When autumn comes, it’s harvest time in China. China’s grain output（粮食生产）was about 664 million tons in 2019. Rice made up much of the output. How important is rice? What other uses are there for it? Let’s learn more together.

Rice on your dinner table is common. But it is very important for the human body. It build up people’s energy. About two-thirds of the world’s people eat rice.

Rice is easy to grow with enough water. People can grow it on wet and dry land, in rain forests（热带雨林）or deserts（沙漠）. It grows well between 18℃to 35℃. A good rainfall also helps its harvest rice.

In China, people began to grow rice about 3, 000 to 4,000 years ago. Now, Chinese people eat almost every day. They cook fried rice and porridge. There are also some rice-based foods for festivals. Every Spring Festival, people make New Year’s cake with sticky rice（糯米）, With it, they wish for a better future. The Dragon Boat Festival is a time to eat zongzi. People remember the great poet Qu Yuan on that day.

Tom is ten years old this year. He is in Grade Two. He doesn’t study hard（努力学习）at school. His teacher doesn’t like him. But Tom thinks he is the cleverest（最聪明的）student in his class. And he thinks his math is good. On a Sunday afternoon, Tom goes home. He is very hungry.

So he says to his mother, “Mom, I am very hungry. Can I have some food to eat?” “Dinner is not ready now, but there are two cakes on the plate（盘子）. You can eat them.”

When he sees the two cakes, Tom says, “Mom, I have three cakes now. Look! This is the first cake. This is the second cake. One and two is three. I am very clever.”

“Yes, you’re very clever,” says his mother. “Now give（给）me the first cake, your father will eat the second cake, and you eat the third one.”

The history of tofu in China—Tofu is very popular in the East today, but tofu was first eaten in China over 2, 000 years ago. There is an ancient Chinese picture. It shows a kitchen scene which proves that soymilk（豆浆）and tofu were being made in China. The oldest written material of tofu also appeared in China about 1500AD, in a poem named Ode to Tofu by Su Ping.

The history of tofu in Japan—Kento priests（教士）, who went to China, brought tofu back to Jap during the Nara era（奈良时代）（710-794）. The word “tofu” was first mentioned in Japan in the diary of another priest called Nakaomi. The word “tofu” was first written in the actual Japanese characters in 1489. Tofu gradually became popular in Japan. The cooking book Tofu Hyakuchin came out in 1782 and sold very well.

The history of tofu in Western world—In 1603, a Spanish dictionary was the first European document（文献）with the word “tofu”, The first English reference（参考书目）to tofu was in1704. And tofu was first produced in France by Paillieux in 1880. Hirata & Co started to make tofu in San Francisco in 1895.