and over again.

This is why I sometimes retreat to the refuge of my apartment to cook up something entirely different. Today, for lunch I cooked up a box of Rice A Roni. When living in the U.S., I would look upon Rice A Roni as a last resort, if I had nothing else at all in my pantry. Rice A Roni would be among the first items I would donate to a food drive, if I were asked to contribute something to those in need. But, here inside the Yellow Spaceship, the box of Rice A Roni I stuffed inside my suitcase last time I visited America feels almost like a gourmet treat a chef possessing two Michelin stars might create.

Rice A Roni was created in the 1950s during that wondrous era in America when the food industry was inventing all sorts of strange novelties to capture the attention of suburban families eager to try out the newest food innovations advertised on that other new innovation: television. This was also the decade when cheese in a spray can, Jell-O, Tang (powdered artificial orange juice), and TV dinners (frozen meals in aluminum trays) were invented. Rice A Roni is a boxed meal with both rice and macaroni, hence the very clever little name. No more would families need to argue about whether to serve rice or macaroni with dinner, when one could have both!!!

Marketing and advertising was also incredibly important for generating sales of these weird Space Age food products. I still remember the catchy song and lyrics from the Rice A Roni ads I heard on almost a daily basis as a kid: "Rice A Roni, the flavor can't be beat. Rice A Roni, The San Francisco Treat!" The song would be accompanied by an animation of a San Francisco cable car zipping across the City by the Bay. Now, I don't know if Rice A Roni was invented in San Francisco, but I can imagine the ad agency that created the Rice A Roni commercials deciding that people across America would be far more likely to purchase a product that had BOTH rice and macaroni if these gullible consumers thought it came from the sophisticated kitchens of that illustrious city. Though I haven't heard the Rice A Roni song in probably 30 years and the product is no longer advertised on TV, you will notice that the cable car remains as the product logo on the front of the box--and the tagline is still on the box too.

What is important is not the history of Rice A Roni. Instead it is the peculiar mixture of slightly overly-crunchy rice and slightly overly-soggy macaroni that matters. In 60 years, The Golden Grain Company still hasn't developed a product or figured out quite the right cooking time where both the Rice and the Roni have the same consistency. Yet, I loved the bowl of fake cheese and fake broccoli, crunchy rice and soggy noodle I devoured this afternoon. When you are marooned inside a Yellow Spaceship: variety, no matter how odd the manifestation, is indeed the spice of life, especially when it harkens back to a day far in the past when the future seemed so promising and limitless.